001. HEADCANON: // CHARACTER STUDY. - Tumblr Posts
HEADCANON: // PTSD.
Sidney absolutely deals with some PTSD after the events of the first film, but I don’t think it hits her nearly as hard initially as it does once someone else takes up the mantle of ghostface in the second film and starts patterning the original Woodsboro murders. Following the first movie, Billy and Stu are both dead. Sidney knows this. She knows they’re not coming back, they’re done, they’re never going to hurt anybody. And while she has a lot of truths to face in regard to who her mother was and how she had accused the wrong man of her murder, it’s not terribly difficult for her to sleep at night and go about her everyday life as normal once the shock around everything wears off. She’s survived a horrible ordeal in her life at just 17 years old, but it passes. It all passes, and she expects that to be the worst thing she’ll ever have to deal with. She never anticipates copycat killers, or more people attacking her. She lived through the horror movie, she assumes she’ll be fine.
When she goes off to Windsor, she’s prepared for prank calls with voice modifiers, both out of experience of dealing with prank callers before and in anticipation of the opening of stab, based directly off of Gale’s book about the murders. She’s healed from the original murders and she’s more concerned with midterms, above all else, until the reporters show up in the wake of the murders of Maureen Evans and Phil Stevens. She immediately seeks out Randy, as he’s someone who can help make sense of everything and understand where Sidney’s coming from, as he also lived through the original murders. Yet as more and more people start dropping, the severity of what’s going on sets in for Sidney: someone else is after her, and as a result she’s not sure who she can trust. And while she ends up alive, yet again, after the fact, the truth hits her hard: she’s something of a curse to the people around her.
As such, by the third film we see a very different Sidney; she’s dropped out of college, moved out into the middle of nowhere, changed her name, and the only people who know where she lives are Dewey, her father, and Cotton Weary. She has a dog for protection and companionship. She keeps her entire house locked down with a digital security system and has a gun hidden in her desk drawer for extra protection. Her father does all her shopping for her, bringing her groceries and anything else she needs, and she works for a crisis hotline from home. It’s better this way; as she explains to her father, “psychos can’t kill what they can’t find.” And still, it doesn’t stop someone from picking off people tied to the filming ofstab iii, in the order characters (or their real-life counterparts) are killed off in the movie. The killer even finds Sidney, taunting her with phone calls, telling her that unless she faces the past, more people will continue to die—so she finds herself facing her trauma head-on at the studio where they’re filming the movie. By the end of it, she’s faced everything, survived everything, and found that locking herself away from the world is no way to live.
Ten years pass between the third and fourth movie. Ten years of healing, of reliving the details of her past, and rather than allow the media and those who hunted her down to cast her as a victim, Sidney’s taken control of her narrative. In her book, she talks about how she’s dug herself out of darkness, formed her own sense of self, refused to let the bad things that people have pushed on her define who she is, and is using it as an opportunity to show others that it does, indeed, get better. Yet as the book tour ends in Woodsboro, the murders start up again; local teenagers are being slaughtered, just like it had started fifteen years previously, and her cousin Jill is being thrown into the light of a victim. This time around, however, Sidney’s changed. She’s stopped wallowing, stopped running, stopped hiding. She faces Ghostface head-on in several fights, actively seeking them out, telling them to cut the crap and come after her if that’s what they want so bad. She takes Jill and her friends under her wing until it seems like it’s the end for Sidney—and in true Sidney Prescott fashion, she disposes of the killer without, for a second, placing blame on herself.
If she’s learned anything about horror movies over the years, it’s one thing: don’t fuck with the original.