Despite Matthew Lillard's Stu not appearing in Scream's 2022 reboot, the sequel effectively updates the killer character for a new generation.

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Scream 2022 ahead.

The killers of Scream 2022 are not related to the original movie’s villain Stu Macher — which makes them a perfect tribute to Matthew Lillard’s iconic character. While many fans were hoping that the original Scream villain Stu Macher might return in Scream 2022, the movie’s villains proved a fitting continuation of the character’s legacy despite his absence. Both demented horror fans with a sick sense of humor and misjudged priorities, Scream 2022’s killers couldn’t have been more influenced by Stu if they were related to the original character.

Despite what some fans predicted, Matthew Lillard’s Stu Macher does not appear in Scream 2022. While the character of Stu is still canonically alive, it is actually the original Scream's long-dead killer Billy who makes a surprise appearance in Scream 2022 instead. While this shock subverted the expectations of many, some were disappointed to see fan-favorite Lillard absent from the latest franchise addition.

However, the killers of Scream 2022 were a perfect update of Stu, with both of them playing the role that Lillard fulfilled in the original movie. While Lillard’s Scream character was motivated by an arrogant desire to be infamous and enact a real-life horror movie, his co-conspirator Billy Loomis had a more grounded and human motivation for his killing spree. In contrast, both of Scream 2022’s killers Richie and Amber had the same moronic motivations (loving horror movies so much that they were willing to kill to fix a derailed franchise), and their unhinged brio brought to mind the antics of Lillard’s iconic villain. However, there was more to Scream 2022’s tribute to Stu Macher than mere recreation of his darkly funny evil deeds, as the movie also updated the character’s motives and attitudes.

Sam’s Billy Loomis Connection Mirrored The Original Scream

Scream 2022’s new character Sam is set up as the obvious villain since she has a concrete canon connection to Billy Loomis, one of the original killers (he is her secret father). Similarly, a look back on the Scream franchise timeline proves Billy’s motivations in the original movie came from an incident that occurred before the franchise began—Maureen Prescott’s affair with his father. Thus, viewers are led to believe that Scream 2022’s killer will be Sam who, just like her father Billy, is haunted by a shameful secret from her parent's past. In contrast, Richie and Amber’s motivations, killing to save a movie series, are much more like Stu’s motivations in Scream (wanting to live out a real-life horror movie without any substantial justification).

It would have been easy to reveal that Amber and/or Richie were Stu’s secret children, but it was much truer to Stu’s character that the duo were simply deranged horror fans with no connection to anyone involved in the earlier killing sprees. The reveal that neither Amber nor Richie had a motive beyond wanting better Scream (or rather, Stab) sequels was a self-consciously goofy one and watched like a rebuttal to the original movie’s insistence that at least one killer needed a legitimate or serious motivation. Here, both killers were the Stu of the duo — something reaffirmed by their actions throughout the reboot.

Richie & Amber Re-enacted Stu’s Antics

Richie corralling everyone out of the house party was a recreation of Stu sending everyone packing in the climax of Scream, while Amber toying with Randy’s niece while retrieving beer in the basement was a less bloody version of Tatum’s fatal encounter with Ghostface in Scream. Not only that but in the opening scene, Tara is admonished for failing to remember the second killer in the original Stab—Stu Macher. The fact that the killers care more about ranking the slasher franchise’s sequels than the lives of their friends is a testament to how much Richie and Amber’s seemingly affable personae recreate Stu’s charismatic, funny, and utterly dead inside character. However, there is one pivotal update made by Scream’s 2022 reboot.

Scream 2022’s Killers Updated Stu’s Motives

The premise of Amber and Richie being willing to kill for the sake of their favorite movie series updates the original Scream’s commentary on fandom culture and does so in a way that makes Scream 2’s Mickey look more than a bit under-written in terms of his far-fetched motives. Where in the mid-‘90s, Stu was the perfect parody of movie obsessives - more interested in who would play him in a movie than the reality of his actions and totally disconnected from the real world - Amber and Richie are far too invested in their fandom. Scream 2022 avoided Blair Witch’s mistakes by giving franchise fans what they hoped for, but the reboot pulled no punches when it came to savagely satirizing entitled fandoms as a whole. Where Stu didn’t care about anything, Amber and Richie care so much about a bad horror movie that they’re willing to kill over it, turning Scream’s 1996 satire of grunge-era apathy into a skewering of over-invested, obsessive fandom culture.

The idea of a killer shrugging off murder as a meaningless joke hit hard in the mid-‘90s when the movies of Gregg Araki and Larry Clarke had defined the decade’s youth culture as glib, uncaring, and amoral. In contrast, Scream 2022’s meta-message works because the villains are far too invested in something as ephemeral as a movie, staking not only their entire personality on a franchise’s fandom but killing innocent people for the sake of hopefully inspiring a future movie. While Amber and Richie may match Stu’s goofy charm and unexpectedly cruel depths, the pair have a zealousness that is all their own and unique to the cultural environment of the early 2020s, just like Stu’s unfeeling brutality was quintessentially 90’s. Where the late ‘90s depicted its movie fans as uncaring and apathetic enough to laugh off murder like Lillard’s disaffected Stu, Scream 2022 rewrites these same fans as over-invested obsessives writing screeds about how their favorite franchise betrayed them and willing to take up arms for the sake of ensuring the sanctity of their childhood memories are maintained.

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