“Ah, the suffering. The sweet, sweet suffering.” When you take a deeper look at the tragedy in the lives of Scream Queens/Final Girls Sidney Prescott (Scream) and Laurie Strode (Halloween), it certainly seems like something Pinhead could get into on a Friday night.
If you had to live the life of Laurie Strode or Sidney Prescott, which would you choose? Let’s take a look.
The tragedy of Laurie Strode:
First off, Laurie has the worst friends. Sidney’s friends are way nicer, and half of them end up psycho killers! “Poor Laurie, scared another one away! It’s tragic!” No, Annie, tragic is your final moment being that foggy window scene from Titanic with less love-making and more hot Michael Myers breath. Which brings us to Laurie’s first tragic event: Having all her friends murdered as a teenager. What’s worse is Laurie has no time to process this. She suddenly finds her friend dead in a bed using a goddamn tombstone as a cuddle buddy, and the forty-year chase is on; her youth stolen in an instant.
It’s important to note here that Michael Myers became possibly supernatural very quickly to Laurie. This wasn’t an event that made any sense, hence the “Was that the Boogeyman?” statement uttered to Dr. Loomis. This was an inexplicable force of nature that she’d stabbed, gouged, and watched get shot six times only to have him stand up and walk away. Later, she’ll shoot him in both eyes and watch him be set ablaze and still somehow keep moving forward. That has to completely fuck with a human’s mind. At least Sidney knew her adversaries were human.
Laurie’s crush Ben Tramer is squished by a couple of cars and has his entire body turned into a WCW Monday Nitro pyro show. She’s been taken to a hospital with what has to be the lowest-reviewed staff in the history of Yelp. One doctor is half in the bag, and a creepy EMT keeps ogling her. Imagine showing up after all these events to what’s supposed to be a safe place, only to have the unstoppable murder force of a single man take the entire thing over. Could you ever feel safe again after that? Anywhere? I couldn’t. Well, maybe wrapped in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arms. Did I just write that out loud? Moving along…
After taking a short-lived job in the small town of Santa Mira, California, Laurie has so much trauma she has to split it into two different timelines. In one, she has to come to terms with the fact that this solitary slaughter machine on two legs is her brother. Just a nice cherry on top of Satan’s Double Scoop Fuck You Sundae.
In this same timeline, she has to then fake her own death and go into hiding as Keri Tate. She marries an abusive chain-smoking methadone addict; she’s got severe PTSD with a side of night terrors, is extremely overprotective of her haircut-challenged son, and has both a pill and alcohol dependency. She actually starts making Scream movies (H20) to throw Michael off the scent.
The one thing Laurie does have is a succesful career as a Dean at Hillcrest Academy until Michael ruins that too (they frown on your brother murdering your students). Oh, and for the sake of argument, we’re just going to forget that whole thing about her literally dying in Resurrection altogether. Who doesn’t want to forget Resurrection?
Laurie does have at least a few moments of peace when she stands up to Michael, hunts him down, and literally cuts his head off. For just a moment, Laurie experiences the same type of satisfaction Sidney gets to experience at the end of every Scream. She was able to put her Boogeyman down. No, that is not the title of Rob Zombie’s next album, and no, that wasn’t Michael. It turns out her one moment of cathartic release was just an innocent paramedic. We can now add extreme guilt to this overflowing grocery buggy of totally fucked that is Laurie’s current psyche.
But wait! There’s more!
Another version of Laurie grows up with an equal amount of PTSD, lives in the woods, and cosplays as Rambo. She’s had her children taken away and no successful relationships throughout her life. I don’t even think she owns a cat. As a matter of fact, I hope not because she ends up burning her own God-forsaken house down to once again try and stop Michael. This time he takes her daughter, son-in-law, half the town, and her granddaughter’s friends. And I don’t mean to IHOP. No, I mean he murders them gratuitously.
We may know how Laurie’s story ends, Sidney’s is still a question mark, but I imagine it’s not like in Mortal Kombat when defeating Shang Tsung releases your best friends’ souls as they give you a thumbs up on their way to Heaven. I think she’s in for a morbid life, whether or not she survives. Sad yet? Let’s talk about Sidney!
The tragedy of Sidney Prescott:
We’ll be a little briefer with Sidney’s pseudo-quasi-non-happy existence, as she only has one timeline to wrangle with (Thank Christ).
In contrast to Laurie, Sidney had her youth slowly and mysteriously stolen from her. Her mother was murdered when Sidney was quite young, with all of Woodsboro gossiping, as she died having an affair with a dude named Cotton. Sidney wrongfully accuses Cotton of her mother’s murder, thus grappling with the subsequent guilt of sending an innocent man to prison for years. A garage door crushes her best friend Tatum to death; she loses her virginity to a guy who, albeit is handsome, but still parts his hair in the middle, and reveals himself minutes later as a homicidal maniac and her mother’s killer.
Sidney may not have had a supernatural force to reckon with, but she has had to survive a twenty-five years-long murder spree featuring a whopping NINE different serial killers. Which, at some point, has to make your question your people skills. She’s been stabbed multiple times and been forced to murder five people in self-defense. That’s as many as Ghostface dispatched in the entirety of Scream 2022, and you could argue she’s had to help murder a handful more.
Sidney’s psyche reacts differently than Laurie’s in that she’s able to mostly overcome all this and move forward with her head held high. Still, these people keep popping up until her entire existence is basically one fucked up game of serial killer Whac-A-Mole.
It’s not the mysterious Boogeyman popping up on schedule. No, it’s the conniving, smart-ass human being standing right in front of her on any day of the week, hiding in plain sight.
She attempts College only to have two more best friends and her boyfriend murdered in the killer’s quest to get to her. She’s forced out of seclusion to find out she has a half-brother who naturally tries to kill her, writes a book about overcoming darkness (because, at this point, she’s basically the Stephen King of almost being brutally hacked to death), and can’t even promote it without her own niece trying to murder the shit out of her.
Finally, she marries the dude from Grey’s Anatomy and finds a little peace in her life until the God-forsaken phone rings, and she finds out her lifelong protector and friend Deputy Dewey Riley has been gutted from groin to sternum by a teenage girl. She then has to help murder a couple more young adults after getting stabbed in the gut for her troubles before walking off into the supposed sunset. Until the next time, of course. Her entire life is basically the ex-communication scene at the end of John Wick 2, where even the hot dog stand guy might want her dead.
The choices here are a lifelong battle either way. Behind one door, we have an unstoppable, probably supernatural force of nature. One that strikes on schedule, has inflicted multiple injuries, and murdered nearly everyone you’ve ever loved. Severe PTSD and a boatload of other understandable mental health issues, along with the possibility of maybe even sharing DNA with this fucker. You’ll never understand him or why he’s doing this to your life.
On the other hand, your life is the world’s worst game of Guess Who? You have a killable foe but live a life knowing there will always be another. Your killers will taunt you and injure you and kill those closest to you without fail until you’re ultimately forced to murder them yourself. Your dad wears a denim jacket the same color as his jeans.
As these iconic characters (perhaps?) near their collective end, (we’re hoping for a happy retirement), their suffering has been legendary. Which shoes would you rather step into? Will we ever understand what Josh Hartnett’s hairdresser was thinking that fateful day in 1998?
