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1. The show draws perhaps most heavily from the Scream franchise, with multiple masked killers who constantly vanish, whodunnit mysteries, teen victims, and a knife as the primary weapon.
2. "Oh my god there's two of them!" The two-killer surprise was the ingenious twist of Scream (1996), and in Scream Queens.
3. Chanel's snowy hedge maze replicates the one in The Shining (1979). Both scenes feature the strategy of walking backward and the rolled eyes of the dead.
4. Roger is killed with a nail gun that transforms him into a Pinhead lookalike from Hellraiser (1987).
5. The Red Devil waves a whirring chainsaw in a clear reference to Leatherface in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
6. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis recreates her mother Janet Leigh's famous shower scene in Psycho (1960).
7. Sam is suffocated to death with a plastic bag while the other girls party. In Black Christmas (1974), Clare is killed the same way during a sorority party.
8. When the characters break into the Red Devil's lair to rescue Zayday, the scene is shot in night vision from the perspective of the killer, just like in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
9. Zayday was also held captive in a pit, like Catherine was in Silence of the Lambs.
10. Hester Ulrich gets the Hannibal treatment in her glass prison cell, but her advice is less helpful than his.
11. Melanie Dorkus' burned face looks like Freddy Krueger's from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Although it is Chanel who tries to stab her in bed, sending feathers into the air just like in Nancy's attack.
12. The opening credits also reference the bathtub scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
13. Miss Bean pulling off her burned face recalls the terrifying face-peeling scene in Poltergeist (1982).
14. The Chanels are inspired by the Heathers from the dark comedy Heathers (1988), where the girls in the popular clique are all named Heather.
15. The "Sexy Gopher Whore Head Challenge" that kills Tiffany references Veronica Sawyer's dream in Heathers.
16. Chanel #2's funeral parodies a similar scene from Heathers, where the characters reveal their true feelings about the person who died.
17. The phrase "dead gay Boone" originates from the Heathers scene where a father mourns his "dead gay son."
18. The Dickie Dollar Scholars don all-white outfits to attack the Red Devil with baseball bats, a clever reference to both the Backstreet Boys and the ultra-violent gang from A Clockwork Orange (1971).
19. Chanel #3 always wears earmuffs, making her resemble Princess Leia from Star Wars, played by the actress' real-life mother Carrie Fisher.
20. Speaking of Star Wars, C.U.R.E. patient Catherine gets called Chewbacca by Chanel...and you can see why:
21. Jennifer's candle-themed death might be a reference to the wax-covered corpses in House of Wax (2005).
22. Brock Holt's killer hand with a mind of its own is likely a reference to Anton's possessed hand in Idle Hands (1999).
23. Finally, Dean Munsch is so unkillable that she's compared to Michael Myers from Halloween, which the actress starred in. She even does the iconic head tilt!
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