Sidney Prescott is the Best Final Girl
Sidney Prescott, for years, has risked regressing into self-parody. The first time she was targeted by two peers donning a Ghostface mask, she was almost killed. The strength of her resolve and unmatched capacity to exploit homicidal, adolescent sensibilities saved her life. Sidney successfully teased her way free from death and lived to fight another day. And, well, fight she would, because in the years that followed Wes Craven’s smash 1996 hit Scream, Sidney has been at the center of the Ghostface slayings not once more, not twice more, but four additional times.
Even 2022’s Scream, a quasi-reboot that endeavored to augment legacy players with a new core cast, was principally her story. Were it not for a pay dispute, Sidney (and actress Neve Campbell) would have been back for Scream 6, incredulously placing Prescott in the Ghostface crosshairs once again. And now, well, she’s back for the upcoming Scream 7.
It’s rare that a single final girl is given so many opportunities to contend with their franchise killer. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has done it seven times, though three of those encompass a self-contained trilogy, with two even taking place on the same night. Ergo, that longstanding beef with Michael Myers is conceptually different. More importantly, so as not to risk lampooning its own internal logic (and box office receipts), 2018’s Halloween retconned everything but the first. It was Curtis’ and Strode’s fifth time going at it with Michael, though canonically only the second.
Also Read: ‘Halloween’ TV Series: Beloved Horror Franchise is Set for “A creative reset”
A killer can’t, per horror convention, stay in pursuit of one single target. It erodes the illusion, that beguiling sense of audience identification that makes a scary movie a scary movie. At a certain point, the Ghostface threat evaporates because of its rinse-and-repeat love affair with just one person. Ostensibly so, at least. While I’ve argued that Sidney Prescott’s appearances post-Scream 3 were farcically conceived, they nonetheless augment her status as the one, the true, the definitive final girl.
The history of the final girl—less the concept, more the language—is a complicated one. When Carol Clover first coined the term in 1992, it ignited a firestorm. Decades later, her seminal text Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is almost biblical in introductory film criticism and media studies courses. Since its publication, the final girl concept has been expanded upon, rejected by some, and repurposed, and revitalized, for a new era. The final girl of yesteryear, the kind through which Clover distilled her assessment, remains a horror touchstone, though an avowedly subverted one. Sort of.
Take Laurie Strode again. One of Clover’s key contentions is that the final girl is innately irreconcilable with feminist theory on account of the character’s filmic and narrative masculinization. Clover interrogates phallic imagery, nondescript clothing and names, and—more importantly—a cultural rejection of male terror. The Laurie Strode of David Gordon Green’s contemporary Halloween trilogy is all of those things, playing into hegemonic horror norms more regularly than it transcends them.
Also Read: Nancy Thompson Is the Ultimate Final Girl
Sidney Prescott, conversely, is the synthesis of every antecedent, and future, final girl. She is every scary movie survivor, good, bad, and indifferent, all at once. She has Laurie Strode’s naivete, Nancy Thompson’s (Heather Langenkamp) strength and resiliency, and Sally Hardesty’s (Marilyn Burns) unbridled terror. It’s easy to forget, especially with the Sidney Prescott of the 21st century (see: Scream 3 and beyond), but Prescott can scream. And scream she does. A lot.
Those screams, coupled with her arsenal of strengths and weaknesses, conceptualize her as near untouchable. Sidney Prescott knows she’s above it. She knows what kind of movie she is in (namely, a horror movie) and she embraces and spurns convention with the fluidity of a knife in Casey Becker’s gut. She breaks some rules and accepts others under the reasonable auspices that those rules, quite simply, don’t apply to her.
If they did, there would be no Sidney Prescott in Scream 5. Instead, she’d have been killed off like Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) in the opening act of Friday the 13th: Part 2. She might have made it to the third entry, like returning player Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, only to, again, meet her end. Even Sally Hardesty, played by Olwen Fouéré in 2022’s legacy sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was killed by the long-dormant killer, Leatherface. Oh, and Laurie Strode? She’s canonically died twice, first off-screen in Halloween 4, then in slapstick fashion in Halloween: Resurrection.
Horror kills its final girls. But Sidney Prescott is more than horror—she transcends it. The rules that govern how she acts, whether she lives or dies, were moot not just by Scream’s conclusion, but by the time she taunted the Ghostface killer on her very first call.
Seriously, check it out:
Even still, it would have been easy for Sidney Prescott to, again, regress into parody. The modern horror scene, no doubt incited by Scream almost 30 years ago, is just a touch too clever for its own good. Audiences reject earnestness, and filmmakers—afraid of perceived cinematic cringe—often undermine their own material for no other reason than to preemptively be in on the joke. Scream, despite where it is now, was never simply and exclusively satirical. That meta-awareness worked because it was grounded in genuine terror.
While it wasn’t the first movie to imbue itself with a meta-awareness of its genre (Wes Craven even did that himself a year before with New Nightmare), it was the most successful. And, yes, it was cute to see the opening act’s victim acknowledge a world where Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street are real movies. Someone, the tagline goes, has taken their love of scary movies—scary movies the audience knows—one step too far.
Also Read: Who Is The Best Final Girl of All Time?
Cute has a shelf-life, and wisely, Prescott as a character rejects horror in broad terms in the first Scream. She is, again, above them, not watching them, asking the killer, “What’s the point? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It’s insulting.” Yet that rejection is simultaneously adoring. She doesn’t know horror, but she does respect it. You have to at least know the rules to break them.
By Scream 5, Sidney Prescott is no better versed in horror movies than she was at the start. She doesn’t need to be. She’s more than just another final girl. She endures, and she transcends, because she remains above the fray. Just try and knock her down. Nine different Ghostface killers have tried. See if you can do any better.
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Categorized:Editorials
