Did Billy plan to kill Stu by intentionally stabbing him too deep and being the lone survivor, similar to what his mother does in the end of the sequel? He might have thought that Stu wasn't the brightest, so that Stu might have been able to run his mouth at some point and it was too risky to keep him along.
shareCould be, hard to say. He sure didn't seem to care whether he lived.
shareI dont really think so because he didnt stab him completely and then tried to kill him on top of that. He might've hated him and it showed by this action but not enough to kill or to think the worst of him. Like resented him perhaps because he helped him and believed in him in ways no one ever really did and at the same time was also good so it countered him being the only one who was good and needing someone to accomplish what he did otherwise he couldnt have done it by himself and taken full credit in pride.
It's funny, this whole scenario resembles what they did in scary movie where they made out to be homos. Which I never liked but it was somewhat funny and it did add a hidden spin. Now this could of him going too deep could've been of a play on love & hate like S&M like homos like to do.
Now I really think it was messed up what he was trying to given that he did help him with everything unconditionally and he was really his friend but he probably wasn't that well to begin with.
Good stuff I found this, I thought about adding it to you,
BrettTheKiller16
·
11/6/2017
This should be in trivia aswell. Whether or not Billy and Stu were actually gay and acting out some sort of Nathan Leopold & Richard Loeb scenario is a question that has haunted viewers since this movie came out, since Stu comes up behind Billy, puts his head and hand on Billy's shoulder and taunts Sidney physically smashed up against Billy at the ending. Stu pulls a similar move with Randy at the video store, taunting Randy from behind, and then Billy comes up face to face with Randy on the other side; the two of them bullying him from both sides. Were they bullying him, or flirting with him, or a little of both. There's also Sidney's "pansy-assed mamma's boy" line which might play into the Billy-is-gay theory (if you hold stock in stereotypes). Billy clearly seems to be interested in Sidney; he has sex with her, and so is Stu, although perhaps all that is a cover; or perhaps they're both bisexual. Kevin Williamson is himself gay, and a vocal proponent of gay rights and eliminating stereotypes in the media, so it's likely that he would say no, that was not a conscious attempt on his part to perpetuate those kinds of anti-gay stereotypes (gays as serial killers, etc). But political messages aside, viewers and critics continue to ask the question, which means something unintentionally came across in Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard's performances that maybe nobody consciously planned.
ScaryMovie53
·
12/17/2018
Interesting theories. Thanks for expanding my education with Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. With that said:
1. I dont think Billy and Stu were gays. At least not Billy. If there was a gay theme about these two, it can only be if Stu was in love with Billy. Not likely. They were homophobic as hell. When Sidney said "you pansy ass mamma's boy", she didnt aimed to his sexuality. She meant "if you choose to act like a child, you have no right to grow up". Just like how Stu didnt really had a thing for Sid. He meant "if i'm going down, i'm taking you with me!". The kind of male psychopaths who rape their unrealized love interest for control? That's not the case. Stu wanted to have control over his rival, not over a girl who doesnt see him the way he see her.
2. When they bullied Randy, they didnt flirted with him. It was a pure intimidation. Stu played with Randy's ear to annoy him, not for anything beyond it. Even if Billy was bisexual (he wasn't. He was straight), he saw Randy as an intellectual rival and nothing more.
3. There was only one LGTB killer in the franchise so far. It was the pre-retcon Audrey. Too bad they retconed her into a good person. Seeing a bisexual killer who redeems herself would be interesting.
4. If we assume nobody take the similarities between the killers in Scream and Scre4m one step too far, the only reason for "Billy and Stu are gays" theory is the amazing chemistry between Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard. Great chemistry. That's all.
Dcn1989
·
5/30/2016
I don't care what people say about Billy being the main villain, Stu is the true Ghostface.
-He committed the first on-screen murders.
-He was the first to attack and nearly succeed in killing Sidney.
-He was the first to make Sidney question her past decisions.
-He had the most kills: Steve, Casey, and Kenny.
-He was behind the mask the most: The first kills, Sidney's first attack, Billy's "murder", the house attack, "Behind you, Jamie" (although Skeet was behind the mask in that scene), Kenny's murder.
All Billy did was bitch and complain. Stu did all the dirty work. He also had the more memorable kills except for Billy killing Tatum.
Homosexuality subtext in Scream
For years this has played on my mind but I haven't seen or heard of any discussions surrounding it - which makes me question the validity of my assumption, but I always find myself viewing the movie through an almost queer-reading way that I can't seem to get myself out of now.
So it essentially started with Scream 2 when Randy calls Billy a Homo-repressed Mamma's boy. Although this could just be a throwaway line mocking Billy, I think it genuinely holds up if you watch the original movie through this vision.
To do this we have to look at Scream 1996 as a self contained movie with no outside information from sequels (such as the Roman retcon) because that was made after the fact. The line in Scream 2 just solidifies what I already thought.
In Scream we see that Billy's main motivation is to have sex with Sidney. It's been 1 year since the death of her mother, and we know that Billy and Sidney started off hot and heavy. So assuming that Billy was already dating Sidney at the time of learning about his father's affair with Maureen, we can take from it that he was dating her for other reasons than revenge. There are a few moments when Ghostface could have killed Sidney but let her get away. I think that's pretty important when you look at the finale. Billy reveals himself as the killer only after he gets what he wants from Sidney, sex. We know that Stu was doing it because he wanted to enact a bunch of murders. But Billy's motivations are entirely different and personal.
There is a lot more that I am brain-fogging over. I do believe that Billy was written to be gay and is homosexually repressed. I think Maureen's affair gave him justification to rape her to see if he could have sex with a woman. And then murder her on grounds of the affair. The entire movie is about trying to prove to himself that he isn't gay, and wants to have sex with Sidney properly as further proof. Once he does this he feels justified in killing her the same way he did Maureen.
I do need to watch again to properly make a detailed analysis. But the subtext is all definitely there for me. Just wondering if anyone else picked up on it/takes it that seriously?
I honestly see this as a cultural thing. Where two people of the same sex cant be partners and if people ever see two people together they usually think they're doing it and rightfully so because people tend to emulate movies but it all seems like pervert society thing because people in other culturals tend to do have friends, inner circle and they could or could not have sex with them. That is besides the point but here sex is a common objective and if they havent then the common question is why are they together? Doesnt make sense unless they're family members and sometimes that even begins to wonder especially if they are attractive. This came up before I remember where for example in the Last Samurai people started speculating if they were gay and then this subject came up that if every movie where there is two partnership there is always gay speculations, like Frodo, and samwise, xenia and gabrielle, Hercules and ioalus, it's a common morbid theme. I think a lot has to do with personal, whether you want it and your looking for it and in real life if you pursue such relations. Such a personal view.
shareItchyRedRobin
Liver alone!
6 months ago
I suppose Billy taking out his aggression on Stu is something to be looked at. I didn't actually think of that. Although phallic representation is always an easy go-to so I generally overlook it.
I'm a month late to this post but I definitely read Scream as a queer-coded movie, or at least a movie with very gay sensibilities - I mean, at its core what is Scream about but identity and prescribed societal roles and how much those labels matter in terms of how you're treated/perceived by others, through the lens of genre meta? Sidney of course grapples with what it is to be a public victim/trauma survivor and the way it radically changes the way everyone views/treats her (it's pretty unique for a non-sequel slasher to open on an already-traumatized protagonist, I like that about her arc). I think it's really fair to say that Billy and Stu also struggle with their personas and how to control the narratives around themselves...in possibly the most extreme way there is to do it!
Everyone quotes Billy's "movies don't create psychos" line but I think "it's just one big movie, only you can't pick your genre" says a LOT more about his character. So you can't pick your genre and know you're in a horror movie - what happens to gay/bisexual-coded men in classic horror? They're either a laughable early-acts kill or they're the villain, typically as one half of a big ol' enmeshed couple of Leopold & Loeb types. Billy looked at his life (attracted to men, absent mom) and the options before him and chose to be Norman Bates, and from the perspective of a queer reading it's pretty powerful!
And then Stu - Stu we have constantly asserting his masculinity, I think that defensiveness is his primary motivation as a character! "It takes a man to do something like that (which I did, I'm a man)," "yo I am SO buff," bringing up Jamie Lee Curtis' tits multiple times at the party (clearly just to get a reaction - we learn shortly after that he's studied horror movies extensively, he doesn't need to be asking if JLC will be shirtless), killing his ex and the big football star Chad she dumped him for. His big finale breakdown isn't about the fact that he's bleeding out, it's about how panicked he is at the thought of disappointing his parents. And what does he do right before dying at a woman's hands (the ultimate masculinity fail, you could say)? Tries to assert his heterosexuality at her (I always had a thing for you, Sid, no really, tell my parents I was straight).
heterosexuality at her (I always had a thing for you, Sid, no really, tell my parents I was straight).
Other easy-to-read-as-gay stuff (leaving out the obvious stuff other people have mentioned like the Billy/Stu/Randy video store scene or the physical...vibes...between Billy and Stu in the reveal scene):
Billy's horror movie references include: comparing himself to Norman Bates (a gay-coded cross-dressing villain with mommy issues) and comparing Sidney to "Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs" (in which the villain is Buffalo Bill, gay-coded cross-dresser with mommy issues)
Billy is specifically trying to seduce Sid so he can kill her off within the social rules of the horror genre - he and Stu literally taunt her about no longer being a virgin multiple times in the reveal scene! Your angle of wanting to "prove his heterosexuality" is a good one too, I mentioned Stu's defensiveness about his masculinity but Billy has some of that too for sure. (ALSO, immediately after the virginity-loss scene, Sidney becomes overwhelmingly suspicious that Billy is hiding something from her - sure, it's literally about her suspecting him of the murders, but it has the subtext/emotional beats of the kind of questioning a closeted teen would get.)
stabbing/penetration and knife (or gun)/dick symbolism are pretty common overall in the horror genre (killers frequently stab because they can't fuck, whether because they're incels or gay or whatever) - Scream does this for sure, their targets are pretty much all people who've emasculated them in some way, and then in the whole mutual stabbing scene during the reveal/climax Stu's dialogue is pretty explicitly sexual ("come on baby, get it up"). Stu even has some dialogue about how stabbing is like, super manly and a woman couldn't have done it at one point.
Scream ALSO makes at least a couple other penetration jokes at Billy's expense that I remember off the top of my head (Ghostface calling to tell Sidney that she specifically "fingered" the wrong suspect, Sidney reclaiming her sexual agency/power in the climax by literally fingering the hole in Billy's chest)
There's probably other stuff too, for example horror movies often make a lot out of hiding in closets/coming out of the closet for gay symbolism but I haven't ever paid really close attention to that in Scream (besides remembering the bit where Ghostface/Stu(?) is hiding in the closet in Sid's place early in the movie and there's extended "someone is clearly in the closet here, when will he come out and do the spooky thing?" suspense with a couple fakeouts).
I read Sidney as lesbian-coded too, but that's a bit more of a Scream 2 thing I think (besides the stuff related to her ambivalence about Billy/sex with Billy that I've already mentioned, which can also be read as a reflection on her character) - having her in a SECOND ambivalent relationship in the sequel and then never pairing her off again is so good. Every time I see the "no homo, it's normal for teen girl bedrooms to have 2 beds for sleepover purposes, right?" scene at Tatum's place in the first one I laugh though.
Edit: coming back with a few other notes -
people talk about how long the Sidney/Billy sex scene buildup seems to last (compared to the movement of time in the scenes it's cut with), with the reading that Billy is deliberately wasting time/reluctant to move forward - to be sure Stu is ready to stage his attack, to try to work himself up to straight sex, who knows? it's another point in the "overall ambivalence toward heterosexuality" column
another point where Billy is emasculated - Scream is known for subverting the slasher trope of showing a woman topless; instead they have 2 scenes where female nudity is teased but not ever actually showed...and ultimately Billy's bare chest is the only one shown onscreen
Edit 2: A friend of mine read this and wanted to also call out that when Billy quotes Norman Bates, it's not Norman he attributes the line to, it's Anthony Perkins - an actor whose career was essentially defined by his gay identity and closetedness, that's the best-known fact about him and readings of his portrayal of Bates in particular. That, in turn, reminded me that "Stu Macher" is generally considered a nod to Joel Schumacher, gay director of classics like The Lost Boys. (And re: Sidney-as-queer-too implications while we're talking actor/director references, tie in Billy comparing her specifically to Jodie Foster!)
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