Ghostface Killers Ranked By How Unique Their Motive Is
Emma Horne Each Ghostface has their own reasons for beginning a killing spree. Some are straightforward, while others are more intriguing and unique.
The Scream franchise is unique amongst slashers for having a different killer (or killers) beneath the Ghostface mask in every film (unlike franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th, where audiences can usually be assured that the killer is Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees). What this has allowed for is a variety of unique killers to take on the Ghostface mantle, each with their own motives.
Each killer has their own reasoning for doing what they do, with some more sympathetic or original than the others. While some Ghostface killers have clear-cut motives and others are more dubious, each one reveals their reasoning during the third act killer reveal.
9 Mrs. Loomis
Mrs. Loomis didn't have a very interesting motive, which she admits when she reveals herself. As she says, her motive is far less "90s" than the others'— it's classic revenge. Because Sidney killed her son, she wants to kill Sidney.
While that is fairly refreshing from the standpoint of the Scream franchise, it is the farthest thing from a unique motive out there. Revenge kills are classic, especially with horror, so Mrs. Loomis' has to be the least unique motive in the franchise.
8 Charlie Walker
Charlie's motive is the opposite of Mrs. Loomis's: fairly unique for the horror genre at large, but overdone within the Scream franchise. Charlie is a movie buff, and he wants to make a movie. More than that, he wants a movie where he's the hero.
His secondary motive is even more classic: he wants a love interest. He agrees to work with Jill to get back at Kirby for ignoring him and to get intimate with Jill (both of which are easily predictable motives). Rejection led him to warp his reality until everything was just a movie he was making for himself, one where he was powerful and important. The motive might be scary, but it isn't unique.
7 Roman Bridger
Roman, along with being the Ghostface with the highest kill count, lives the stereotype of a would-be killer: he comes from a broken family, is unwanted by his mother, and is jealous of the life that Sidney gets to lead. Seeing someone else with everything he wants, Roman is driven to take it all away from her, specifically by killing her and all those close to her.
Admittedly, there aren't that many movies out there where the killer is doing what they're doing because their mom left them, but it is essentially Billy's motive with a little long-lost-sibling drama thrown in. Roman is jealous and angry, but his backstory comes off as a poorly-done plot twist more than a believable, unique motive. In fact, it is straight out of a soap opera.
6 Billy Loomis
Billy Loomis is the scariest Ghostface killer in the Scream franchise, partially because he is so realistic. Significant others are statistically the most likely ones to kill a person, so they might be expected. Thankfully, Billy's motive was not as simple as getting tired of his girlfriend or getting with Sidney simply because he was looking for someone to kill. It's a little more complicated than that.
Billy targets Sidney because his family was broken apart by hers. His father was having a relationship with Sidney's mother, which prompted his mother to leave him. It's a form of revenge kill, which makes it unoriginal, but the specifics of the family drama made it unique - at least when the movie first came out.
5 Richie Kirsch
Pretty much everyone in the Scream movies is motivated by horror movies, at least a little bit. But Richie takes it to the extreme, wanting to inspire better horror movies by setting up some real-world inspiration for them.
The Stab movies are in-world horror movies mirroring the events of the first three Scream movies. After those real-world events, however, they had to start making up the horror on their own, which fans agree was not overly successful. Richie is convinced that providing some real-world inspiration would solve that problem, which is, admittedly, fairly unique as far as motives are concerned.
4 Amber Freeman
Amber had relatively similar motives to Richie, but with variation and depth that made her more unique. She lived in the Macher house, which inspired her obsession with the Stab movies and her desire to re-enact them. This circumstantial information makes her more interesting and makes her motive make more sense.
Furthermore, she adds another element to her motive: she was radicalized by chat rooms. While this was likely just part of her attempts to keep Sidney and Gale from killing her long enough to take them out, it was likely to be true (to some extent). Scream movies tend to put current controversies into the motives of the killers, and it is no wonder that Amber has this radicalization narrative in the world of Q-Anon.
3 Stu Macher
Stu Macher is responsible for some of the most savage Ghostface kills in the Scream franchise and is relatively unique because he doesn't really seem to have a motive. He says it's scarier when the killer doesn't have a motive, and that's true, but it also makes fans want to understand him more. He later claims peer pressure as his motive, which is pretty weak, but fans speculate there were deeper motivations.
One fan theory is that Stu was in love with Billy and would do anything to make him happy. Others propose that Stu was woman-hating since he killed both his current and ex-girlfriends over the course of the movie. But it's entirely possible that he really was just a teenager who was a little too into his horror movies.
2 Jill Roberts
Scream 4 provided both one of the weakest killers in Charlie and the most interesting in Jill. Jill decided that she wanted to become the final girl and to do so, she set up a killing spree of everyone she knew and perfectly framed her ex-boyfriend along the way. Her killer strategy shows off the kind of cunning that would help Jill survive almost anything, and she would have won if she had simply had a little better luck and kept her mouth shut after the fact.
With all of that said, her motive of wanting to be famous as a victim was really unique and made fans want to see a version of the movie where she succeeded and had to go up against the next killer in an alternate version of Scream 5. Jill was a really fascinating character, and her motive is a massive part of that.
1 Mickey Altieri
Mickey had a desire to kill regardless of his situation. What made him take part in this particular set of killings, however, is what makes him interesting. Unlike all the others, Mickey wants to be caught and put on trial for his crimes, and he wants to use the motive of having been inspired by the movies.
Keep in mind, his motive is not actually that the movies made him do it. His motive is wanting to be famous and stir up public controversy. This desire to be publicly acknowledged as a killer and get away with it was quite a weird but unique take that made him stand out in comparison to the other killers.
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