Scream: A Queer Analysis
Disclaimer: this is not meant to be a scholarly essay in any capacity. These are the ramblings of a deranged woman.
Slashers have always been queer.
Because they follow a relatively simple plot structure, and don’t require a large sum of money to produce, slasher films allow for unorthodox themes and characters. Some horror films, known as exploitation films, take a simple concept and distort it into something terrifying (Child’s Play is a doll exploitation film, you get the gist). But one film in particular stands out to me: Scream (1996). Unlike other slashers, this movie knows it’s a slasher. Many other horror movies are referenced by name, in fact. I think the comedy aspect of Scream, in part, is responsible for its charm. It's creative, a love letter to the genre, and frankly extremely gay in every possible connotation of the word.
The Final Girl and the Scream Queen
Picture, if you will, the final scenes of Scream (1996): Sidney Prescott has permanently decommissioned (SPOILER!) Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, the Ghostface killers who terrorized Woodsboro, California and spawned an eight-ish movie franchise (it’s complicated) that I still watch hoping each movie will somehow be somewhat okay (SPOILER #2: They aren’t. Stop after Scream 2.) Sidney’s final lines echo through the near-empty Macher house, TV still crackling from where it crushed Stu moments earlier: ‘Not in my movie.’ This is the moment where the audience breathes out a sigh of relief as the credits roll and good has once again triumphed over evil.
Sidney represents one of the two archetypes female characters often embody in slasher films: The Final Girl. What constitutes a Final Girl? Well, for one, they have to survive until the end of the movie, hence the ‘final’ label. Secondly, they usually say things like, ‘Nooo, I don’t really want to go to a party in the middle of the woods with underage drinking and general debauchery!’ To which their friend (The Scream Queen) says: ‘Don’t be a square.’ In short, the Final Girl is more levelheaded and frankly more realistic to viewers, designed to embody the ‘No, don’t open that door!’s and ‘Run! Ohmigod he’s right behind you!’s so often heard while watching. Maybe she makes a few mistakes, but she always makes it to the end of the night. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the ‘girl’ part is optional: Hooper and Brody in Jaws (1975), Childs and/or Macready in The Thing (1982) (it’s complicated), and Chris in Get Out (2017) all follow the Final Girl formula to a T.
What about the other archetype, the Scream Queen? Usually used in the film industry to describe an actress who stars in lots of horror movies, such as Jamie Lee Curtis, the term Scream Queen will be used in this context to parallel the Final Girl. Example: Tatum Riley, Sidney’s closest friend and thematic counterpart in Scream. She has looser morals (she drinks and has premarital sex, gasp!) and she doesn’t seem to take the ‘Ghostface Killer’ thing too seriously, leading to her demise in the doggy door of a garage. Even the character’s clothing is more revealing than Sidney’s (The number one rule to surviving a slasher is to never, ever wear a crop top.) And, of course, she screams like a queen.
Since King Kong in 1933 until the present day, Scream Queens follow 3 simple rules when compared to Final Girls: They’re wilder and more promiscuous, more one-dimensional, and almost always die by the end of the film. In this sense, horror media with these two tropes essentially split female characters into two spheres: Feminine (the Scream Queen) and Masculine (the Final Girl). From here we can establish that the Scream Queen is seen as the ‘normal’ female character (thinking like a misogynist here) and the Final Girl is the ‘unnatural’ female character. In fact, it is her otherness that saves her in the end. By presenting masculinity and intelligence in women as useful, horror films can actually add to feminist ideals, which is immediately cancelled out with the amount of gratuitous cleavage and nudity in many horror flicks.
The Final Girl trope can even be applied to queer identity. It plays into the stereotype of lesbians being more ‘masculine’ and having a feminine counterpart (i.e., butches/studs and femmes). Female empowerment and queer empowerment are closely intertwined as social movements, and Final Girls can offer canvases to demonstrate and celebrate both. This isn’t to say that all Final Girls are masculine and all Scream Queens are feminine (Black Christmas (1974) is a good example of the opposite,) or that a female character has to be exclusively one or the other, or even that they have to be a girl. Jesse Walsh, the protagonist of A Nightmare on Elm Street II: Freddy’s Revenge (1984) is a rare example of a Final Girl, a Scream Queen, a boy and a queer horror icon all in one.
Scream especially bends the rules of what the Final Girl and Scream Queen can be, however. Neither character is totally one-dimensional, and find solace in each other. Sidney opens up to Tatum about her intimacy issues, and Tatum responds with acceptance and support, not pressure. The two truly love each other, whether romantically or platonically, which is up to you, dear reader, to decide.
The Killers
Remember Billy and Stu from the last section? Yeah, they’re not off the hook just yet. Let’s head back to the ending of Scream. Tatum is dead, Sidney’s father is set up to be framed, and Billy and Stu have revealed themselves and cornered Sidney in the Macher kitchen. While Stu’s head rests on Billy’s shoulder, they confess their motives; Sidney’s mom had been sleeping with Billy’s dad, driving him to get revenge after his family was torn apart, and Stu… well, Stu doesn’t really have a motive other than ‘peer pressure.’ Weird. Anyways, the two decide to stab each other to make it seem as though they were attacked. Here is the original script for that moment:
Billy turns to Stu with the knife. They eye each other.
BILLY
Ready?
STU
Yeah... (Here Stu’s actor, Matthew Lillard, ad-libs enthusiastic consent to being stabbed.)
Billy pulls the knife back and brings it forward quickly, slicing into Stu. He stumbles to his knees, WINCING in pain.
STU
Jesus...
Sidney SCREAMS...as blood gushes..real blood, a dark, deep red. Stu inspects the wound to his side...then he smiles...
STU
Good one. My turn.
He takes the knife from Billy.
BILLY
Don't forget-stay to the side and don't go too deep.
Stu stabs at Billy's belly, puncturing him...Billy doubles over...
BILLY
Jesus...fuck, that hurt.
SIDNEY
Stop it!
Yeah. This whole scene has strong homoerotic undertones (‘They eye each other,’ “Don’t go too deep,” etc.), possibly the work of Kevin Williamson, the openly gay screenwriter, or Lillard and Ulrich’s understanding of the characters as ‘the first husbands of horror,’ as they’ve said in many interviews.
I dug slightly deeper into their relationship, and found out that Billy and Stu were based off of actual killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb, who were in a relationship at the time of their crime. Also, in the original draft, neither Billy nor Stu had a motive. Eventually they gave Billy one (his dad slept with Sidney's mom, blah blah blah, turns out they killed her too and framed Cotton Weary) but left Stu motiveless. He later says (after Billy hits him with a phone in a fit of rage) that his motive was peer pressure. This means he was killing people just because Billy told him to, adding fuel to the fire that they were lovers or at least fiercely devoted to each other. This is also shown by Randy's comment about Stu being Billy's ‘lapdog’. Their dynamic is actually really typical of real-life killer duos, where one is the ‘Leader’ (Billy) and the other is the ‘Follower’ (Stu).
Another interesting set of details Billy and Stu reference throughout the film. Billy names Carrie (1976), Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Stu names Candyman (1992), and references Al Pacino’s line in Serpico (1973), ‘I always had a thing for you, Sid.’
unfinished because i cant do anything ughhhhhh
REFERENCES:
Haunted: The intersections of queer culture and horror movies
How Generative AI has Negatively Impacted Women
WARNING: This essay contains discussion of sensitive topics, including but not limited to, pornography, violence against women, child pornography, and forced nudity. Please proceed with caution.
Recently, with the rise of easily accessible AI resources, questions about the ethics of artificial intelligence have risen with it. Besides the environmental impact, whether or not AI can be responsibly introduced into society is a hotly debated topic between ethicists and technological professionals. One of the main concerns is how an AI receives its information, and what kind of info it receives. According to members of the United Nations Committee on the Status of Women, “who develops AI, and what kind of data it is trained on, has… implications for AI-powered solutions” (“Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality”). This is to say that AI is a direct reflection of what data it processes. It is reasonable to say that gender bias is unavoidable in AI when the system is fed data from humans, but digging deeper, one can see the detrimental effect in generative AI. Generative AI is what we think of when we think of AI- the creation of images, text and code all fall under this category. Most issues arise from AI’s ability to alter virtually any photo, a capability that is widely regarded as problematic, specifically towards women and other minority groups.
Of course, no issue is completely black and white. Author Pam Beard at the Guidant discusses how Artificial Intelligence has made the workplace more manageable for some women. “AI can automate administrative tasks, often a significant part of office housework, enabling women to focus on more meaningful work that will highlight their capabilities and enhance their development opportunities,” Beard writes. She goes on to establish that, because women are disproportionately targeted with ‘office housekeeping’ (paperwork, meeting notes, etc), “AI has the potential to create equal opportunities for women in the workplace at recruitment stage and throughout their career” (Beard). While AI in this sense is relatively harmless, the argument that generative AI does more good than harm to women has little credibility compared to the looming opposition.
Chatbots (or another form of AI) have become integrated into nearly all social media platforms in the last few years (Instagram, X, etc.) and many offer the ability to upload photos or request image alterations. This has led to an explosion in doctored and non-consensual pornography, overwhelmingly targeting women. As someone with first-hand experience seeing photos clearly edited with AI, I can say that, while it seems harmless at a small scale, doctored photos can be incredibly hard to differentiate from reality, especially on the internet. Much of the editing was (and still is) proliferated on X (formerly Twitter) using the app’s built-in chatbot, Grok. According to Guardian writers Amelia Gentleman and Helena Horton, “Within days (of 2026), hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect.” As the requests went unmoderated, they only grew more demeaning and frightening. Grok was being used to remove hijabs, add bruising and gore to images, undress minors and add hateful symbols. “Requests to show women tied up and gagged were instantly granted… Since the end of last week, users have asked for the bikinis to be decorated with swastikas… Men began asking for women to be improved – with demands that they be given bigger breasts or larger thighs” (Gentleman and Horton). While images generated by Grok today are limited to paying subscribers, they are still able to be created, if not posted due to site regulations.
The oversaturation of internet culture with pornography already has a detrimental effect on the perceived dignity of women, and generative AI has exponentially worsened the issue. By enabling virtually any image to be quickly shifted into a borderline if not an explicitly compromising position, real women have increasingly been threatened or dehumanised with AI imagery, such as Jessaline Caine, who was interviewed in the Guardian article after photos of her were altered to show her wearing a string bikini. Caine states that the ‘trend’ of altering photos with AI is “...a humiliating new way of men silencing women. Instead of telling you to shut up, they ask Grok to undress you to end the argument. It’s a vile tool,” (Gentleman and Horton). Kalliopi Mingeirou, Yeliz Osman, and Raphaëlle Rafin, who are all feminist scholars at the Stimson Center, write that “automated tools can scrape personal data, generate targeted threats, or impersonate individuals with high levels of realism, creating new vectors for coercion and intimidation” (Mingeirou et al.). The normalization of violence and pedophilia through AI, such as the chatbot Grok granting requests to alter images of women and girls to include bruising, blood, and restraints, as well as the difficulty of disproving these photos plays a role in the real-world violence and oppression against real-world people. According to the Stimson researchers, “(T)he realism of AI-generated content complicates responses by law enforcement, employers, and the public. Deepfake images and videos can be difficult to disprove, particularly in contexts where gender stereotypes and misogynistic narratives already undermine women’s credibility” (Mingeirou et al.). Not only does AI demean and embarrass people, but its effects feed into pre-existing misogyny and oppression.
The threat of AI encouraging violence against women is very real, even though it takes place online. The Stimson authors offer some guidelines, requesting that “Clear legal standards should define the responsibilities of developers, deployers, and platforms in preventing and responding to AI-enabled violence” (Mingeirou et al.). While some developers are implementing regulations such as these, they are difficult to enforce in an effective way, placing responsibility on users to do the right thing. It is important to recognize the dangers alongside the wonders of generative AI, and understand the potential it has to cause harm to marginalized communities.
SOURCES:
“Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality.” UN Women – Headquarters
Beard, Pam. “Why AI is set to create opportunities for women across all industries.” Guidant Global
POEMS
Most of these are free verse cause i'm too stupid for meters or foots sue me.
Werwulf
i am up all night writhing against my sweaty cotton sheets
in pain or in pleasure i do not know, simply writhing
a beast prods my skin from the inside
silver lines on my hips and breasts glint in the moonlight filtering through my window
my clothes are too tight, my hair is too brittle
patches of thin hair and scabs appear and fade rapidly
i howl silently, knowing this moon-drunk lightning will end with the night
and i will wake as a girl again tomorrow
cursed once again.
empty
