Scream’s Sidney Prescott faces the same battle for survival as many young, gay kids, says the franchise’s screenwriter Kevin Williamson.
In a new interview, Williamson reflected on how his own sexuality informed Prescott’s character. Played by Neve Campbell, the hero develops major trust issues after learning her boyfriend murdered her own mother.
One of the things I’ve wrestled with is trust,” Williamson told the Independent, “and Sidney trusted no one. “Did she really know her mother? Is her boyfriend who he says he is? In the end, she wasn’t even trusting herself.”
Sidney, Williamson said, is anything but the “final girl” – the horror film trope of the virginal teenager who outwits the slayer. But as a closeted gay kid growing up in North Carolina and Texas, final girls were a figure he had long related to.