A scary movie icon! While the original Scream premiered in 1996, many stars have taken on the role of Ghostface in the franchise’s many sequels.
The masked murderer, who later became known as Ghostface, made their first appearance in the inaugural slasher film. The first movie follows Sidney Prescott — who is played by Neve Campbell — as she and her high school friends become the targets of a serial killer in their fictional hometown of Woodsboro.
While the character was originally voiced by Roger L. Jackson, the voice actor wasn’t the one behind the fictional killings. In Scream, Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard’s characters — Billy Loomis and Stu Marcher respectively — were unveiled as the mass murderers. The twosome planned the attacks to get revenge on Prescott’s family after their mother had an affair with Billy’s father and planned to frame Sidney for the crimes.
In the sequel, Sidney finds herself as the target of a new Ghostface as she attends college. This time, Billy’s mother, who is portrayed by Laurie Metcalf, is out for revenge for her son. She hires a man named Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) online to commit the murders.
In the first two horror films, Ghostface turned out to be multiple people. However, in the third flick, only one person was revealed as the murderer. Roman Bridger, who was played by Scott Foley, revealed he was Sidney’s estranged half-brother who wants revenge against his sister after he learns she had a perfect childhood while he was given up for adoption by their mother.
Ghostface continued to appear in the fourth film of the franchise. However, for the spinoff TV series, the iconic killer didn’t appear in the first two seasons. Instead, the murderer was labeled as the Lakewood Slasher and had no relation with Ghostface. However, Ghostface made its TV debut in the third season. In the finale, Tyga and Giorgia Whigham were outed as the killers.
When the franchise got a reboot in 2022, Ghostface was no longer targeting Sidney’s friends and family. Instead, the focus turned to Billy’s daughter, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and her half-sister Tara, played by Jenna Ortega. The sisters become targets due to their connection to the infamous murderer in the fifth and sixth films.
In Scream VI, there were a total of four Ghostfaces with one of the characters getting slashed by another within the first few minutes of the film. Dermot Mulroney, who plays one of the murderers in the film, revealed he didn’t know he was going to play the iconic character.
“I was told by my agent, ‘Good news, we have a call from Scream VI, they want you, they can’t tell you anything else, but they need to let you know that you are the bad guy,’” the Wedding Date actor recalled to Entertainment Weekly in March 2023. “It wasn’t called ‘Ghostface’ there; it was just ‘the bad guy.’ I wasn’t even up on how intense people are following Ghostface.”
He continued: So then I get pieces of the script, but they neglected to tell me what part I’m playing. So I’m looking for two things when I’m reading the script, which part it is that I am and who it is in the script that’s going to wind up being Ghostface. So, for a while, I suspected that I was going to play the psychologist because Bailey is written so mildly I thought that’s probably not my part; it’s just a passing detective. It shows you that the script itself was quite ingenious in how they buried Bailey or made him incidental to scenes. Then I get to the end, and it is Bailey! It was me all along!”
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Keep scrolling to see who ended up being Ghostface over the years:
