Editorials
Scream Fans, We Need to Talk: An Open Letter to Toxic Fans

Dear Scream Fans,
The first Scream movie was released in 1996 when I was in middle school. I was scared of everything at the time—I was once scared to meet a cousin from Puerto Rico because his name was Freddie, and I was positive he would be Freddy Krueger. My parents were always watching movies like Predator, Alien, Terminator, and Jaws, and all of them terrified me.
The things I remember most about Scream’s release are that my parents had the same cordless phone as Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker (which I’d only seen in the trailers) and a girl walking ahead of me in the middle school hallway, saying, “That movie is gay. Drew Barrymore dies in the beginning.” My first big spoiler, alongside some casual homophobia!
Later that year, I rented Scream from Blockbuster with some friends and fell immediately in love. At that point, I’d never watched a movie that scared me so much that I genuinely loved and cared about all the characters. It felt so cool, so hip. The women were tough and fashionable, while the guys were all hot. I was fully in.
Scream 2 came out a year later and would become the first in the franchise I saw in theaters. Now we’re coming up on the release of Scream VI, which officially means this franchise has been releasing movies for over half my life. The last standing characters from that first film are my absolute favorite final girls, Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers and Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott. Unfortunately, Sidney will not be in this new installment because Paramount wouldn’t pay her what she deserves. But, inversely, we are still getting the beloved shit-talking Gale Weathers—alongside the return of Hayden Panettiere’s fan favorite Kirby Reed from Scream 4. We are, of course, also getting the return of the new batch of survivors from 2022’s Scream. For me, this franchise has always been the horror franchise. The characters are always dynamic, and I always care about them. Sure, there are older franchises with more sequels and scarier villains, but this one is it for me. It’s why I love horror. But most importantly, no one tells someone to “fuck off,” quite like my gay icon Gale Weathers.
So, tell me why over the past year, I’ve had more Twitter accounts with Sidney Prescott as their avatar on social call me a “fake fan” than ever before in my life? What the fuck even constitutes a “fake fan”? If you’re a fan, you’re a fan. Hosting a queer pop-culture podcast (Slayerfest 98), cohosting a horror podcast (My Bloody Judy), and running the social media account for both over the last few years has taught me how even the fandoms I’m in, the fandoms I love, can be extremely toxic. The fact that any adult would even use the term “fake fan” would be truly laughable if it wasn’t also accompanied by a zillion more harassing tweets and comments.
Am I upset Neve Campbell isn’t coming back? Fucking of course I am! She is the face of the franchise—without Sidney Prescott there would’ve never been a Scream franchise. Does that mean I will take that anger out on the folks doing the new movie? No, I’m not a child—I know that’s all because of the higher-ups not caring. The original script for Scream VI had a role for Sidney—the creative team clearly did want her back. Do these people who have turned their whole personality into hating the current state of the Scream franchise know they could spend their time doing literally anything else? Do these people who say, “Wes Craven wouldn’t have wanted this,” talk to him from beyond the grave? Do these people know Wes Craven killed Heather Langenkamp’s beloved final girl Nancy Thompson in the 3rd Nightmare on Elm Street movie? Do they realize they sound just like the killers in 2022’s Scream?
Before the new film’s release, two horror podcasters told me they’d never cover Scream because the fandom was so toxic online. I was so young and naïve back then I assumed they were exaggerating—but, dear reader, they were not. My horror pod once did a recording on things we’d like to see the franchise do next, and foolishly, my cohost Zachary and I both said Sidney deserved a break. We felt the franchise should stop punishing Sidney and move on to new motivations for Ghostface; she deserved to live a happy life. We also talked about new opening kills they could do. I talked about my idea (aka my fanfic) of Gale getting attacked at a Stab-themed drag competition where she tells Trixie and Katya to “fuck off” backstage. So many comments asked us if we’d ever watched a Scream movie. When we did a livestream and talked about how much we wanted Kirby to come back, someone in the chat wouldn’t stop telling us how stupid we were to think they’d ever bring her back (well guess what Mimi).
What makes fans become this way? What joy does it bring them to find folks who enjoy the new additions to the franchise that they hate and tell them they aren’t real fans for liking it? These people clearly love the original movies—we love the same thing, so why fight? I don’t care if some random person online doesn’t share the same opinion on a movie as me, so why do they?
I have friends who didn’t like 2022’s Scream, and that’s fine! Why would I be mad at that? I disagree with it, and that’s normal. I haven’t liked many movies folks have loved, and I don’t go to their social media accounts to harass them for it.
And it’s, of course, these toxic folks who happen to be loudest online, unfortunately. They are absolutely not the majority of Scream fans. All of the Scream fans I’m friends with (the ones who did and did not like the newest one) are all fun and chill.
It’s like Star Wars! I love Star Wars, I grew up on Star Wars but the toxic fans who are the loudest online make it pretty impossible to post anything about Star Wars without drawing in at least someone telling you that your mom deserves to die over your opinion (I once had folks angry in my Twitter mentions over a viral tweet about loving Baby Yoda). It’s mostly turned me off from the franchise so I’ve become more of a casual fan now. My podcast Slayerfest 98 talks Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all things Marvel, and you can be sure I’ve encountered toxic fans with both. The toxic corner of Buffy fans are the ones who get furious over Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iconic slayer’s boyfriends—which is totally not the point of the show. It’s a discourse I truly wouldn’t give a shit about if not for the angry Spuffy fans that once campaigned for a publisher to drop one of my cohost’s novels and then told me I needed to fire her. All over her hot take on the beloved vampire, Spike. Then there’s the many toxic corners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe where folks will get furious if you say anything bad about it or the folks who get mad if you say anything nice about any of the properties where, you know, a woman exists as more than a side character. Then there’s the corner of the internet that are Marvel Haters and will hate on anything Marvel.
The internet is a hellhole.
We are constantly dealing with exhausting election cycles, racists, homophobes, mass shooting news, and the ever-charming incels. Fandoms should not be like that. They should be fun! Celebrate what you love about the fandom! The killers in the newest Scream weren’t supposed to be models of how one should act in a fandom…and yet!
And if you can’t just enjoy the parts of a fandom that you love and just can’t help screaming online about how much you hate Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera (the franchise’s first non-white Final Girls), then at least leave me alone.
With love,
Ian Carlos Crawford
Editorials
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.
Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown
Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?
But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)
What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?
What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.
However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.
What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?
Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.
This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.
Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.
If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.
Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.
So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?
It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us
I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.
For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?
Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.
However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.
What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie
Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.
Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.
Editorials
Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?
Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?
Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest
The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies
While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time.
Watch the trailer for Umma below
Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More
Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.
I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.