Scream 3

The opening murder makes one thing immediately clear.

Ghostface isn't finished.

Cotton Weary has transformed the notoriety surrounding Woodsboro into a successful entertainment career, but fame doesn't protect him when the killer comes calling.

Soon the trail leads directly to Hollywood and the production of Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro.

It's the perfect setting for Scream.

A movie about horror movies has now entered a movie studio where people are making a movie about the murders from the previous movies.

The franchise's obsession with horror conventions has effectively swallowed itself whole.

The Stab films have always allowed Scream to make fun of its own mythology.

In Scream 3, that joke becomes the entire playground.

The production has reconstructed familiar Woodsboro locations.

There is another Sidney.

Another Gale.

Another Dewey.

Sets imitate places where real people died, while actors discuss characters based on the people standing beside them.

Then Ghostface starts killing the cast.

Suddenly, nobody knows whether the screenplay predicts the murders or whether the murderer is using it as instructions.

One of the film's funniest ideas arrives in the form of Jennifer Jolie.

Jennifer is playing Gale Weathers in Stab 3.

Unfortunately for the real Gale Weathers, Jennifer has very strong opinions about the woman she's portraying.

Parker Posey's performance gives Scream 3 some of its best comic energy, particularly when the two Gales are forced to investigate together.

They're competitive.

They're suspicious of one another.

And somehow they make an unexpectedly effective team.

Hollywood has produced a copy of Gale Weathers.

Gale isn't entirely impressed.

By now, surviving has practically become Dewey Riley's superpower.

He's been stabbed.

More than once.

He's limped his way through two Ghostface massacres.

And when Scream 3 begins, he's working as a technical adviser on Stab 3 while trying to keep the production's actors alive.

His relationship with Gale remains complicated, but underneath the arguments there's still something neither of them has managed to leave behind.

Ghostface may keep returning.

Apparently so do Gale and Dewey.

Sidney Prescott has finally done what seems sensible.

She has vanished.

Living in isolation and working remotely as a crisis counsellor, Sidney has created a life where nobody is supposed to know where she is.

Her gates are locked.

Her location is secret.

She carefully controls her contact with the outside world.

But Ghostface has always understood that the telephone is enough.

When the calls begin again, Sidney realises that hiding hasn't ended the story.

It has only delayed the next chapter.

The murders increasingly point toward Sidney's mother, Maureen Prescott.

Throughout the first two films, Maureen's death hangs over everything that happens to Sidney.

Scream 3 goes further back.

Before Woodsboro.

Before Sidney.

Before the name Maureen Prescott.

The investigation uncovers Maureen's time in Hollywood, where she pursued an acting career under another name.

What happened during that period becomes the missing piece connecting the new murders to everything Sidney has already survived.

Randy Meeks may be gone, but Randy still explains the rules.

Through a videotaped message recorded before his death, he warns the survivors that the third instalment changes everything.

This isn't merely another sequel.

It's the conclusion of a trilogy.

The past can return.

Something everyone thought they knew may be wrong.

And anyone can die.

The message is classic Scream: a horror movie explaining exactly what kind of horror movie it has become while its characters are trapped inside it.

One of Scream 3's cleverest sequences sends Sidney onto the reconstructed Woodsboro set.

Her childhood home is there.

The rooms are there.

The memories are there.

But none of it is real.

It's a movie set built from the worst moments of her life.

Ghostface turns that artificial environment into a weapon, forcing Sidney to move through recreations of places tied to Billy Loomis and the original murders.

For Sidney, Hollywood hasn't simply adapted her trauma.

It has rebuilt it.

This Ghostface isn't interested in Sidney's recent history alone.

The killer knows things about Maureen that Sidney doesn't know herself.

Photographs appear.

Old names surface.

Hollywood connections begin fitting together.

And the mystery shifts.

The question is no longer simply who's under the mask.

It's why this particular killer seems to believe Sidney's entire story belongs to them too.

The trail eventually leads to Stab 3 director Roman Bridger.

Roman isn't simply another person connected to the film production.

He's connected to Sidney.

Roman reveals that he is Maureen Prescott's son and Sidney's half-brother, born during the time Maureen tried to leave behind.

After she rejected his attempts to contact her, Roman became consumed by resentment.

But his involvement goes even deeper.

He reveals that he helped set the original tragedy in motion by showing Billy Loomis evidence of Maureen's affair with Billy's father.

The events that eventually created the first Ghostface murders had another hand behind them.

Roman believes Sidney received the life he should have had.

A mother.

A family.

Attention.

Sympathy.

Fame.

To Roman, Sidney became famous because of suffering he believes should have been his.

But that's the flaw in his entire worldview.

Sidney never wanted any of it.

She didn't ask to become a survivor.

She didn't ask for books, movies or headlines.

She simply kept refusing to die.

Their confrontation turns the franchise's family history into something brutally personal.

Roman wants Sidney to understand him.

Sidney understands enough.

Then she fights back.

By the third movie, Scream has established a defining idea of the franchise.

Ghostface isn't one person.

The costume can come back because anyone can wear it.

Billy and Stu wore it.

Mrs Loomis and Mickey wore it.

Now Roman wears it.

Different killers.

Different motives.

Same face.

That simplicity is exactly what makes Ghostface such an effective horror icon.

The monster doesn't need to come back from the dead.

Someone else just needs to pick up the mask.

After Roman is defeated, Scream 3 gives Sidney something the previous films rarely allowed her.

Quiet.

She joins Dewey, Gale and the others at home.

Dewey proposes to Gale.

Life, somehow, continues.

Then Sidney notices something unusual.

A door has blown open.

For most of the film, Sidney has lived behind gates, alarms and locks.

This time she looks at the open door.

And leaves it open.

It's a small moment, but an important one.

For the first time since Woodsboro, Sidney doesn't let fear decide.

Scream 3 was designed as the conclusion to Sidney Prescott's original trilogy.

The first film dismantled the rules of the slasher movie.

The second examined what happens when a successful horror film inevitably gets a sequel.

The third turns its attention toward trilogies, Hollywood and the entertainment industry that transforms real tragedy into something audiences can consume.

It's broader and more openly comedic than the first two films, but underneath all the movie-industry jokes remains the same central character.

Sidney Prescott survives.

Not because Ghostface stops calling.

Not because the past disappears.

But because she finally reaches a point where the past no longer controls every door she opens.

Ghostface would eventually return.

But the original Scream trilogy had reached its ending.

For the moment, Woodsboro could finally go quiet.