Although Stu Macher was only in the first Scream movie, he quickly acquired popularity as one of the best movie villains of all time. In the original slasher movie, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) ended up uncovering high school serial killer Ghostface and found out that he wasn’t just her boyfriend, Billy Loomis, (Skeet Ulrich), but also his best friend Stu.
After your classic final girl showdown, both Billy and Stu met their makers, but horror movie fans have long suspected (read: hoped), that Stu somehow survived being crushed by a burning house. However, in an interview with Collider, Scream writer Kevin Williamson put those rumours to bed once and for all. “No, he’s dead,” he said. “I think that started because of the college scene, the frat party scene because he’s standing in the background. He just came to visit set that night.”
The frat party scene Kevin is referring to is, of course, Matthew Lillard’s cameo in Scream 2, where the Stu Macher actor got the chance to play an extra at a college party after swinging by the set of the ‘90s movie.
However, as Lillard himself revealed in the past, it’s not like the idea of Stu coming back from the dead in the Scream-i-verse, hasn’t been floated around before. ” The idea was to have me […] orchestrating mayhem from prison, like with people attacking high schools,” he said during an appearance on 2009 podcast Pop My Culture.
However, the Columbine High School shooting of 1999 meant that the ideas was ultimately scrapped and the movie was drastically rewritten before its release in 2ooo.
Either way, you don’t have to wait too long until the next instalment in the Scream franchise. Scream 6 arrives in theatres on March 10, 2023.