Woman of the Month: Sam and Tara Carpenter

Sam and Tara Carpenter from Scream 5 and 6

I’m doubling back and editing this post to finally bring you November’s Women of the Month (plural).

For the first time since starting these posts in August 2014, I was completely without inspiration. I couldn’t think of a single female character to showcase. The ground rules I set for myself meant I could only feature one woman per film/book/story, and that she had to be heroic (or at least not overtly villainous) in nature – but given that most of my reading and viewing this year has been continuation of stories rather than new material, the well had simply run dry.

And then last week, I watched Scream 6. It was a lot of fun, and held up surprisingly well given the absence of both Neve Campbell and David Arquette, largely due to the baton of main character being passed to sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter. For my money, I think they fill Sydney Prescott’s shoes pretty well – though of course, there’s no replacing the original Final Girl.

Once the credits rolled, I filed the Carpenter sisters away in my mind, expecting to one day write about them at some point (maybe in an end of year retrospective) but not before their shared story reached what would have presumably been its conclusion in the inevitable Scream 7. Despite moving past their differences and teaming up to take down their would-be killers, the ending definitely left room for more growth – especially given the fierce, almost deranged glee they demonstrate when turning the tables on the Ghostface killers.

Except... now there won’t be. Just yesterday news broke that Melissa Barrera had been fired from the franchise after speaking out against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This morning, Jenna Ortega also announced she wouldn’t be returning for Scream 7, and although the official word is she wanted a release from her contract so she could film season two of Wednesday, that this announcement came so quickly on the heels of Barrera’s firing is pretty transparently not a coincidence.

So that’s it for the Carpenter sisters. It’s disappointing, and a terrible look for Spyglass/Paramount studios who have lost their first leading lady by not offering her a decent pay-check, fired their second one for speaking out against genocide, and then promptly losing their popular young starlet a day later. Where on earth does the franchise go from here?

And yet given the way Scream 6 ends... it works as a conclusion to Sam and Tara’s development and relationship with each other. The two of them were first introduced in Scream 5, with Tara in the franchise’s traditional role of victim in the cold open: the young girl who gets a phone call while she’s alone in her house at night, which quickly escalates into a full-blown attack by the Ghostface killer.

The twist on expectations is that Tara survives. The action then cuts to Sam, who we quickly learn is Tara’s estranged sister, living with her boyfriend and working retail in Modesto. She rushes to her sister’s hospital bed in Woodsboro, where the two of them quickly realize they’re in the eye of the storm when it comes to the township’s latest killing spree. In a somewhat dodgy but still interesting reveal, it turns out that the reason for the sisters’ estrangement (and their parents’ divorce) is that Sam is the illegitimate daughter of Billy Loomis, one of the killers in the original Scream.

As such, the story is just as much about Sam coming to terms with this potential hereditary darkness within her as it is surviving the rampage of a serial killer, who is clearly very aware of this biological connection with the franchise’s first murderer. It’s a theme that continues in Scream 6, which gives time and space to exploring the natural consequences of surviving a mass murder: intense psychological trauma.

The sisters now live in New York, with Tara trying to live life to the fullest and Sam getting trapped inside a paranoid outlook in which anyone and everything could potentially be out to get them. And yes, their relationship is still very strained. But Sam’s overprotectiveness of Tara leads to the inevitable thematic outcome when she eventually trusts her to take care of herself (complete with an echo of her “you have to let me go” admonition), after which the girls call upon their own resourcefulness and strength to take down their assailants.

Like I said, there was room for more character exploration here, particularly in the way the sisters are clearly relishing the violence they inflict upon the Ghostface killers (which we are vicariously sharing in). As Sam feared, there is darkness not only in her, but Tara as well.

Yet in the final scene, Sam casts away her father’s mask and joins her sister and her friends as the sun rises. The Carpenter sisters get to walk away together, having come to terms with their history and their relationship. Like Sydney before them, I hope they enjoy their happy ending – and that the actresses are able to move on to better, more worthy projects.  

(And hey, a character played by Jenna Ortega gets to be Woman of the Month two months in a row!)