After a triumphant return in 2022 following an eleven year hiatus, the Scream series is not taking another long break, roaring back with a new installment, Scream VI, just fourteen months later.
Once more the trio known as Radio Silence (Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and Executive Producer Chad Villella) are guiding the ship alongside returning writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, along with nearly all the surviving characters from the previous film – minus Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, after the actress declined to appear following a salary dispute.
This time, the series makes a very notable move to New York, as Woodsboro natives Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), Chad (Mason Gooding), and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown ) find their new home is also the location for a new murder spree from someone taking on the Ghostface identity – which soon brings more familiar faces back into the mix, including franchise mainstay Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Scream 4 favorite Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere).
I spoke to the directors and several of the cast about the film’s setting, how the franchise’s new lead, Sam, is adjusting to life in the shadow of Ghostface, and more – including who they imagine could portray them in Scream’s fictional Stab series.
STAB STARS?
The Stab movies have been a fun element of the series since Scream 2, with this in-universe franchise – a series of films based off of the events we’ve been seeing in the actual Scream films – providing a lot of fodder for Scream’s meta observations. The first Stab in particular starred several real life actors, some seen on screen in clips during the films, including the likes of Tori Spelling, Luke Wilson, and Heather Graham.
So who should play their respective roles if we ever were to see Stab versions of these new era Scream characters? Said Melissa Barrera, of who she’d like to play the Stab Sam Carpenter, “I would love to see, I don’t know, like Camila Mendes or Camila Cabello. You know, a Latina. It has to be a Latina!”
Said Jasmin Savoy Brown (“Mindy Meeks-Martin”), “I mean, I have gone out against Kiersey Clemons for many roles she’s beat me for. So it only makes sense that she would play a better version of me in a movie I’m in.”
Her onscreen brother, Mason Gooding (“Chad Meeks-Martin”) noted, “I just recently got mistaken for Lucien [Laviscount], the guy from Emily in Paris, at a party. It was a really blatant misconception and I would love to see him then play Chad in a Stab installment so I could be like, ‘Oh, at least it’s appropriate now,’ because it wasn’t before!”
Franchise newcomer Dermot Mulroney, who plays Detective Wayne Bailey, the father of Sam, Tara, and Mindy’s roommate, Quinn (Liana Liberato), pondered the idea, replying, “For an actor to play Bailey in the Stab movie within Scream 7… I don’t know why Billy Crudup comes to mind.” He chuckled, adding, “But he’d have to wear a slightly greyer wig to play me playing Bailey… In the movie within the movie within the movie?”
SAM’S STATE OF MIND
In the fifth Scream movie, we learned Sam was the daughter of original Scream killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), and greatly fears she may have some of his own darkness within her – which certainly seemed plausible given how she oh-so violently retaliated against her murderous boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid), when his true nature was revealed. Scream VI picks up a year later and regarding how it depicts Sam, Barrera remarked, “These movies are always very self aware and they draw from whatever’s going on in the real world and put it expertly into fiction. And I think what the writers did really well in this movie is that they incorporated the reactions to Sam into this world inside the movie.”
This meant finding Sam both praised and scorned by people in the wake of the last Woodsboro massacre, with some thinking she’s a hero, some thinking she’s a villain – even while their reactions to her come with their own topsy-turvy elements. As Barrera put it, “You have a lot of people that are loving her and [some] idolizing her because they think she’s Ghostface and then you have a lot of people that hate her and are throwing drinks at her on the street and it’s very polarizing. And I feel like it’s very much what happened after the last movie, which is great. She’s not a tepid character. People have strong opinions about her. I think it makes sense.”
Said Gillett, regarding Sam, “We love the idea of a character who has sort of embraced a part of herself that she’s maybe been afraid to recognize. And once that’s happened, the idea that where do you go from there when you know this thing is inside of you.” Of the sisters at the center of the story, he added, “We love that Sam and Tara both are dealing with things in very opposite ways. Sam is seeing a therapist but she’s not really talking about herself. And Tara is not interested in dealing with anything, she’d rather just sort of forget about that. So there’s avoidance on both of their parts and they ultimately need to kind of recognize how challenging the situation they’re in is together in order to overcome it.”
While Sam has surface parallels to Sidney Prescott, murderous dead boyfriend included, Barrera noted, “I wanted Sam to feel very, very different to Sidney and Gale, because those are the two iconic women of the franchise. I feel like she’s her own person and she’s dealing with her own demons. The fact that there’s so much darkness in her makes her such an interesting character to play. I love playing someone that’s volatile and that can snap at any moment that you don’t fully trust.”
THAT NEW YORK FEELING
Though not the first Scream movie set outside Woodsboro – Scream 2 being set at an Ohio college, Scream 3 in Los Angeles – Scream VI is still the first movie in quite awhile to move away from the franchise’s most notable setting, bringing with it very different locations from the previous Scream film Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin directed.
The directors said it was exciting to change things up in such a notable way and while they filmed in Montreal, not Manhattan, the film certainly makes use of its setting, with Ghostface striking in the likes of corner bodegas and subway cars. Said Gillett, “We felt like there was a responsibility to actually represent those locations and use them in a way that felt really valuable and that the movie could only exist and that sequence could only play out that way because of the location. We’re huge fans of the lineage of movies that take place in New York but for a Scream movie to be set there, there just are certain things that we just felt like we had to do in order to make it feel like it deserved to be there.”
After Bettinelli-Olpin joked this meant having scenes set at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building (neither of which are actually visited in the film), Gillett observed, regarding their more mundane locations. “We wanted to represent an honest look at the city. It’s not the tourist destination version of New York, it’s a group of kids who have moved there to move on with their lives. So the movie really finds those parts of the city that feel normal and everyday and turns them into something horrific.”
Opening just 14 months after the last film, Scream VI boasts the fastest turnaround between entries in the franchise since the mere 12 month gap between 1996’s Scream and 1997’s Scream 2. Observed Bettinelli-Olpin, of how quickly they jumped back into the series, “There’s a really intense energy that you need to go that fast and get everyone back together and I think that comes through in the movie. We’ve talked a lot about how this movie has a different kind of more high octane energy through it and I think a lot of that comes from the pace at which it was made.”
THE SHRINE
A key set in Scream VI is a macabre shrine seen in the trailers – a makeshift museum the characters discover inside an old movie theater, filled with artifacts from the murder sprees in all the previous films, including items taken from both the killers and victims.
Savoy Brown declared the set was “creepy,” with Gooding agreeing that was true and also was impressive, “Considering it was in a working theater. Like it was one that was in order, but they dressed it to look like this museum.”
Savoy Brown remarked, “The set dec on this film is incredible and that segues into the subway platform that was built on a stage,” as she brought up another set glimpsed in the trailers, as our heroes find themselves on a packed subway filled with people dressed in Halloween costumes, including several Ghostfaces – one of whom could be the real thing. Said Savoy Brown, “We didn’t shoot that on an actual subway. They built that there. Oh my god, it was incredible.”
Said Mulroney, of the museum, “I was amazed at that set… It’s a collection of all the artifacts, let’s say, from previous Scream films, and then [you] felt the Stab franchise within the Scream films, so it was kind of eye opening.”
Mulroney admitted he wasn’t an expert on the Scream series, laughing, “I don’t even know half of the stuff or couldn’t identify it until I was told,” but marveled at the work that went into “that display, the collection, the depth of the thought that went into what parts of five other movies [it included.]”
As Gooding put it, “The museum itself was meant to look like it was set up by fans so that when you appreciate it as a fan watching the movie, you’ll be able to pick Easter eggs out that we don’t even touch on in the movie. It’s great. It’s such a well designed piece of work.”
Scream VI opens March 10.
For more on Scream‘s fictional Stab movie series, click below for a dive into everything we know about the franchise.
