'Scream' Ending Explained: Who The Killers Are & What It Really Means
Scream (1996) was a genuine game-changer for the horror genre when it debuted, with its twist ending and meta focus underscoring its more inventive qualities. The film, courtesy of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) director Wes Craven, is a classic slasher thriller, with a slow-burn mystery over the true identity of the murderous Ghostface. The complication is that it’s in a setting where everyone is aware of horror movies and their tropes, with the killers purposefully playing on expectations to trap their victims.
This gave Craven a chance to comment (and poke fun) at the genre, while also still delivering a pretty good example of its strengths. Notably, the film’s plot twist is a clever bit of subterfuge that has paid serious dividends over the years, inspiring plenty of other killers and plot developments in the series. Here’s what’s going on in the Scream ending and how it shapes all the sequels.
The True Killers In 'Scream,' Explained
Scream focuses on the high schoolers in Woodsboro, California, as a masked killer (dubbed Ghostface) slaughters several teenagers. The film lays clues about the identity of the killer throughout, with one of the prime suspects being Sidney's boyfriend Billy. While this does turn out to be true, it's more complicated than that. As revealed in the climax of the film, Billy recruited his friend Stu to help him with the killings. Billy's motivation stems from his lingering fury over Sidney's mother Maureen, whose affair with his father drove his own mother away.
Having murdered Maureen a year prior and successfully framed Cotton Weary for the crime, Billy's simmering rage and murderous tendencies convinced him to go on a rampage that could claim Sydney’s life and blame it all on Maureen's widower as one final stroke of revenge. Stu largely went along with it for the thrill of it, serving as the film’s exemplification of a villain who just embraces being a villain. The intervention of Gale gives Sidney a chance to survive, though, disrupting their final killing stroke and giving the heroes a chance to dispatch both killers.
'Scream' Was All About Deconstructing (And Rebuilding) Slashers
Scream was rooted in a self-reflective approach to the horror genre, slashers in particular. Wes Craven had already begun playing with the fourth wall in films like Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), but Scream is more than just a meta deconstruction. While characters can predict certain events based on horror tropes, they don’t have to fall prey to them. Billy and Stu’s rampage is spurred on partly by their love for horror movies, taking inspiration from the killers and replicating the mocking tactics of characters like Freddy Krueger. However, people like Dewey and Gale are able to alter the trajectory of the story by getting involved.
Officers and reporters are often auxiliary characters at best in horror movies, but here they help turn the tide and even cite their own knowledge of horror movies as a survival tactic. This is especially true with the movie’s final grim punchline, where Sidney knows the killer will get up for one last scare, responding to Billy’s attempt at such a fright with a bullet to the brain. It’s a movie that embraces all the horror tropes and archetypes, but uses them in service of a narrative about a young woman overcoming trauma and refusing to let the world decide her fate for her.
30 Years Later, the Ending of 'Scream' Is Still Driving the Series
The success of Scream led to an overarching franchise, with several sequels released in the years since. While other horror franchises like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street largely shifted to standalone chapters with their sequels, Scream has really rooted its underlying mythology in the aftermath of the Woodsboro massacre. Scream 2 (1997) fully embraced being a sequel and rooted its killer reveal around Billy and Stu, while also introducing an in-universe horror franchise called "Stab" that goes on to become a very famous horror franchise in its own right.
The modern movies in the series, like Scream (2022), build off of both that larger "Stab" franchise as well as the legacy of Billy, filtered through his daughter Sam's fears that she inherited his worst impulses. The series has been able to use its own legacy as a means to comment upon itself, poking fun at fandom culture while also showcasing how it can become possessive and dangerous. Throughout it all, the underlying motivation of revenge remains a major driver of the killers, filtered through a culture obsessed with scary stories and true crime. Scream’s ending laid the groundwork for what the series has become over the years, but remains a perfectly tight conclusion in its own right.
