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‘SCREAM’ KING Screenwriter Kevin Williamson on the real-life gay killers who inspired Stu and Billy, and what Sidney means to him BY CHRIS AZZOPARDI
Issue 333 |
MARCH, 2022
still wondering about those homoerotic undertones 25 years after Billy Loomis and Stu Macher terrorized Woodsboro in Wes Craven’s “Scream,” you’ve been on the right track all along. Ahead of the new “Scream,” openly gay screenwriter of the first “Scream,” Kevin Williamson, has confirmed that Billy (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu (Matthew Lillard), who are thought to be queer by many LGBTQ+ fan theorists, were based on infamous mass murderers Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb, both of whom reportedly admitted they were gay and in a relationship. In May 1924, Leopold and Loeb, who’ve been called the “LGBTQ+ prototype for Bonnie and Clyde,” killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks as an act of intellectual superiority. It’s been called the “perfect crime,” one that has influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” as well as the 2002 crime thriller “Murder by Numbers.” Both are noted for their homoeroticism. Now, nearly three decades after “Scream” came out, theorists can officially categorize “Scream” in that same queer-coded realm. “It’s very sort of homoerotic, in the sense that there were these two guys that killed this other person just to see if they could get away with it,” Williamson said, drawing parallels between the Leopold and Loeb case and Billy and Stu. “And one of the reasons that one could get the other one [to follow] is because I think the other one was secretly in love with him. And it was sort of a fascinating case study on double murderers. If you Google ‘Leopold and Loeb,’ you will see. And you’ll read about it and you’ll get, OK, that’s Billy and Stu.” This wasn’t lost on “Scream” queen Neve Campbell, who has starred as the film’s Ghostface-fighting heroine mainstay Sidney Prescott. When I recently asked Campbell about Billy and Stu, she acknowledged a “burgeoning love relationship,” before elaborating on exactly what that means. After calling them “pretty confused guys,” she said, “Maybe some of their
