Scream: Resurrection is a 2019 slasher miniseries, based on the films of the same name by Wes Craven, as well as being a retool of the MTV series that aired from 2015 to 2016.
Deion Elliot (RJ Cyler) is the star running back of his high school's football team in the midst of planning for his future, when his tragic past unexpectedly comes back to haunt him, putting himself and those around him in danger.
Also appearing in the series are Mary J. Blige as Deion's mother, Tyga as Deion's step-brother, Keke Palmer, Tyler Posey, CJ Wallace (Monsters and Men) and Jessica Sula (Skins), while Roger L. Jackson returns to the Scream franchise as the voice of Ghostface, whose classic mask also makes a comeback after being absent from the MTV series due to copyright restrictions. Queen Latifah serves as an executive producer, while the late Cravennote receives a posthumous credit here.
Scream: Resurrection aired all six of its episodes over three nights on VH1 (moving from its original home on MTV) in July 2019.
Has a budding character page.
Scream: Resurrection contains examples of:
- And Starring: Paris Jackson gets the "and featuring" billing in the first look teaser.
- Angsty Surviving Twin: When Marcus was attacked by Hookman, Deion ran to get the cops instead of staying and trying to fight him, after all, he was a small, frightened, 9-10 year old boy who couldn't fight a huge guy with a hook hand. Still, even though his cowardice is justified, Deion still feels massive guilt for abandoning his twin.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Manny is easily one of the nicest people in the whole show, but pissing him off is a bad idea, as a racist redneck who ran Kym off the road found out when Manny used a tire iron to break his arm, making him and his buddies run away scared.
- Big Bad: Beth turns out to be the main villain, a sociopath simply looking for an excuse to kill. While Jamal too was a Ghostface, they had different agendas, with Beth convincing Jamal to carry out murders to get revenge against Deion/Marcus while she too committed murders on the side, eventually killing Jamal so he wouldn't be a loose end that could probably reveal her true intentions.
- Black Dude Dies First: Since most of the cast is black, the show does a race-inverted version by having Ghostface's first two victims both be white guys. It's also discussed in the first episode, as Beth tells Deion and Kym that, as black people, they have the lowest chances of survival if they're really in a horror movie. Eventually defied, as Deion and Kym both survive to the end of the season while Beth herself (revealed to be the killer) dies by Kym's hand.
- The Breakfast Plot: During the first episode, most of the main characters end up in detention together, and a teacher compares the kids to The Breakfast Club, which they have to google before realizing that it's actually a pretty accurate comparison. Later on, Ghostface dubs the group "The Deadfast Club" after deciding to target them.
- Bury Your Gays: The openly gay Manny is blown up inside Kym's car.
- Cassandra Truth: Liv's shady, impulsive behavior (not being at the school when Ghostface went after the gang, being defensive when asked about having a second phone, slashing Kym's tire with a knife, indirectly leading to Manny's death, and getting Deion in trouble with her dad so he wouldn't go after Ghostface, leading to her dad getting stabbed by Ghostface, who then frames Deion for it) causes Beth and Kym to think she's Ghostface and causes Deion to break up with her over her behavior. It turns out that she isn't Ghostface and that her actions were due to mental issues stemming from a messy divorce between her dad and mom, who she keeps in contact with using the secret phone and Deion makes up with her after learning about that and finding out that Jay was really Ghostface. Still, there is enough distrust towards her that when Deion finds her in suspicious circumstances (knocking out Beth and trapping her in a room after she reveals a element of Amir's death she shouldn't have known) and learning from Jay, before he died from getting stabbed by his partner, that there's a second, female killer, he doesn't fully believe her when she and Beth both accuse each other of being the other killer.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: This Ghostface is not messing around, delivering excruciating, brutal deaths to his/her victims.
- Tommy, a teen who bullied Marcus as a child, gets stabbed in the neck and has his head covered with a plastic bag, essentially making him both bleed to death and drown in his own blood.
- School Jerk Jock Avery is thrown from a second floor and impaled on a metal beam, in front of a big crowd.
- Shane is pinned down with a fire escape ladder and has drugs pumped into him through his eye, having a painful death as he foams from the mouth.
- Luther, the Hookman, is chained inside a trash compactor and is crushed as Deion tries and fails to find a way to free him.
- Manny, who suffers from asthma, is trapped inside Kym's wrecked car when Ghostface lies fire to the gasoline pouring from it, Manny slowly asphyxiating from the smoke before the car explodes.
- After evading Ghostface and getting into the elevator inside Beth's family's funeral home, Ghostface impales Amir through the elevator door with a saw blade, holding it steady as the elevator goes up and the blade cuts right through Amir.
- A police officer is stabbed in the head but doesn't die from it, and as he convulses in horrible pain, Ghostface pours alcohol on him and lights him on fire.
- Jamal is stabbed multiple times on his torso with the sharp end of a trash-picking stick and then tied up, slowly bleeding to death painfully for hours.
- Marcus, while not murdered, ended up dying from either asphyxia or dehydration in the trunk of a car in a junkyard while trying to hide from the Hookman who attacked him.
- Death of a Child: The very first death in the series is a young child out trick or treating, who gets impaled through the chest with a hook. It's later revealed that the child, Marcus, was not murdered, but instead died after hiding from his attacker and either not daring or not being able to get out of his hiding place.
- Detention Episode: Deion is put in detention when trying to defend Liv from her boyfriend, Avery Collins, when he wouldn't let her leave during a fight; Liv then gets puts in detention for talking back to the teacher and trying to defend Deion.
- Also in detention is Kym and Manny, the former of which yelled at a teacher's face with a megaphone, and Beth, who was smoking on school grounds earlier in the episode right next to a "No Smoking" sign.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Jamal is quite understandably upset about Deion's death and Marcus stealing his twin's identity, but he really goes overboard by plotting to murder "Deion" as well as his friends who had nothing to do with it.
- Fake-Out Opening: The opening scene of the first episode features a hot blonde celebrity receiving a phone-call and basically recreating the iconic first scene of the original Scream. She is not harmed in any way and the kid in the Ghostface costume who got candy from her is the real first victim of the show.
- Final Girl: A Discussed Trope, as when discussing the fact that a slasher killer is after them and they're all probably going to die, Beth tells Liv that she's probably safe because she has Final Girl written all over her. And in fact seems to tick all the boxes and the nicest and seemingly most wholesome of the kids. Beth eventually reveals that she aimed for Liv to become the final girl but decides to kill her anyway, until Deion/Marcus saves her, then Kym returns with Beth's discarded gun and kills Beth as the latter rises from behind the couple to kill them, resulting in two final girls.
- For the Evulz: Beth's motivation for the killing spree boils down to this. She wanted to stage a horror story where she'll enjoy to be the villain.
- Goth: Beth dresses in black, wears really heavy dark makeup and has a ton of piercings. While discussing what horror movie characters they are, Beth describes herself as a goth.
- Hidden Depths: Shane is a high school drop-out and apparent drug user who also sells drugs and carries out other illegal activities, such as theft. This is all because his grandmother is sick and he's the only family she has, and he is lovingly devoted to caring for her, as seen when he steals medicine from a pharmacy after knocking the clerk unconscious, as his grandmother needs the medicine they can't afford. This only makes his subsequent murder quite heartbreaking.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After revealing herself as the other Ghostface, Beth puts on the costume to chase after Liv, but then abandons the mask after getting hit in the face with a locker door since, as she lampshades, is really impractical for serial killing.
- Beth: God. You have no idea how hard it is to see in this damn thing.
- Lovable Jock: Deion is a popular football player for his school, and he is also nice to almost everybody he interacts with.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: All of both Ghostfaces' victims were male. The only female to be killed was Beth, who was one of the two Ghostfaces.
- Meta Guy: Beth is the resident horror movie fan, with deep knowledge of all the corresponding tropes, which she explains to the others and applies to the situation they're in. In this she fills the same role as Randy in the original Scream trilogy and Noah in the previous TV series. The main difference being that she's one of the killers here, and she wanted to be similar to the villains of the movies she likes.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Manny's murder heavily affects Kym, especially as she realizes she was not the best of friends and took Manny for granted.
- Needle in a Stack of Needles: Ghostface makes Dieon go to a silent disco where everyone, including Dieon and the rest of the Deadfest Club, are wearing Ghostface costumes.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Shane manages to get a hold of a gun and prevents Ghostface from killing Kym, but he's unable to bring himself to shoot the killer. This results in several more deaths.
- Liv punctures one tire of Kym's car while she, Deion and a tag-along Amir go elsewhere, because she wanted to keep the others safe. This leaves Kym, Manny and Beth stranded in a gas station with a bunch of white supremacist rednecks who run Kym off the road after she had an altercation with their leader, the end result being Manny, going to Kym's aid, getting murdered by Ghostface.
- Police Are Useless: As expected, the police in the show are incompetent when a slasher is prowling the area. Then again, the six initial deaths didn't seem related to each other and looked like really bad accidents. After all, a guy getting his throat cut and suffocated with a bag near a scary building with winos, a high school senior at a party with drugs and alcohol falling onto a sharp object, a gang member getting his throat cut, a drug dealer dying of an overdose, a drunk getting crushed to death in his own junkyard, and a high school student getting burned to death in a car accident while in a really bad part of town don't scream "Ghostface Killer". But when a police officer is attacked and left for dead and a high school student is found eviscerated with a bonesaw, they begin to take shit seriously.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: In the fourth episode, Ghostface asks the group to choose who in the group should die next and adds "snitchers die". It turns out their intention was to murder the person who would throw one of them under the bus instead. Amir, who secretly voted for Deion, learns this the hard way. Ghostface rubs it in his face by showing him that she's actually his first girlfriend who killed him.
- Shown Their Work: Kym watches a bunch of horror flicks in the second episode brought from a Red Box to prepare herself for Ghostface; the first film she watches is the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween. The film is decisive among the fanbase with many outright hating it, yet it and its sequel are well known among 90s-00s millennials and non-fans of the horror genre (like Kym, who is into buddy cop films like Rush Hour) to the point that
they're unaware of the original 1978 film and think of the 2007 version instead. However, when Amir makes his mix tape for Beth, he includes lines from the 1978 Halloween due to her being a horror movie buff; the 1978 film is respected among devoted horror fans so it would make sense Amir would choose the older film since horror fans know to never "fuck with the orginal". - Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Tyler Posey, Jessica Sula and Giullian Yao Gioiello did not appear in any of the trailers prior to the show's debut.
- Self-Harm: In the first episode, Beth implies that she has had issues with this, as when Deion's friend suggests cutting class that day, she responds that she's the last person he should be talking to about "cutting".
- Liv holds a lighter's flame to her arm, further conveying her father letting Deion know about Liv acting out in destructive ways after he and his wife's divorced.
- The Sociopath: Beth, one of the two killers, who outright reveals herself as one, as she kills people only because she feels like it, displaying not a single shred of sympathy for anybody.
- The One Guy: With the deaths of Manny, Shane and Amir, the main character Deion is now the only male member left of the "Deadfast Club".
- Undying Loyalty:
- Jamal is described to have this for Deion, according to promotional materials. Turns out he does, and is trying to avenge his death as Ghostface, knowing that Marcus took his identity from the night he died.
- Manny, who always sticks by Kym. Even after they have a strong argument that causes Kym to storm off even on a flat tire and a group of white supremacist rednecks go after her, he runs over on foot to try and save Kym from being hurt.
- Wham Episode: Episode 6, where it's revealed that there were two killers, Jamal and Beth, each with their own separate agendas, but also The Reveal that Deion was actually Marcus all along, as he and his brother had switched costumes that Halloween night, resulting in Deion's demise, with Marcus passing himself off as Deion ever since because people always treated Deion much better than they did with Marcus.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: In the second episode, the Deadfest Club get trapped in the school with Ghostface along with Shane (who they initially thought was Ghostface); Shane brags about being well armed with a small revolver and was previously shown robbing a pharmacy with said revolver, but when actually faced with having to shoot Ghostface, his tough-guy image falters when he struggles to pull the trigger, allowing the killer to escape. He's then criticized by the gang, as well as being called a "pussy" by Beth, for his cowardice. However, in a lot of cases, it's hard to gain the nerve to shoot somebody when you don't murder people on a daily basis, and while being a thief and a drug dealer, Shane's never killed anyone and draws the line at it; besides, he probably doesn't want to get involved with gun violence when it could kill him or land him in jail, especially he has to take care of his sickly grandmother.
