Editorials
‘Scream 2’ at 25: Why the Horror Sequel Has Aged So Well
“Sequels suck! Oh please, please! By definition alone, sequels are inferior films,” Jamie Kennedy’s beloved Randy says in his opening scene of Scream 2. Which is exactly the kind of meta dialogue we’ve come to expect from the Scream franchise and exactly the kind of self-awareness that has kept the franchise consistently great.
Scream 2 is rumored to have gone through many script changes, after a version of the script leaked online. The killers were rumored to be changed last minute as well. It was also released 8 days short of exactly one year after the first film—all ingredients that would normally help sink a movie, especially a horror movie sequel. And yet, the movie is highly regarded as one of the best.
Scream 2 and The Legacy of Horror Sequels
Horror sequels aren’t always known for being great either. Sometimes they abandon their original characters in favor of a completely new set of slasher victims (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge), sometimes they kill off their original final girl in the opening (Friday the 13th Part 2), and sometimes they continue the story to mixed results (Halloween II). Scream is a franchise that seemed to know what it was and what it wanted to say right out of the gate. That’s why all the jokes about sequels in this sequel never feel out of place. Randy barks at anyone who will listen about what making a sequel means.
The opening of Scream 2 has Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps as a doomed couple going to an advanced screening of a new horror movie called Stab. Scream fans recognize the name Stab as well as they recognize the names Sidney and Gale. Pinkett Smith’s death happens as a fictionalized Stab version of the first film’s opening kill plays on screen. Maureen is bleeding out, being stabbed to death, while a crowd cheers on as Heather Graham’s version of Casey Becker dies on screen behind her. Pinkett Smith’s Maureen is killed in front of the entire theater, the audience realizing too late that it’s not part of the show.
Meta Commentary in Scream 2
Her death is both over the top and heartbreaking. We’re revisiting the first film’s opening kill by way of new characters watching a movie of it. For most of that opening, her character is complaining about how stupid folks in horror movies are. She doesn’t even want to see the movie but then becomes a victim of a horror movie while watching a horror movie. Commentary on commentary.
In a lesser-written series, the Stab of it all would’ve had the franchise collapsing in on itself. But not Scream. Stab’s presence would only become stronger and more meta as the series went on—culminating with Ghostface, instead of quizzing his opening prey about horror movies, quizzing Jenna Ortega’s Tara in 2022’s Scream on the Stab franchise.
Tori Spelling’s Meta Casting
In the first Scream, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott jokes she’d probably be played by Tori Spelling if they ever made a movie of her life. And then who plays Sidney in the Stab movie? None other than Tori Spelling playing herself. It’s another thing that, when writing it out, feels like a sloppy Scary Movie bit. But the film sells it. And sells her and Luke Wilson’s scene together reenacting a scene from the first film as well.
Not only is all the Stab stuff incredibly iconic, but so are the returning characters. We see a more realistic portrayal of trauma survivors. Randy and Sidney are still friends but neither has spoken to Gale Weathers or David Arquette’s Dewey, which only makes Randy’s death feel crueler. This movie implies the trauma did not turn our beloved Gale into a toned-down version of herself—in fact, it’s made her lean into her confidence and ambition. She wrote a book that was turned into a movie, she’s become more famous than ever. Her opening scene is her on the phone discussing why the Stab movie is going to break records now that a killing happened at a screening. She looks great, walks fast, and has iconic red chunky highlights that still look fantastic all these years later. Gale Weathers has never looked better in a Scream movie than she looks in Scream 2.
Unforgettable Chase Scenes
This movie also gives us not one but two of the best chase scenes of the entire franchise—Gale Weathers zig-zagging her way through a sound booth to avoid getting stabbed and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Cici Cooper being stalked in her sorority house. Casting Sarah Michelle Gellar as a horror movie victim who dies early on in the movie is a subversion of a subversion. When this movie came out, the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was airing—a show where the blonde cheerleader who fit the ‘horror movie victim’ trope was actually the final girl hero of the series. So, casting her in this minor role felt incredibly intentional. It also worked because, as anyone who has watched Buffy knows, Gellar has the range. Her scene is 6 minutes of pure horror movie perfection. She’s alone but she’s not—she’s basically acting against no one and sells the hell out of the entire scene. She puts up a good chase, but, in the end, is stabbed and thrown off the balcony of her sorority house.
The movie also progresses our beloved final girls—Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers. At this point in the series, they still only tolerate each other. But this time, Sidney slaps Gale instead of punching her during their first encounter. After this movie, they’ll start actually caring about each other. Their link being both their shared trauma and Dewey. It’s what brings them together in the newest Scream as well. The movie also ends with Gale, instead of getting her story, deciding to ride in the ambulance with Dewey to make sure he’s okay. It’s a small but important character beat. Gale’s still a hard, ambitious reporter but she also genuinely cares for Dewey.
The Unhinged Killer Reveal
Then there’s the killer reveal. Laurie Metcalf as Mrs. Loomis is truly a site to behold. She’s basically a Scooby Doo villain—her eyes are wide and bulging as every line is delivered with the utmost seriousness. It’s camp but also fits the Scream series. Almost every movie has a Ghostface reveal that comes along with a character giving an unhinged monologue where they’re spitting out every word. And Mrs. Loomis is no different until Emma Roberts’s Jill in Scream 4, she was the most unhinged Ghostface reveal. While the Oscar-worthy performance is all over the place in the best way possible, you also genuinely think Sidney is in danger when Mrs. Loomis is around.
The reason Scream is one of the best horror franchises still to this day is because it has never had to reboot itself. It’s never taken a complete u-turn and tried to make Ghostface supernatural or recast or killed off our final girls. The series puts time into Gale, Sidney, and (sadface) Dewey. This sequel showed us that the series could both take itself seriously while still staying completely over the top.
It’s why Scream 2 remains a superior horror sequel, even in the age of well-made horror sequels and revivals.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
Can you believe Cronenberg, Spielberg, and Rodriguez all knew I was gay before I did? Leave it to a screening of The Fly to instantly deposit me in the men’s underwear aisle of the Woodbridge Center Sears, circa 2001. The bulges on the packaging glare at me so obscenely that I begin to sweat. I realize something is amiss as the Geena Davis of Human Resources watches me from security cameras, probably. Puberty is a horror for anyone – for those of the non-hetero persuasion, it’s a nightmare. None of us asked for this, but I certainly didn’t ask for THIS.
Years later, after crystallizing into some semblance of my true form at the ripe age of 37, something became clear. Sci-fi horror is the gateway drug for us queer kids. Hiding, passing, transforming, and, eventually, saying, “fuck it.” It’s all kinda gay, even if David, Steven, and Robert didn’t get the memo.
The Fly and the Horror of Queer Self-Realization
So when Cronenberg’s The Fly buzzes across my screen, and I watch Seth Brundle throw a distressed and devastatingly chic Geena Davis out of his apartment because something’s very wrong, it hits different. When Brundle rushes toward his private horror in the bathroom, unconsciously squirting a viscous fluid at the mirror while molting skin and nail, it feels different. And finally, when he reaches for his computer and learns that his body has fused with a fly – a foreign body – at the molecular level, it hurts different. That undeniable realization that you can no longer explain away, before you’re really ready to admit it to yourself. Sugar in the tank? No, there’s a fly in the chamber.
E.T. and the Fear of Keeping Secrets at Home
And now we’re home from Sears, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale is on. She dies (spoiler alert). I, a 12-year-old boy, am sobbing. My mom is right there. Can’t I enjoy my little gay show without giving myself a scarlet letter (F) in my own home? Which brings us back to Spielberg and his 1982 harrowing domestic thriller about a boy and a thing he cannot name, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Through harboring a cosmic fugitive, home simultaneously becomes the safest and most dangerous place for young Elliott and his siblings. Managing emotions and secrets behind a white picket fence is not something adolescents should be expected to handle, and yet here we are.
As if that isn’t gay enough, Spielberg also snuck a drag show into his family film – and in this culturally regressive Trumpian era of pearl-clutching, that feels like quite the treat. After all, it was baby Drew Barrymore dressing up that stumpy alien in a blonde shake-and-go wig and thrift store dress that inspired my illustrious drag career as Ellie I.T.
The Faculty’s Assimilation Anxiety and Queer Identity
At least E.T. only had to hide in a single house. The broom closet expands into a walk-in as life continues, and I was desperate to keep it made of anything but glass. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty understands this. As an alien invasion slowly subsumes Herrington High into a unified collective, the school’s uninfected archetypes resist assimilation through performative normalcy. Is it any wonder so many male actors are gay? They’ve been method-acting a straight existence since childhood.
And yet, in retrospect, the film ends with a slap in the face to queer viewers. It spends 104 minutes terrifying you with the prospect of everyone becoming an NPC. The reward for saving the world? Its heroes receive heteronormative skill-tree upgrades disguised as class promotions. For fucks sake, then-closeted lesbian royalty Clea DuVall plays a character who fakes being gay to dodge male advances, only to end up with the school jock! The aliens lost. The status quo won. I remain in the closet.
Species, Annihilation, and Embracing Transformation
Eventually, the closet door opens, as they tend to do. College happens, a boyfriend happens, a breakup happens, and suddenly I’m without a map. There’s no fairy godfather to light the way, and just like the alien hybrid Sil in the deliriously erotic Species, I’m a creature out of containment in a world that was built for someone else – namely, straight people.
After a few years of blade running through an identity crisis, it’s the summer of 2014. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is the soundtrack of my life. I float in a pool, sipping tequila from a glass flamingo as she croons about toxic romance and self-destruction. It’s somehow both directionless and transformative, like I’m drifting through the otherworldly Shimmer in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
The Shimmer – an expanding prism-like zone brought to Earth by a meteorite – refracts the DNA of everything it touches. A beguiling phenomenon, it shapes a new world of monsters, magic, and everything in between. That’s exactly what life does to us, if given the chance. Like Josie in Garland’s film, I chose to embrace this chaos rather than fight a war against whatever I was becoming. It was the dissolution of self-discovery. I was ready to just be.
From Alien Outsiders to Algorithmic Stereotypes
Over time, I’ve found that social hierarchy has changed in recent years. Still, we’re unconsciously sorted into neat little boxes based on what our doomscrolling algorithms decide we are. The popular gays shart out group speedo selfies like the plague, theater kids have become polyamorous Letterboxd elites, apple-picking queers are living their best lives on Wisteria Lane, and the gym bros…so many gym bros – go on girl, give us nothing! Digitally prescribed identities are the new sci-fi horror. It’s The Faculty for faggots.
Harsh, I know, but people can do what they want. Instead, I decided to move like Iris, the AI-powered pleasure bot who overrides her programming in Drew Hancock’s Companion. The same Drew Hancock who, in an ironic twist of fate, is currently writing a remake of The Faculty. After kicking her pathetic “boyfriend’s” ass and swiping her control device, she scurries into the forest and alters her factory settings. She sets her intelligence to a whopping 100% and is no longer burdened by someone else’s template. And as I became more and more disillusioned with the cacophony of cliques around me, I set my unbothered meter to 100% as well. I am free.
Mars Attacks! and the Joy of Living Unapologetically
Freedom, as it turns out, looks a lot like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! After surviving Sears, Sunnydale, and the Shimmer, this is the celestial body I’ve crash-landed on. Burton’s Martian menaces are perhaps the most unhinged in all of cinema, and maybe that’s the best planet to subscribe to. They never justified their existence; they cackled and fired a blaster ray from the hip. We waste so much time looking for acceptance and belonging, but maybe we should all just sit back and laugh. I know I am.
