While I loved almost everything about Scream 7, from the nonstop suspense and kill scenes to the meta concept of the killer representing the overzealous fandom that was furious when Neve Campbell wasn’t paid to return for Scream 6, like most other fans, I was perplexed by the lack of killer backstory.
So, when a friend and I rewatched the film together, we began discussing script tweaks that could have been made to the killer’s limited onscreen moments to iron out details of the mostly missing character development. My breakdown of what we came up with is going to be loaded with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film, stop reading, like, NOW.
Okay, now that the rest of us are alone, we’re going to be discussing Anna Camp’s character Jessica, of course. Even Anna saw the problems with the script, and you can hear what she had to say about it in this interview with cutie Tommy DiDario.
Meanwhile, here are some ideas my friend and I came up with to better explain the Jessica character, and most of it could have been handled in the scene when we first meet her in Sidney’s coffee shop. After Jessica’s son, Lucas, tries to coax Sidney into discussing life as a survivor, he leaves, and the two women sit down to talk. They are friends and neighbors, but we have absolutely no sense of how long they have been, because Jessica’s timeline is nonexistent. By the end of the movie, we have learned that she was married, that she killed her abusive husband, and that she checked herself into a facility for a while, so my friend and I used that information as a jumping-off point to expand her story and piece together a past for her in the brief exchange she has with Sidney.
For starters, we needed a clear connection between Sidney and Jessica, and that easily could have been established by looking back at the history of the franchise. Remember when Sidney worked as a hotline counselor in Scream 3? What if during the coffee shop conversation with Sidney, Jessica simply thanked her for being her counselor when she was trying to escape her abusive spouse and then helping her relocate and start over when a house went up for sale next door? It would not only create a foundation for their friendship, it would also be echoed in Jessica’s final monologue when she says Sidney saved her life and now she’s going to start all over.
Next, where was Jessica’s son Lucas when she checked herself into that facility? What if it were worked into the coffee shop conversation that he’d been sent to live, let’s say, with his grandparents? When Sidney laments the struggle of dealing with her resentful daughter, Jessica could empathize by saying that Lucas resents her for deserting him or neglecting him while she was tending to her own mental health. She could claim that during the period of separation, Lucas became weirdly obsessed with serial killers, implying that he had abandonment issues that could serve as a red herring clue. If viewers surmise that maybe Lucas snapped as a result, leading him to go on a murderous rampage, it would deepen the whodunit aspect of the film. Not to mention, since Jessica is so flippant about killing him at the end of the movie, it would make sense that she would plant a seed in Sidney’s head that he’s messed up enough to be the killer in hopes that Sidney might do what she does best, as Jessica points out—kill the presumed killer.
Then there’s Jessica’s brief conversation with Gale, however, nothing is really said to enrich her character here either. She does say she and her son are “friends of [Sid’s] family”, which makes it sound like they are closer than we ever get to feel they are, and she isn’t happy when Gale grills her son as if he’s a suspect, but that’s it.
We see Jessica just one more time for her killer motivation monologue, when Anna Camp delivers Rebecca Gayheart level crazy. Even with some of the conversation enhancements I presented above, there are still some odd pieces of dangling dialogue here. For instance, when Jessica nonchalantly reveals she killed her husband and got away with it with no explanation as to how, she could have made some sort of quip about the magic of white privilege combined with a claim of self-defense working wonders in the legal system. When Sidney says, “Jessica, please. what are you doing?” and “Listen to me. This isn’t you. Whatever this is, there’s another way,” it suggests that she knows Jessica on a deeper level than we are ever privy to, which would make sense if Sidney had counseled her at an earlier time. Jessica could say that while Sidney had been trying to help her find herself, she found out who Sidney really was by reading her book, which would segue right into her monologue about Sidney’s whole identity being that of a final girl.
The dialogue as it stands would also have to be adjusted to address Jessica’s asinine claim that she checked herself into the facility due to Sidney’s New York absence, so it would better align with my suggestions about her doing so to seek treatment for her trauma. Also, as written, Jessica saying she chose to enter one particular facility to be closer to Sidney just creates another glaring plot hole. Like, that’s where she went to become closer to Sidney? Wouldn’t she have actually moved next door to Sidney to be closer to her? That statement once again muddles the timeline, because we have no idea if Jessica moved next door to Sidney after leaving the facility, or if she already lived next door to Sidney when she went to the facility, which would mean she at some point just disappeared for a while and Sidney would have been aware of her absence. The timeline is just completely fucked the way it was originally written, and I don’t understand why Kevin Williamson didn’t demand that the producers allow him to do more rewrites before directing it, because I guarantee he would have fixed all this…even if not in the ways my friend and I formulated.
