The Angel of Indian Lake

Her husband died in the water in 2015, and her son was suffocated with a dry-cleaning bag in 2019.
And now she’s got a chainsaw.

…this is maybe the one thing I believe in in the whole world: that when it’s your time, you don’t run from it—you stand against it, you keep your eyes open, and you rip and claw your whole way down, hope you can at least be a worthy trophy.

…you know the first one is third person of course, but it’s really tight on Jade. I think when people remember My Heart is a Chainsaw, they always say Jade is a narrator, and that’s always weird to me because she’s like our narrative focus, but she’s not actually the one speaking except for in her “Slasher 101” essays. Then when I figured out I was going to do a sequel and then a trilogy, I realized I’ve got to modulate the delivery throughout these three books.
So what I landed on for doing that was in the second one, it’s going to shatter and splinter into a multivocal thing with a lot of people speaking in Reaper, and a lot of people’s angles. To me, that was kind of set up for missing Jade. Like “This is fun, but I wish we had Jade.” So then in the third one, if I were able to, instead of only letting her speak during the [essays], if the main part of the narrative became her voice, then I was hoping that could feel like a return a little bit. Or it could just be as simple as I knew I was having to say goodbye to Jade and I wanted to hang out with her more. And how better to hang out with her than first person? - from the Paste interview

The third installment of a trilogy always has to up the stakes and kill people we thought couldn’t die. I knew this going in, knew I’d have to do all that. In Chainsaw, Jade was fighting for herself. In Reaper, she was fighting for her friends, for this family she’d cobbled together. In Angel, she’s having to fight for her community—for Proofrock. And of course I had to adhere to Randy’s rules for the third in a trilogy, too. They were very helpful. This is my first time doing this, I mean. I needed a lot of help. - from the Nerd Daily interview

…justice doesn’t extract itself, you’ve got to pull it bloody and pulsing from the chest of whoever wronged you.

There’s probably 12-14 beats of the slasher. You got to have the opening blood sacrifice. You got t have the red herrings, you’ve got to have the third rail body dumps. You’ve got to its like you’re going around a carousel and reaching out and hitting 12 or 14 bells as you go around. You got t hit all those bells for sure. But what I think makes a really good slasher movie is if you’re doing a revenge slasher of a mystery slasher, I guess they get called both, delaying knowledge of who the slasher is. That’s the most pleasurable, such that everything crashes to a head at the reveal when the person pulls their mask off and gives their big speech about I did this because you did this to me, or whatever it is.

The rules in Scream are a basic set to survive any horror film: you can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs, and never (ever, under any circumstances) say “I’ll be right back”. Ironically, Randy explains these rules during a party, with half the attendees already drunk. Still, they hold some truth: Sidney has sex with Billy, and although she’s later attacked, it’s Billy the one who ultimately dies. Tatum (Rose McGowan) goes to the basement to get more beers and is killed there, and Stu says “I’ll be right back” right after Randy explains the rules, and is later killed (albeit in self-defense) by Sidney. In Scream 2, the rules for a horror sequel are: the body count is always bigger, the death scenes are more elaborate (“more blood, more gore”), and the third rule is not explained in the final cut, although it was revealed in the teaser trailer to be “never, ever, under any circumstances assume the killer is dead”.