Warning: This article contains spoilers for Heart Eyes. has accomplished something for Mason Gooding that the Scream franchise never could. Heart Eyes is an original slasher movie starring Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt as a duo falling in love while trying to escape the rampage of the couple-murdering Heart Eyes Killer on Valentine's Day. The movie, which was directed by Josh Ruben and written by Michael Kennedy, Christopher Landon, and Phillip Murphy, also stars Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, Devon Sawa, and Jordana Brewster.
Heart Eyes is not the first time that Gooding has dipped his toe into the slasher genre. He originated the character of Chad Meeks-Martin - the nephew of the original trilogy's Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) - in the 2022 legacy sequel Scream. He reprised the role in 2023's Scream VI and is set to return opposite Jasmin Savoy Brown as his twin sister Mindy in the upcoming Scream 7. alongside Mindy, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), and her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega).
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With the Heart Eyes release launching in February 2025, sandwiched between the 2023 release of Scream VI and the impending 2026 debut of Scream 7, the juxtaposition between Gooding's major slasher movie characters has been made even more glaring. This is because Heart Eyes offers the star , even though there have been five Ghostface killers featured so far in the Scream movies in which he has starred.
With the exception of Scream 3, every movie in the franchise has featured more than one character taking on the Ghostface mantle.
In fact, Mason Gooding's character Jay manages to dispatch two of the three Heart Eyes killers. Although Olivia Holt’s character Ally delivers the killing blow to the movie’s most prominent killer, the secretly villainous detective Jeanette Shaw (Jordan Brewster), Jay is instrumental in the death of the first killer, Eli (Vinnie Bennett). (Yoson An) completely on his own, using one of the killer's mechanical arrows.
Jay's kill count in blows Chad's completely out of the water. Not only has Chad not managed to kill a single one of the five Ghostface killers in his two Scream movies, . In this way, he takes after legacy character Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who was presumed dead for portions of both of the original two movies before miraculously surviving. It remains to be seen if Scream 7 finally shows Chad taking out one of the killers, but Gooding's new original slasher has beaten it to the punch.
