Though I tried to avoid news about the new
Scream sequel, I ended up reading
an item about Lauren Graham being cast in it. I like Lauren Graham. I think she’s a talented actress — more of a comedic one, sure, but a good one nonetheless who may well get to use her full range in this new
Scream movie. Her joining
Scream 4 was enough to make me investigate this rather unexpected sequel in order to see what it was really about. The film has Emma Roberts playing what I assume to be the central role: Jill Kessler, the cousin of Neve Campbell’s character. Graham plays the character’s mother, Kate Kessler. Sidney Prescott (Cambell), Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) are all returning, even though the movie will focus largely on a new batch of potential corpses. The film takes place ten years after the events of
Scream 3.
So there’s that. Personally, I feel the series should have died with the third movie and poor Jennifer Jolie — the kind of amazing character Parker Posey played,
whose name seems to associate Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie long before they ever had a reason to be associated. However, I will nonetheless see
Scream 4 in the theater and be entertained, so perhaps this extension beyond the original planned trilogy will prove to be a worthwhile venture after all.
The fact that Roberts and Graham’s characters have the last name
Kessler reminded me of a certain habit that series creator
Kevin Williamson has when naming his characters. Williamson — the writer of
Scream and most recently
The Vampire Diaries — tends to favor certain types of names. Consider, if you will, the following:
In
Scream, there’s Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). In
Scream 2, there’s
Cici Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar). In
Dawson’s Creek, there’s Joey Potter (Katie Homes) and Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson). In
The Faculty, there’s Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek). In
Teaching Miss Tingle, there’s Luke Churner (Barry Watson) and Principal Potter (Michael McKean). In the short-lived ABC series
Wastleland, there’s Jesse Presser (Sasha Alexander) and Dawnie Parker (Marisa Coughlan). In the WB series
Glory Days, there’s Zane Walker (Ben Crowley). In the CW series
Hidden Palms, there’s Johnny Miller (Taylor Handley) and Liza Witter (Ellary Porterfield).
Weird, huh? I’d almost argue that he’s using “agent” names as a shorthand way of defining his characters, but I don’t think that’s the case. Having the last name
Becker seems to have little bearing on Drew Barrymore’s character in
Scream, unless the etymology of
Becker goes back to something meaning “person who dies unexpectedly soon.” And it’s also not that Williamson is choosing common last names.
Cooper and
Parker might show up a lot in any given American phonebook, sure, but how often do you meet people with the last name
Churner?
Presser?
Witter?
Though the “agent” names show up the most frequently in Williamson’s work, they’re not the only ones that show up more than once.
He also likes surnames that end in
s:
In Scream, there’s Randy Meeks. In Scream 2, there’s Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett) and Phil Stevens (Omar Epps). In Teaching Miss Tingle, there’s Miss Banks (Molly Ringwald). In Glory Days, there’s Ellie Sparks (Poppy Montgomery). In Hidden Palms, there’s Gretta Matthews (Amber Heard) and Nikki Barnes (Tessa Thompson).
He also likes surnames that end in
y:
In Scream, there’s Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) and Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler). In Dawson’s Creek, there’s Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek) and Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams). In Hidden Palms, there’s Bob and Karen Hardy (D.W. Moffett and Gail O’Grady).
And he also likes to give masculine names to female characters:
In Scream, there’s Sidney Prescott. In Scream 2, there’s Murphy (Portia de Rossi). In Dawson’s Creek, there’s Andie McPhee (Meredith Monroe). In The Faculty, there’s Stokely “Stokes” Mitchell (Clea DuVall). In Wasteland, there’s Sam Price (Rebecca Gayheart).
(Note: These lists exclude
Scream 3, which Williamson had a hand in creating but the script for which was written by Ehren Krueger. It also leaves out
I Know What You Did Last Summer and
The Vampire Diaries, since they’re both based on books I have not read and I’m therefore not sure whether the characters in these were named by Williamson. And, finally, it skips the majority of
Dawson’s Creek, since Williamson left the show in its second season.)
And then there are a whole lot of names that show up twice in Williamson’s work — newscasters named
Gail appear in both the
Screams and
Dawson’s Creek,
Casey is also the name of Elijah Woods’s character in
The Faculty, there’s a Dawnie in both
Scream 2 and
Wasteland, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character mentions a Dawson’s Beach in
I Know What You Did Last Summer, just to name a few. And even though Williamson is apparently not credited with any work on
Halloween: 20 Years Later,
at least according to IMDb, I’m pretty sure he at least wrote a treatment for the film, which could account for why it features Jamie Lee Curtis’s character starting a new life as a high school English teacher named
Ms. Tate, which happens to be the name of Sidney’s English teacher in
Scream.
So what have we learned?
For one, I have a weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Kevin Williamson — not because I love all of it, but mostly because I loved
Scream enough that I’ve interestedly tracked this writer’s career for the last decade-and-a-half. I also, for some reason, still remember the name of Sidney Prescott’s English teacher, even though she only appears in
Scream for about ten seconds and even though her name may only be mentioned in the script and not the film itself. That all aside, what I was hoping to point out is that Williamson clearly has developed a few naming conventions within his work. I honestly wonder if it’s intentional or if it’s the result of something subconscious. For what it’s worth,
the IMDb page for Scream 4 also lists Hayden Panettiere as playing Kirby Reed (girl with guy’s name), Rory Culkin as playing Charlie Walker (surname ends in
er) and Lake Bell as playing Judy Hicks (surname ends in
s). So if Williamson is aware of these habits, he certainly has no intention of changing them.
NOTE:
Anyone who saw Scream 4
knows that Jill and Kate Kessler became Jill and Kate Roberts. I do not know if this happened before or after Ehren Kruger revised parts of the script, but Roberts
is still a name that ends in s
. Also, Kate ended up being played by Mary McDonnell, but that’s neither here nor there.
