She is Sidney Prescott, and she is the one thing that has held this series together. Anna Faris was an unknown with no agent and no headshots when Keenen Ivory Wayans cast her, and she has been the lead of five of the six films.

What makes the part work is that she plays it completely straight. David Zucker said she is so convincing, and she can convey the sincerity, which is why the jokes around her land. Faris herself spent the first shoot certain she was not funny.

The only film she is not in is the fifth one, and that is not because she said no. The studio never asked her. She has joked it was for budget reasons, and added that she would not have done it without Regina anyway.

Cindy’s best friend, Shorty’s sister, and the only character in the series who dies over and over and simply turns up again in the next film with no explanation offered and none needed.

Her death in the cinema in the first film, stabbed by an entire audience who have had enough of her talking through the movie, is one of the two or three things everybody remembers. The sixth film rhymes with it deliberately: her daughter, a character actually named DEI, is stabbed by a whole subway car of people.

Regina Hall auditioned four times for the first film and was advised not to take it. She refused to do the fifth without Anna Faris, describing a pact between them, and comparing the two of them to the Laverne and Shirley of their day.

Brenda’s brother, permanently high, and the character who gets most of the film’s best known lines. Wrapped in a blanket saying he sees dead people. On the phone for the Wazzup sequence. Explaining what white people do wrong in a horror film while it is happening to him.

In the second film a marijuana plant turns on him, rolls him up in a blanket and sets his hair on fire. In the sixth he gets the teacup from Get Out and falls into the sunken place, with the killer as the psychiatrist.

Marlon Wayans co-wrote the first two films and the sixth one, produced all three, and was the person who pushed hardest to get the family back after twenty five years away.

Known to everybody as Gay Ray. The joke is a simple one that the films never once let go of: Ray insists loudly and constantly that he is straight, and absolutely nothing else about him agrees with him. Twenty five years later in the sixth film he is still insisting, and is now also rich from bitcoin.

He is the other half of the Wazzup sequence, and he is the one in the red dress in the What Lies Beneath parody in the second film.

This is also the part of these films that has aged hardest, and the people who made them know it. Producer Bo Zenga said in 2020 that there is a lot of gay humor in it that he does not think would make it into a movie today. Marlon Wayans agreed it would be difficult to greenlight now, but said the reaction would still be the same, and defended it on intent, arguing that anybody can make a joke about anything and what matters is who is telling it and why.

He is Dewey Riley, the slow deputy nobody takes seriously, and he is also the killer. The limp is fake. He drops it in the last shot of the first film and walks away, which is the Usual Suspects ending played for laughs.

That one actor plays both parts was Dave Sheridan’s own idea. He turned up to his audition in character as the killer and deliberately ruined it, which got him an emergency callback, and then offered to take Doofy on condition that he could play the killer too. The studio agreed because it saved them money.

He is back in the sixth film, reunited with Gail.

She is Gale Weathers, which in these films means a reporter who will climb over anybody to get the story and then write a book about it. She interviews the grieving on camera, sets up surveillance cameras in other people’s houses, and treats the whole thing as a career opportunity.

She and Doofy end up together, and the sixth film brings both of them back and picks the relationship up exactly where it was left, including the jokes nobody expected to hear again.

The sixth film also puts her through The Substance. She goes into the white tiled room, the killer gives her lip filler and pumps her full of the fluid, her back splits open, and what comes out of it is the unredacted Epstein files.