The Scream franchise was revived last weekend when the meta-horror series topped the box office with a stellar $30 million opening. A lot of the interest was sparked by the legacy characters, played by Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox. If you’ve seen the film, you know one of them didn’t make it and now Neve Campbell is contemplating if that shocking death was the right choice.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Despite escaping near death across four installments, it was David Arquette’s Dewey Riley that catches the bad end of Ghostface’s knife in a particularly brutal scene. It’s made all the more upsetting because Dewey has a pretty emotional arc in the new film and probably has the most depth of the returning legacy characters. While speaking with “Variety,” Neve Campbell, who plays final girl bad-ass Sidney Prescott, addresses that she’s not sure it was the right choice and Courteney Cox even suggested to directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin to shoot it both ways so they had options in regards to keeping him around or not, much like Wes Craven did with the character in Scream and Scream 2. Campbell said, “I was devastated. I still have trouble wrapping my head around it. I still question whether it was the right choice, because from what I’m hearing, there are a lot of fans who are really upset.”
Campbell did reveal that herself, Arquette, and Cox, all talked about his demise beforehand and that’s when she brought up Cox’s suggestion. Campbell said, “We did. We were sad about it. Courteney had tried to tell the directors to shoot it both ways to give themselves the option because Wes would do that sometimes when there were certain characters that were so beloved.”
The reality of the situation is that a legacy character had to die to raise the stakes. I’m a big Randy Meeks fan and felt like that character was my spirit animal in the first Scream so I was devastated when Jamie Kennedy died in Scream 2. That being said, an important character has to bite the dust to show that no one is safe. I know I didn’t want to see any of the legacy characters go and it’s hard to choose who I would let go of if it were my choice. Also, from a narrative standpoint, Dewey had to die for Sidney to have a reason to come back to Woodsboro. In one of her early scenes during the film, she expresses on the phone with Dewey that she has no plans on returning to that town after he informs her about the new murders. A strong reason had to get her involved and his murder happened to be it.
Do YOU think it was right to kill off Dewey in the latest Scream?