It’s been 25 years sinceScream 2hit the big screen, and in a retrospective, writer Kevin Williamson revealed he still had one regret about the movie. Williamson, who wrote the first twoScreammovies alongsideScream 4,and who also served as executive producer on the series fromScream 2onwards, revealed that he regrets killing off fan favorite character Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy).
Scream 2continued the series' characteristic satirizing of the horror genre. This time, thehorror movie decided to subvert the final girl tropeby following Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) to college, where she’s terrorized by a new Ghostface. Her friend and fellow Woodsboro survivor Randy is also along for the ride. Unlike many horror movie sequels which choose to kill off the final girl from the first film, however, Sidney survives the events of the sequel, while Randy is killed halfway through the movie.
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In a retrospective interview conducted byEW, Williamson recalls his writing process forScream 2.Williamson leaked a fake script forScream 2in order to throw people off the trail of what the sequel would be about:Scream 2was out less than a year after the first one, so interest was sky-high. He also said he regretted killing off Randy:
“I thought if you kill someone really important to the audience in the middle, it just ups the stakes. Everything’s off the table. I knew we weren’t going to kill Sydney [sic], I knew we weren’t going to kill Gale or Dewey. Those three characters, forScream 2, were safe, and so I had to look to the secondary characters. I love Randy, I would have given him a much bigger life had I known this franchise was going to live and live. I would have loved for him to be a legacy character. At the time, I thought it would just be the punch in the gut the audience needed at that time, to really get mad, and get mad at the killer.”
Williamson’s words also reveal that he never intended tokill off the uncharacteristically smart horror protagonist, Sidney. That makes sense on multiple levels:Screamhas always skewered the conventions of slashers, and killing off the final girl from the first film is a slasher film staple. Usually, it’s the slashers themselves that become iconic, but in this case, Sidney herself has become an icon, while Ghostface is always a different person (or people).
Sidney’s also aslasher victim without being an obnoxious character. Her character’s defining trait is that she’s a survivor no matter what. Though that wasn’t as well-defined for the franchise duringScream 2,it becomes readily apparent when rewatching the series.
Randy, however, might not have been the best person to kill off so early into the franchise. Had Williamson known that the series would have continued pastScream 2,perhaps he’d have written things differently -Scream 3does feature a cameo from the character. In aslasher whodunnit, however, main characters frequently get killed off. If Randy hadn’t been killed, who knows who else might have been killed off?
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