Scream VI and the Final Girl Reversal

This academic essay was developed for the Entertainment Cultures course in my master's degree. Since the course focused on media franchise cultures, intellectual property management, and transmedia synergies, I chose to examine the evolution of the final girl in the Scream franchise, from the first two films to the recent requel cycle. More specifically, the essay reads the 2022 reboot-requel and its direct sequel as works that preserve the serial logic of Scream while updating it for a new generational context. Within that shift, the project investigates how the figure of the final girl changes across the franchise, asking what the new heroines retain from the earlier model and what they revise in relation to contemporary horror, feminist discourse, and audience expectations.

I developed the essay through a comparative close reading of the original Scream films and the recent requel cycle, using Scream VI as the central case study. I reconstructed the franchise's changing treatment of the final girl by moving from Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers to Sam and Tara Carpenter, paying particular attention to how agency, violence, sexuality, and spectatorship are redistributed in the newer films. I also situated the analysis within a broader industrial and cultural landscape, connecting the franchise to contemporary horror reboots, the legacy of #MeToo, and the changing representation of female protagonists in horror cinema.

My approach combined film analysis with gender theory and franchise studies. I started from Carol J. Clover's classical formulation of the final girl and used it as a reference point to show how Scream had already complicated that model in the 1990s, first by multiplying the figure of the surviving heroine and then by loosening the moral and sexual constraints traditionally attached to her. From there, I argued that the requel saga pushes this transformation further, especially through the more ambiguous and unstable figure of Sam Carpenter. At the same time, the essay reads the new cycle as a move from the solitary final girl toward a more collective and generational model of survival, in line with wider shifts in contemporary feminist culture.

• —Narrative analysis
• —Critical writing
• —Media analysis
• —Research synthesis