Who Are the Ghostface Killers in ‘Scream 2’?

Riding the wave of success left behind by Wes Craven‘s iconic Scream in 1996, Scream 2 proved this franchise would have a fruitful future. As our favorite final girl, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), heads to college, we find out that Ghostface’s reign of terror has followed her onto campus. Familiar faces and an array of new ones all make for an endless suspect list. In classic Scream fashion, we are prompted to use horror and sequel tropes to theorize the killer’s identity as the numbers are whittled down in a new series of creative death scenes. Whilst we got to enjoy the fun murder mystery and slasher meta-commentary, the filmmakers and writers were in a turbulent frenzy when piecing together the film’s ending. To fully take advantage of the first installment’s popularity, the production of Scream 2 was hastened, leading to circulating fake scripts, multiple alternate endings, and even the leak of a dummy script. In hindsight, the script leak was possibly the best thing that could’ve happened for the quality of the film, making us appreciate the real ending more which is congruous with the Scream universe and is far more satisfying.

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Who Was the Killer in ‘Scream 2’?

As Sidney flees into the college auditorium, unknowingly heading into the finale face-down, the face of the first Ghostface killer is revealed. She finds her boyfriend, Derek (Jerry O’Connell), strung up on a star as a part of a fraternity hazing ritual and watches as Derek’s horror-fan friend Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) saunters in with a gun. Mickey plays on her past trauma and deviously suggests that Derek may be his partner, creating a situation that would mimic the first film. But since this is a sequel, Derek is innocent and is promptly killed. There are definitely two types of reactions to Mickey being the killer: some expected it because of his fairly creepy demeanor, whereas others had discarded him early on since he was too obvious of a suspect and thus were shocked.

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Mickey truly made no attempt at hiding his slightly psychotic side, with Olyphant perfecting the eerie Kubrickian stare that was featured in many scenes throughout the film. He even claims that he wants to get caught. That way he would be able to blame on-screen violence for his actions, creating a debacle in court and notoriety for him. His “fake” death and actual death wrap up the film’s commentary on fandom toxicity and how the media impacts real-world violence. The ideas revolving around Mickey’s character feel like an extension of Billy Loomis’s (Skeet Ulrich) line in Scream: “movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative.” Like Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) in the first film, Mickey is a psychopath in the making and just needs the right encouragement and connections to act on his impulses.

Mrs. Loomis Is the Mastermind Killer in ‘Scream 2’

After the first reveal, one of the most random characters walks into the room: reporter Debbie Salt (Laurie Metcalf). Throughout the film, she was more akin to an irritating gnat, buzzing around Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and making off-hand comments designed to goad. But then we discover that she is actually Mrs. Loomis — the mother who abandoned her family when she found out her husband was cheating on her. Armed with a gun and the timeless motive of revenge, she reverts into her role as a mother to kill her son’s, Billy Loomis’s, killer. It also doesn’t help that Sidney’s mother was the one who had an affair with Mrs. Loomis’s husband. In her frenzied monologue, she explains how she met Mickey on an online psychopath forum and proceeded to fund and encourage his actions as Ghostface. After shooting Mickey, she reveals that her plan is to emerge from the massacre as the lone survivor and to pin everything on Mickey. But as every Ghostface eventually learns, Sidney Prescott is truly the ultimate final girl. In the end, Mrs. Loomis’s death is carried out by a bullet from Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the innocent man accused of Sidney’s mother’s death, and an extra headshot by Sidney since “they always come back.”

What Were ‘Scream 2’s Alternate Endings?

Scream 2 faced many writing challenges primarily due to the tight timeline the team was forced to operate in. They not only had multiple alternate endings planned but also circulated fake scripts. Despite keeping the real endings a closely guarded secret, even to the cast, one of the real scripts ended up being leaked. However, as executive producer Kevin Williamson explains in a Collider interview, “the first leaked script that went out was the fake one, so by the time the real one went out, no one believed it.”

One such decoy script they had prepared involved Dewey (David Arquette) being the killer. But the dummy script that was leaked in 1997 featured Derek and Hallie (Elise Neal), Sidney’s roommate, as the Ghostface killers. Their motive would’ve been similar to Mickey’s — wanting to reap the rewards of a high-profile court trial. However, Derek and Hallie being the killers would have been just another arbitrary storyline. We’ve already seen that Sidney has questionable taste in men and doesn’t particularly need to see another one of her boyfriends turn out to be a psychopath. The only reason these two would be paired is to further destroy Sidney’s trust in people, but it still wouldn’t have been as gratifying as the ending we got.

It was always intended for Mrs. Loomis and Mickey to be the core Ghostface killers. However, the team actually changed the original ending which included Cotton Weary snapping in the end and killing Gale, as well as Dewey dying. Cotton Weary’s motive was actually credible. In the first film, Sidney discovers that Billy and Stu murdered her mother, which means she essentially condemned an innocent Cotton Weary to prison. After serving a year and then being released when the truth emerged, Cotton Weary is primed to have a desire for vengeance against Sidney. Instead, we got a film where he ends up helping Sidney escape the killers, who, in return, give him the credit for being the hero, allowing him to start cleaning up his public image. Though the character of Cotton Weary was severely underused in the franchise, this alternative was better than the rudimentary storyline of him becoming a villain. The real ending also allowed the continued survival of legacy characters Gale and Dewey. Although the production of the film was “one big blur of panic” for Williamson and the team, they successfully managed to covet the real ending and made alterations that gave us a satisfying and clever ending.