Warning: This article contains spoilers for Scream.
Scream star Jasmin Savoy Brown has spoken about her reaction to her character Mindy and Mindy's twin brother Chad surviving Ghostface. The film, which hit theaters on January 14 and became the first to knock 2021's box office juggernaut Spider-Man: No Way Home out of the #1 slot for the weekend, is the fifth entry in the Scream franchise, which began with Wes Craven's meta slasher classic from 1996. The film follows a new Ghostface killer creating a "re-quel," combining a new slate of young people with legacy characters including Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who have appeared in every Scream movie so far.
In the film, Brown plays one of the new teen characters, Mindy Meeks-Martin. She is the niece of Jamie Kennedy's character Randy Meeks, who was introduced in the first film and killed during the events of Scream 2. In addition to being a horror movie fanatic who helps the gang define the rules of how to survive a re-quel, she is the twin sister to Mason Gooding's jock character Chad. Although both twins were brutally attacked by the new Ghostface killer, the ending showed them being loaded into ambulances, still breathing, the type of promising ending that the character of Dewey has received several times in the past.
While speaking with THR about her banner year starring in both Scream and the buzzy series Yellowjackets, Brown discussed her character's Scream fate. Once the movie debuted, she had the chance to consider the optics of who survives the film, specifically "people of color" and "siblings." She also says that it's "such an honor to get to play a queer Black woman in the franchise and to get to survive." Read the full quote below:
It’s such an honor to get to play a queer Black woman in the franchise and to get to survive. It’s also cool that the people of color are the only people to survive from the new cast, and it’s really beautiful that the only survivors of the new cast are all siblings. There’s just so much to look at there, and I’m sure as I read more reviews and talk to more people, I’ll understand even more of the depth of it because getting different people’s perspectives deepens the impact. So I’m very grateful and it hasn’t completely sunk in yet.
The amount of characters who live to see the end of Scream is part of the new film's reversal of the tropes set up by the franchise. The filmmakers first tipped their hand in Scream's opening prologue scene, which traditionally features a cameoing celebrity who perishes before the opening title card. Their version of this scene is an intense stalk-and-slash sequence featuring Jenna Ortega's Tara Carpenter, but once the film really begins, it is revealed that she has survived and is in the hospital, a twist of fate that has never happened in a Scream project before.
Scream certainly told a contained story, but part of the re-quel conceit was presenting the audiences with characters they might want to follow into further entries in the franchise. Mindy and Chad are certainly two of the most charismatic new characters, which is a boon considering that the film's franchise-best opening weekend has solidified the possibility of a Scream 6 coming sooner than later. The next film has a strong base of characters to work from should any of the remaining legacy characters not wish to return.
Source: THR