Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore, is a character in the 1996 film Scream.
Casey is a Woodsboro teenager and the former girlfriend of Stu Macher. After receiving a taunting and threatening phone call, she is ordered to answer horror film trivia questions to save the life of her boyfriend, Steve Orth. When she answers incorrectly, Steve is disemboweled and she is asked another question to save her own life. When she refuses to answer, Ghostface chases her down and kills her, leaving her hanged from a tree and disemboweled. Later, it is revealed by Billy Loomis and Stu (who are Casey's Ghostface killers) that even if she answered, they would have killed her anyway. In "Stab", the fictional film within a film based on the murders, Casey is played by Heather Graham.
Barrymore was already a successful actress when she appeared in Scream, at a time when casting a big name for a horror film was uncommon. She was originally signed to play the role of Sidney Prescott after reading the script and approaching the production team herself. However she decided she would rather play the part of Casey Becker because of her connection to the character and wanting to deliver a shock to the audience. It was not due to a scheduling conflict even though a very popular rumor states it was. This has been debunked by Barrymore herself as well as Wes Craven. Like her co-stars Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox, her appearance is credited by Craven for raising the profile of the film and helping to attract a larger female audience.
Several scenes leading to Casey's eventual death gave rise to disputes between Craven and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the film rating board, who raised concerns over the violence and intensity of the scene. When she is initially stabbed in the chest by Ghostface, Craven insisted that he had only been able to make one successful take of the scene, so that no substitution was possible; he was, in fact, lying. The scene in which her corpse is hung from a tree and disemboweled was heavily edited: Craven was forced to remove all still shots of the body, and the scene itself was sped up to reduce its time on screen.