This article originally appeared in We Are Horror.

Everyone agrees that the original 1996 installment in what has become the five-part horror anthology of Scream is the best. It’s the proceeding four sequels (the fifth doesn’t come out til 2022) that cause consternation. I’m partial to the youth, technology and burgeoning social media commentary of Scream 4 or Scre4m (2011), and believe that 1997’s follow up is the weakest, however it’s the turn of the millennium’s Scream 3 that gets many horror fans in a tizzy.

The film is set three years after the second massacre that has beseeched protagonist Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), this time at her university that left her boyfriend Derek (Jerry O’Connell) and friend Randy (Jamie Kennedy) dead at the hands of fellow student Mickey (Timothy Olyphant) and original killer and Sidney’s ex Billy’s (Skeet Ulrich) mom, Debbie (Laurie Metcalf). Phew! Sidney has isolated herself on a ranch where her only company is her golden retriever and the traumatized survivors she anonymously counsels via phone. “You can’t kill what you can’t find,” she reasons of her self-imposed exile.

Everyone except Sidney has managed to prolong their fifteen minutes of infamy into the periphery of Hollywood. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) is Gale Weathersing, while Dewey (David Arquette) acts as a bodyguard to the actress who plays Gale, Jennifer (Parker Posey), in the Stab trilogy, based on the crimes exacted against our core triumvirate that are being reenacted both in front of and behind the camera.

It’s all painfully meta, but the meta narrative ended up foreshadowing a Hollywood scandal almost twenty years ahead of its time: #MeToo. 

The action takes place primarily on the Hollywood backlot where Stab 3 is being filmed, allowing a cameo from Hollywood mainstay who has seen it all, Carrie Fisher, in a role as a studio archivist whom she acknowledges “look[s] just like her.”

“I was up for Princess Leia,” she says. “But you know who got it? The one who slept with George Lucas.”

Disposable and disappeared women is the theme of Scream 3, with the memory of the one who started it all, Sidney’s mother Maureen (Lynn McRee), returning to haunt Sidney’s subconscious. Through Gale and Gale Lite’s sleuthing, they uncover that Maureen was in fact a Hollywood ingenue in the late seventies, before returning to Woodsboro and settling down to have Sidney. Maureen was a victim of the infamous “casting couch.” 

This hearkens back to Fisher’s comments and foreshadows the revelation that the same thing happened to the novice playing Sidney in Stab 3, Angelina (Emily Mortimer). The fact that both of these women ended up murdered by Ghostface further emphasises their disposability.

Their proximity to the ultimate Final Girl Sidney is no coincidence, given the reveal of who dons the Ghostface mask this time around: Sidney’s half-brother as a result of said casting couch, it is inferred, Roman Bridgers (Scott Foley), director of Stab 3 and, indeed, of all of the in-text inspiration for the Stab franchise leading up to this point. Playing into the Freudian and Hitchcockian tropes of it being all mommy’s fault, the lasting legacy that Scream 3 leaves is an indictment of Hollywood’s treatment of women.

Of course Scream prided itself on flaying open the medium of the horror movie and turning it back on itself. As ultimate horror buff and the audiences’ guide to just how Scream did this, Randy, explains in a posthumous video, “true trilogies are about going back to the beginning and discovering something that you thought was true but wasn’t.” Who could have foretold that the producer of Scream 3 would have been accused of, charged with and jailed for similar crimes to those committed by Stab 3 producer, John Milton (Lance Henriksen)?

“You have made millions off the story of [Maureen’s] murder,” Gale admonishes Milton, a clear stand in for Harvey Weinstein, head of Dimension Films, which distributed all four Scream movies thus far.

“Nothing happened to her that she didn’t invite one way or another, no matter what she said afterwards,” Milton defended himself.

It’s a similar catchcry to that which has been levelled against the 90 women who accused Weinstein of sexual assault, harassment, and messing with their careers if they rejected his advances and, indeed, many survivors who’ve spoken up. While those brave enough to do so have become the figureheads of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Scream 3 asks us to consider those who chose to recoil from the industries in which they faced abuse because the alternative was just too damn hard.

Of course Weinstein was not the first Hollywood power player to use his influence to coerce young actresses to do things they didn’t want to. Host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This Karina Longworth wrote in her book Seduction: Sex, Lies & Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood that “Hughes would move from pursuing top female stars to pursuing young (sometimes very young) women whose careers had not yet gotten very far off the ground.” And we all know about horror master Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with his leading ladies. This is not to say that Hughes and Hitchcock committed the same sins as Weinstein, however they used their influence and control over these young women’s careers to get them to do what they wanted, just like Milton did to Maureen, Angelina and countless others in between.

Scream 3 was made over twenty years ago and, despite the franchise’s heavy incorporation of the technology of the times, it has managed to stay timeless not only for being genuinely good but, unfortunately, for being an all-too-relevant portrayal of women in Hollywood and horror.