“One of the things I’ve wrestled with is trust, and Sidney trusted no one. Did she really know her mother? Is her boyfriend who he says he is? In the end she wasn’t even trusting herself. As a gay kid, I related to the final girl [the surviving woman at the end of a horror movie], and to her struggle because it’s what one has to do to survive as a young gay kid, too. You’re watching this girl survive the night and survive the trauma she’s enduring. Subconsciously, I think the Scream movies are coded in gay survival.”—Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, telling The Independent how his experiences as a gay kid informed the iconic horror film series. In the same interview, Williamson also says that the inclusion of gay icons in the series–Sarah Michelle Gellar, Parker Posey, and Carrie Fisher among them–was accidental, and refers to the series as “a gay universe, I guess.”