Occupation: Paranormal Researcher, former television news reporter, former health care worker, former boxer

Known Relatives: Neil (father), Maureen (mother, deceased), Constance (sister, deceased), Cody (nephew), “Nanna” (grandmother, real name unrevealed), first husband (name unrevealed), George Logan (second husband, deceased), Tom Logan (brother-in-law, deceased), 

Base of Operations: Washington, D.C., formerly Pasadena, California, formerly Woodsboro, Illinois

First Appearance: Scary Movie (2000)

History: Cindy Campbell is a native of Woodsboro, Illinois, thirty-five miles west of Rockport, Illinois. Her mother passed away when she was very young, an event that had a serious repercussions in her family. Her sister, Constance, retaliated on her mother’s death by dropping out of school and becoming a free spirit, eventually getting involved in drugs and alcohol. The hard partying eventually took a serious toll on her, and after getting pregnant, she passed away giving birth to her son, Cody. As a teenager, Cindy became Cody’s surrogate mother and increasingly optimistic as she grew up. Her father, Neil, meanwhile started secretly selling illegal drugs to supplement his low income to raise his grandson and take care of his elderly mother.

In her teens, Cindy attended Woodsboro High School where she became close friends with students Brenda Meeks and Buffy Gilmore. She also became acquainted with Brenda’s half brother, Shorty Meeks, Buffy’s brother, Douglas (nick-named “Doofy”), and their boyfriends, Ray Wilkins and Greg Philippe, eventually developing a romantic relationship with Greg’s friend, Bobby Prinze, who started pressuring her into a more sexual relationship. Possibly because of her sister’s lifestyle, Cindy continued to put off Bobby constant sexual advances. Meanwhile, Cindy remained altruistic, soft-spoken and meek at first glance, often striving to help others and showing an interest in animal rights avocation, helping the homeless and protecting the environment.

On Halloween 2009, Cindy and her friends were driving home from a party out of town. Driving under the influence, Bobby accidentally struck and killed a man walking by the side of the highway. The event deeply bothered Cindy. As most of her friends in the car reacted confused or complacent on how to handle the event, Cindy remained convinced the right thing was to report the accident, but Greg, possibly because of earlier minor skirmishes with the law, ultimately decided to cover up the crime, and with Ray and Bobby, dumped the body in the nearby lake.

A year later, Cindy’s classmate, Drew Decker, was brutally murdered at her home, and the murderer started harassing Cindy with notes claiming to know about the death of the man on the highway. She believed the notes meant the killer now had plans to kill her and her friends, and she tried to warn them, but they didn’t take the messages seriously. After Greg himself got a note, he threatened Cindy for sending it to scare him. However, during a beauty contest Buffy had entered, Greg was attacked and stabbed by a figure dressed as the grim reaper. When his body wasn’t found, everyone just reacted as if he was avoiding Cindy. That night, the killer broke into Cindy’s house just as Bobby appeared looking for sex. When he turned out to have the murder weapon on him, the police arrested him for Drew’s murder. However, while staying at Buffy’s house, the killer called Cindy to let her know he was still loose. The call resulted in undermining Cindy’s credibility to her friends, and Buffy mocked her the following day at school, but she was then assaulted and murdered in the girl’s locker room herself at school by the murderer. That night, Brenda was stalked by the killer at the movie theater, getting attacked herself.

Still believing someone at the school was trying to kill her, Cindy confided in Shorty in the events so far, and he decided to turn Cindy’s small gathering of friends into a huge party. After getting intoxicated, Cindy gave in to her inhibitions and seduced Bobby, after which he accidentally revealed that Greg and Buffy were dead when they were only just missing. Realizing he was the real killer after all, Cindy tried to escape as the killer showed up and supposedly killed Bobby, staying alive just long enough to keep Cindy from contacting the police. When  Cindy came back for him, she gave him her father’s gun, which he used to shoot Shorty. Bobby eventually revealed that he had Ray helping him commit the murders the whole time by copying Drew’s murder. Their motivations were based on the intentions of becoming famous after framing Cindy’s father for the murders and setting themselves up as the sole survivors. Unfortunately, Drew’s killer showed up and attacked both Ray and Bobby before turning on Cindy, who managed to evade him. At the police station, Cindy in a moment of clarity realized Doofy was the original killer, having killed Drew for rejecting his advances and turning on Cindy for a similar slight. By then, however, Doofy had fled town with Gail Hailstorm, the reporter covering the murder spree.

Due to the local notoriety in the case, Cindy ended up traveling to California to attend college at the University of Santa Rosita. Surviving their attacks, Brenda and Shorty went along with her. Cindy soon became friends with Theo Keyoko, her dorm roommate, Buddy Wilkerson, who tried to pursue a romance with her, and Alex Monday, a thirty-year-old career college student that had latched on to her by chance. Having survived his attack as well, Ray followed Brenda to the college, having implicated Bobby in the murders and escaping prosecution. Cindy was shocked by this travesty and refused to have anything to do with him. Ray, however, turned up in her psychology class under Dr. Walter Oldman. Oldman had access to the Old Kane House owned by the college and offered the students a passing grade to participate in an insomnia class at the college over the weekend.

In actuality, Kane Manor had a long history as a reputed haunted house after a series of deaths in the mansion. Oldman’s assistant, Dwight Hartman, had purposely chosen Cindy and her friends because of the Woodsboro murders believing they would be more acute to the location's psychic energies. In the house, the activity seemed to gravitate to Cindy because of her resemblance to Caroline Kane, the wife of the previous owner, Hugh Kane, who had been murdered in the house. Hartman meanwhile used technology based on the research of Dr. Lionel Barrett that negated the psychic energies in the house, exorcising the paranormal energies. Cindy later learned that Eugene Hanson, the house caretaker, had murdered both Hugh Kane and his mistress before turning on Caroline for rejecting him. Believing Cindy was Caroline’s reincarnation, he stalked her for a few months until he was arrested.

After graduating college, Cindy became a television news reporter in Washington D.C. and changed her hair color to blonde to avoid getting recognized. She briefly married to a wealthy rap entertainer, but she divorced him after the relationship turned abusive. Now financially secure from the divorce settlement, she started raising Cody full time. She was also reunited with Brenda, who worked as Cody’s teacher. Unfortunately, her employer was consistently wasting her on tabloid articles rather than actual news stories. After covering a crop circle story outside Washington D.C., Cindy met and became attracted to Tom Logan, whose brother, George Logan, owned the farm with the crop circle. After Brenda was found mutilated in her apartment, Cindy suspected her death was connected to a reportedly cursed videotape. Watching the tape herself, Cindy received a mysterious phone message that predicted she would die in seven days. George’s friends, Mahalik Phifer and C. J. Heames, helped Cindy reach a psychic named Shaneequa, who told Cindy she was destined to attract paranormal activity because of her past, and that only she could defeat the evil spirit connected to the tape. Researching the images on the tape, Cindy tracked down Richard Moran, whose daughter, Tabitha, was the evil spirit bound to the tape. Confessing that he once owned George’s farm, she and Tom found the well under the foundation where Tabitha’s body was bound. By sealing the well properly, Tabitha’s spirit was reportedly unable to escape.

With her public credibility ruined by her belief in the paranormal, Cindy lost her job as a reporter and became bitter and short-tempered. Although she and George had gotten married, she became stressed and got in a fight in a bar one night after an argument. Impressed by how she handled herself, George convinced her into channeling her hostility into boxing. As a lightweight boxer, Cindy enjoyed fair success until an error faced her off with a heavy weight female boxer named Tiffany Stone. Tiffany easily defeated Cindy in the match, but George took a blow while trying to stop the mismatched fight and lost his life. According to Shaneequa, this bad luck following her was part of Cindy’s link to the paranormal.

Widowed and alone, Cindy sent Cody off to military school because she felt in it was in his best interest. Having studied healthcare in college, she became a healthcare worker, but on her first job, her boss sent her off unprepared to take care of Gladys Norris, an old lady who lived alone in a haunted house near the wharf. As she was discovering the activity in the house, she met divorcee Tom Ryan during a reported extra-terrestrial attack in D.C. Encountering the ghosts haunting the house, Cindy made contact with the ghost of Toshio Kayako, who confessed to having died in the melee at her boxing match. Now haunting the house, he told her the secret of the attacks rested with his father. Helped by a friend from the TV station, Cindy tracked down Henry Hale, the boy’s father, who now lived in a remote Amish village deep in the Virginia wilderness. Having once lived in the old woman’s house, Hale confessed he was only the boy’s step-father. Toshio’s real father was William Saeki, a reclusive midget with the wealth and resources to fake the alleged alien attacks.

Having exposed the reason behind the attacks, Cindy continued to date Tom Ryan. Gradually, she stopped working as a healthcare worker to focus on becoming a paranormal investigator and documenting her experiences as a writer. One of her first investigations was the haunted house of Daniel and Jody Sanders of Columbus, Ohio, whose activity mirrored that of the Desange Children.

Powers/Abilities: Cindy Campbell is an experienced reporter and health care worker. She also has skills in unarmed combat employing fighting skills from boxing and the martial arts. She also speaks limited Japanese.

Source/Comments: Cindy Campbell is a character in the “Scary Movie” franchise played by actress Anna Faris. Her extended friends and family were played by Regina Hall (Brenda), Shannon Elizabeth (Buffy Gilmore), Shawn Wayans (Shorty), Marlon Wayans (Ray Wilkins), Lochlyn Munro (Greg Philippe), Jon Abrahams (Bobby), Kathleen Richardson (Theo Keyoko), Chris Masterson (Buddy Wilkerson), Tori Spelling (Alex Monday), Simon Rex (Tom Logan), Charlie Sheen (George Logan), Anthony Anderson (Mahalik), Kevin Hart (CJ), Queen Latifah (Shaneequa) and Craig Bierko (Tom Ryan).

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