Scream creator says films are ‘coded in gay survival’
The film series Scream has been described by creator Kevin Williamson as a series ‘coded in gay survival.‘
In an interview with The Independent, Williamson spoke to journalist Adam White about the underlying gay trauma behind the series main protagonist, Sidney Prescott, as well as how Scream has developed from the first movie to the 2022 film coming out in early January.
As we all know, queerness and horror have been interlinked for a long time. Horror often takes real-life anxieties as a topic and conveys them either through text or subtext – the latter being the most popular route to take if you look at examples like Midsommar, Get Out, and Us.
In the slasher genre, however, these anxieties often take on the role of a defiant and traumatic killer who plays the role of a tormenting phantom or figure that chases and slashes at final girls again and again. Either the final girl wins, or they die in a blaze of glory. Sometimes the formula will change a little, but not enough for viewers to be wildly surprised.
One such trauma that has been explored before in early horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is that of queerness. For Williamson, an expression of queerness was found in the role of the prestigious final girl, a figure in horror that he felt kinship to.
“As a gay kid, I related to the final girl and to her struggle because it’s what one has to do to survive as a young gay kid, too,” Williamson tells The Independent. “You’re watching this girl survive the night and survive the trauma she’s enduring. Subconsciously, I think the Scream movies are coded in gay survival.”
For Sidney Prescott in particular, she has to relearn not just everything she thought she knew about her mother and her boyfriend, two people who meant the world to her, but herself too. That sort of trauma is something very familiar to queer people growing up.
It turns out that Sidney Prescott isn’t the only queer icon that will be appearing in the new Scream either. Newcomer on the block, Jasmin Savoy-Brown set to play new main character Mindy Meeks-Martin is both queer and black. A new and exciting addition!
Scream (2022) releases on January 14 next year.
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