As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Many horror movies tend to portray the villains with some sort of mental illness or disorder, which has come under criticism in later years due to a rising awareness and acceptance of mental illnesses. This movie subverts this trope by having Sam as the main protagonist: she hallucinates talking to the ghost of Billy Loomis, and is shown to take anti-psychotic meds, but she's not the killer. And while she's struggled with trauma from her past, she's otherwise portrayed as a normal person (basically truth in television for neurodivergent people: while dealing with the issues that unfortunately come with living with these problems, they're still people who are capable of leading full lives). While this movie's portrayal of mental illness may be somewhat questionable, or at least inaccurate, it's a better direction than most horror films would take.
- Furthermore, a criticism of the in-universe Stab 8 is that the main character is a Mary Sue. Not only is Sam not that, being well-intentioned and caring, but also being distrusted, failing often, and having the weight of her father Billy Loomis's legacy and evil personality on her mind, but the final Ghostface reveal has the explanation that the idea was to frame her as the villain. Not to mention, given how both of these Ghostfaces are practically the representations of modern toxic and sometimes even bigoted fandom, framing a Latina woman, who is in-universe an outcast, as the villain of this story feels like the perfect plan.
- Tara was the first Scream victim that survived the opening attack in her respective movie. But, it kinda makes sense, as Tara fought off her Ghostface as much as possible, buying her some time to survive, whereas Casey (and others) mostly relied on running away. Fight or flight!
- Not only that, but help was very close by during both attacks, and efforts were made by both Tara and her allies to stall for time.
- The movie brings back the song “Red Right Hand” after its absence from the fourth film. The fourth film was a “remake”, so more modern music would be appropriate instead of some song from the ‘90s that 2011 high schoolers wouldn’t remember. This film, however, is a “re-quel”; there are multiple callbacks to the original film as a result of the Revisiting the Roots theme, so why not bring back that song from the original trilogy?
- Not to mention, whilst Amber and Richie basically do their own take on the opening scene of Scream, Tara is (most likely intentionally) still alive at the end of that sequence. Therefore, the murder of Vince is closer to the first kill of a slasher film since it's a direct and clear murder. What song played in the opening credits of Stab, as shown in Scream 2? Red Right Hand.
- Other than knowing their identities and being one of the biggest threats to them and their goal, Richie and Amber have to kill Sidney if they want to inspire a new Stab movie. In the last film, it’s revealed that after the events of the third film, Sidney sued the makers of the Stab franchise to stop basing the movies on her actual life and encounters with Ghostface, forcing them to churn out terrible original stories that led to the series’ decline. Not only is Sidney indirectly responsible for ruining the killers’ favorite movie series, but by their logic (ignoring how the law works in real life), killing Sid means that the lawsuit would be considered null and the Stab makers would be free to make a movie based on Richie and Amber’s “re-quel”.
- Sheriff Judy Hicks, and by extension her son Wes, are only attacked after Sam Carpenter has been given an obvious motive - telling Sam to get out of town to save them all some trouble. Richie almost certainly overheard the conversation, giving him the bright idea that they should target an obvious source of frustration for Sam and further paint her as the killer. Bonus points for it flying in the face of Mindy's reassurance that Wes would be safer than someone like herself or her twin brother Chad. Both Judy and Wes are dead a scene or two later.
- Meta-wise, Mindy reassures Wes that he and his mom were safe because the killers didn’t care for the “sequels”, as they seem to be obsessing over only the original Stab, but that’s just it: they don’t care for the sequels. To the killers, the Hicks are the equivalent of Scrappies, so under the killers’ fucked-up mentality, making a proper “re-quel” involves purging characters from the “inferior sequels”.
- At one point in the movie, Richie sarcastically suggests to Amber "Maybe you're the killer", to which Amber gives him an annoyed look. First-time viewers will likely read this look as "You're seriously blaming me?", but rewatching it, knowing that Amber and Richie are Ghostface, viewers will realize Amber gave him that look thinking "Don't blow our cover, idiot!" A similar instance happened in the first Scream between Billy and Stu.
- Or much like Billy in the first film, they want to attract attention to themselves by planting "obvious" evidence that can be dispelled later.
- Sidney never holds the fact that Billy Loomis is Sam's biological father against her. While this might just be Sidney being a good person, she also has a very good personal reason for this, as two of the previous Ghostfaces have been closely related to Sidney by blood (her half-brother and her first cousin) on the same side of the family. If there is one character in the franchise who would be opposed to the idea that being a slasher is In the Blood, it would be Sidney.
- Sidney probably remembered how Mrs. Loomis leaving had such an effect on Billy, to the point that she became Ghostface herself to avenge him. Sidney decided to trust Nurture over Nature because Sam was raised far away from that and none of the Loomis family history was her fault.
- Sidney might also sympathize with Sam's mother, another woman who had been fooled by Billy's trickery (though to a less deadly degree) and purportedly ended up addicted to drugs herself. Her story also echoes the story of Sidney's mother, who also had a pattern of making some questionable choices after she placed her trust in the wrong person. And while Sam has had to live with her father's infamy, Sidney has had to live with her mother's. Sidney, more than anyone else in the franchise, would understand that Sam had no control of who her parents turned out to be.
- Why does Sidney tell Gale that Billy started the series of Ghostface sprees when it's revealed in Scream 3 that Roman orchestrated Maureen's murder? It's as Roman said, he had no idea Billy and Stu were going to follow up Maureen's murder with a full blown killing spree, in addition to the fact they were the ones who came up with the Ghostface persona.
- During the “For Wes” party, Chad is lured out and attacked by Ghostface, but he survives the film after Ghostface aborts their attempt on his life when they see Richie’s car approaching the house. On a first viewing, this might seem as though Ghostface is afraid of potentially getting caught and flees the scene. But later on, Richie and Amber reveal themselves as the killers, and the former pulls out Tara’s missing inhaler, which was used as a ploy to get both Sam and Tara at the Macher/Freeman house in preparation for the last stages of their plan; kill everyone and frame Sam as the perpetrator. Amber had attacked Chad while wearing the Ghostface costume, but she wasn’t afraid of being caught; she saw Richie’s car arriving and knew that that was her cue to start to clearing out the party in order to lay out the trap she and Richie planned for both Sam and Tara, which forced her to leave Chad for dead instead of finishing him off.
- Mindy survives this film, harkening back to Charlie stating that queer characters survive horror movies.
- Watching Ghostface, it's clear there are two different killers wearing the costume, and they're very different in physicality. One seems a lot more clumsy and brutal, the other a pure No-Nonsense Nemesis, ending the victims quickly and cleanly. But who is who? Pretty clearly, Amber is the more vicious yet clumsy one, as Richie was not in town to attack Tara at the beginning (and this scene is best showcase of her viciousness and clumsiness). Richie appears to be the more straightforward and efficient killer, demonstrated by effectively ending the Hickses in basically one blow apiece (there were more stabs at the Sheriff, but that was more to make sure she'd die before help arrived).
- The tribute to Wes Craven at the end of the film, where the sounds of birds chirping can be heard as Wes was an avid ornithologist, could also technically be seen as a callback to the first film as well. After the brief flash of Ghostface before the end credits start in the first film, the song that plays over the credits is Soho's cover of the The Icicle Works' song, "Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)".
- While references to Judy being in Stab 4 were removed from the final cut (presumably because Radio Silence remembered that Stab 4 wasn't based off the events of Scream 4), it makes sense that if Judy was in a Stab film, it would have to be Stab 4, the only Stab film with an uncertain premise. After all, the studio could have used Stab 3's scrapped concept of Sidney returning to Woodsboro for Stab 4. If so, the production team for Stab 4 probably visited Woodsboro or called up Dewey again for research purposes, either of which led to them discovering Woodsboro cop Judy and writing her into the script.
- Sam being Billy Loomis’s daughter. If she ever took his name, she would be Sam Loomis. In Scream VI, one of the online conspiracy theorists even calls her by this name.
- Tara's favorite horror movie is The Babadook, which she states is a movie about motherhood and grief. Interestingly, Tara's mother is very similar to Amelia, the protagonist of The Babadook, as both of them are mothers dealing with a missing husband and an estranged child. Because of this, it's likely that The Babadook is Tara's favorite movie simply because its story about a grieving mother hit close to home.
- Richie clearing out the party by sarcastically telling the teens he just saved their lives. First viewing it is him being genre savvy. Second viewing it is him as the killer going "get out because I don't need you also dead."
- Billy in Sam's hallucinations being helpful to her and enabling her to survive and save her little sister and friends may seem odd, even off-putting to some fans of the franchise, giving essentially a redemption arc to the series' first true monster. But the obvious needs be stated: this isn't Billy Loomis. Billy's dead and never coming back. This is Sam's hallucination of her father, someone she never actually knew, and has nothing to do with him and everything to do with Sam's illness, insecurities, rage, and dark impulses. Yet for all that, because Sam is fundamentally a good person and Hallucination!Billy is nothing more than a part of Sam's psyche, or course he's helpful and wants Sam to survive and achieve her goals (not letting her sister die). He just advocates for the most direct and bloody path to those ends, because he's nothing more or less than an avatar of Sam's own violent impulses. Billy Loomis himself is still an irredeemable monster; but his daughter can take what he gave her, both good and bad, and choose how to use it to make her own way.
Fridge Horror:
- Is Samantha now just as cursed as Sidney, Gale and the town of Woodsboro by the constant threat of copycat killers? Heck this movie has the most survivors, meaning Tara and her friends could be doomed to that fate as well.
- Hell, Sidney has two daughters now. Will some next generation creep decide to create a legacy franchise by going after them? Think it can’t get worse than that? Think again! The fact that both Sidney’s brother and cousin became murderers might imply that it’s In the Blood, so what if her daughters someday go Ghostface? Now that we know Kirby survived, is this her fate?
- Considering how complicated the development of movies is (meta-wise, it took eleven years for a new Scream movie to come out), how long would it have taken for the Stab people to make another movie, and considering how bad the series had been bombing, would anyone even bother making another Stab movie? It’s possible that if a movie wasn’t put into production, or at least not fast enough, Richie and Amber would’ve gone on another killing spree.
- Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize that such a petty motive, unlike the more personal ones of past Ghostfaces, is easily replicable. Given the toxic sort of fans that Richie and Amber represent, this could happen again.
- Not only that, but fans like that tend to hold a grudge against people involved with the movies they hate. Others like Richie and Amber could very well target the team behind Stab 8, be it the cast, the creatives, the casting director, or even the caterers. It could be Scream 3 all over again.
- Sam and Tara's mom is apparently an addict, but how long this has been true and the details of her struggles aren't elaborated on. Many people (Sam included) fall into substance abuse after enduring something traumatic. It's practically inevitable that finding out her secret love and father of her child was a psychopathic murderer who started a chain of killings that would last years and feeling completely unable to talk to anyone about it would put a significant strain on their mother's psyche; her husband abandoning them when he finds this out may have simply been the last straw.
- When asked how Amber and Richie found out Billy is her father, Amber simply says, "It's a small town and your mom's a drunk." This could imply that Sam's mom drunkenly blabbed to somebody and word spread... or it could mean she opened up about this in AA and somebody broke the rules about confidentiality to gossip. Amber or Richie might have even specifically gone to AA to dig up some dirt on the Carpenters. Either way, poor woman.
- Gale states she isn't going to write a book about the recent killers so that Amber and Richie "die in anonymity" and instead decides to write a book about Dewey and his life. Though this is a heartwarming idea, it has some fridge horror when you think back to the Stab films. The producers would have more than likely have it in their contract that they'd have film rights to any books by Gale Weathers based on actual events of the Ghostface killings after the events of the second or third Scream film (with a new set of producers who took over the franchise after Milton's death). And seeing that Gale would have to include the circumstances that lead to Dewey's death (it being a part of another Ghostface killing), with the addition of news reports from Woodsboro and the fact that there's two towns that knew of Amber and Richie as the killers (that's not including social media accounts they may have), that means the producers would be able to piece together another Stab film and circumvent Gale's plan of letting the killers not have the same fame as the past Ghostface killers. And seeing that the producers seem desperate to keep the franchise alive, them doing a "requel" and seeing that's what the killers were trying to do also, their version of what the events of this film would be like doesn't have to be as accurate, but still keep the "based on a true story" aspect of what would have been the first four films of the series (this is true of the classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which was loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein, but was not about Ed Gein). Essentially, Gale's attempt at trying to honor Dewey's life would still lead to Amber and Richie getting their 15 Minutes of Fame as Ghostfaces.
