Headscratchers / Scream (2022)

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

• Gale gets shot by Amber near the end of the film. Why didn't Gale and Sidney both come packing with bulletproof vests, if they were both armed? For that matter, why wouldn't Dewey, of all people, bring a stabproof vest?
  • Sidney, Gale, and Dewey are all burnt out survivors and despite being wise enough to carry guns, it probably escaped their mind to bring bulletproof vests since they thought they were done with Ghostface.
    • And yet it didn't escape Sidney's mind to wear one in the third movie? If you know a new Ghostface is on the loose, then you know you're not done with Ghostface.
    • Sidney grabbed a bulletproof vest that was in plain sight at the police station. If she came because she heard that Dewey died, she probably didn’t think about preparing beyond what she had on herself, and they went from the hospital to immediately tracking Sam, so they probably did not want to risk being too late by stopping by the station.
    • Scream 3 gave Sidney the benefit of the killer openly inviting her to the final confrontation, while she was at a police station with supplies to plan things out. This new movie clearly takes place over a quicker period of time, and didn't afford them the luxury of carrying anything but the guns Sidney brought from home.
    • Scream 3 Sidney is also HYPER paranoid, as she was coming off multiple killings within the span of 5 to 6 years. Scream 5 Sidney hasn't had to deal with that in years. She's rusty.
• Sidney and Gale didn’t appear to call the police while on their way to Amber’s house. Surely if they had, the police would’ve turned up way before the final killings happened, since Sid and Gale appeared to be quite far away from the house and the police would’ve had a quicker route.
  • They didn't call the police because neither of them knew that Ghostface was killing people at Amber's house.
    • But they knew they would, as they warned Sam that she had been lured to the house with the killers and that she had to escape urgently. It was still police-worthy.
    • Sidney and Gale both admit to Sam at the hospital that they want to personally murder Ghostface to avenge Dewey, so calling the police isn't exactly high on their priority list.
• How are we meant to feel about Billy's... ghost (for lack of a better word) helping Sam throughout the movie? Are we supposed to like him now? It may be just Sam's mind projecting him, but the film is still putting his image on the winning team.
  • It's probably Sam's wishful thinking of what she would've wanted him to be, mixed with her own dark side trying to get out.
  • It's just Sam wrestling with the idea that she may be a killer like him. I don't think it's that deep.
  • He was “helping” her by encouraging her to be a vicious killer. I wouldn’t say we were meant to like him.
  • In his first on-screen appearance, "Billy" asks Sam if her anti-psychotics aren't working anymore. This implies that they were working previously, which suggests that Billy is a hallucination. We're not meant to feel any way about him. He's just an extension of Sam.
  • One could read it as a representation of a violent "fight or flight" mental conflict. Enforced by the psychotic traits being passed down from Billy to Sam yet Sam did not inherit Billy's evil morality ultimately, therefore the conflict being between giving into the violent desire in order to stop this situation and ignoring it and letting Ghostface continue to kill. Ultimately whilst Sam chooses Fight, it's in a pretty justifiable situation where no one would blame her for killing Richie.
• Why doesn't Chad hobble back into the house after being stabbed? Ghostface isn't going to kill him in a room full of people. He would have been safe as long as there are multiple people around.
  • He probably passed out from blood loss like Mindy did just before Amber's reveal.
• Tara's friends keep referring to their world as a movie. Were they being sarcastic, or are they self aware they are in a horror movie?
  • It doesn't seem that they literally know they're in a movie, but rather, this is the logical evolution of the franchise's love of meta-humor. In the first movie, Randy was really the only one who was well-versed in the tropes and conventions of slashers, but in later movies, the whole cast gets in on it. You see it particularly in the second movie, with the film class discussion on sequels, and in the fourth, where the whole group of teens seem to be horror fans. The slasher genre as a whole has become much more self-aware and meta in the 2000s, in large part due to Scream revitalizing the genre after it ran itself into the ground in the '80s, so it only makes sense that the "rules" would get more and more esoteric and self-referential, and that eventually characters would stop remarking that things are like a movie, but that they are a movie. Remember, the killers' motive is that they literally want their killing spree to be made into an in-universe movie.
• So the killers big plan is to have a Ghostface killing spree so the next Stab movie can be based off of a real life event, like the first three were. But the Stab movies started making original movies because Sidney threatened to sue, not because they ran out of Ghostface killing sprees. How were they planning on getting around that hurdle?
  • Look at the Fridge Brilliance page. What these Ghostfaces did brought Sidney back. They clearly intended to kill her. Their plan was to make sure she'd be back partially to involve her in the narrative, it was successful and they came close to killing her. If she died then she can't keep the potential lawsuit going, there'd only be so much Mark could do and even in real life films can be made with a relative protesting and the filmmakers/studio. One can argue they'd still not want a lawsuit, but at least Sidney, the biggest threat to making any based on her life, is out of the way. Not to mention, the plan having a flaw, whether justifiable or not, is not a bad thing since it underlines the nature of these Ghostfaces to be just insane and demented in their actions rather than calculating. Jill wouldn't have gotten away with her plan either.
  • Amber and Richie were interested in making Sam the next Michael Myers, so presumably the plan was to inspire the Stab creators to create movies about Sam since the loophole was that it wasn't about Sidney's life but Sam's life.
  • And a dead person can't be defamed, so if they kill Sidney, then filmmakers have free reign to use her in the franchise.
• I do have one question that I'd like an explanation on, the hospital bit in the middle. Given how the Ghostfaces were planning on getting Sam to Stu's house and that plan revolved around Tara's inhaler, were they planning on killing Tara at the hospital or were they just injuring her more/giving Sam a reason to want to leave town/taking the opportunity to kill Dewey? I feel the latter makes more sense than the former, because if they were going to actually kill Tara then what was their backup plan going to be to get Sam to the house? Reference anything from the film I haven't recalled just to help me understand.
  • Given that Ghostface didn't go for the kill on Tara in the opening or in the hospital when he had the chance, it's safe to say that Amber and Richie at the time believed Tara was more valuable alive than dead.
  • Richie also tries to make Sam think that Tara is one of the killers too, so attacking her at the hospital and leaving her alive would also feed into that. If she miraculously escapes Ghostface twice, the second time being while she's in a wheelchair, that will look extra suspicious.
• Why did Dewey say that love interests always turn out to be Ghostface? Yes, he turned out to be right in Richie's case, but the only other time this applied was Billy.
  • It's probably a meta joke about how requels just ignore the previous sequels and nostalgically focus on the first movie, but the In-Universe explanation can be that Dewey is currently a Jaded Washout, so he's not going to be willingly accurate about the previous Ghostface murders.
  • It actually also applies to Charlie, given that Kirby ended up being the Final Girl of her film, and he betrayed her shortly after their romantic interests were finalized. Jill could arguably count as well, given her relationship with Charlie.
  • Jill was also planning to frame her boyfriend for the murders, which required killing him, so "Love Interest is killer" would be played straight in that instance either way. The only other time it really came up (Scream 3 pretty much lacked a love interest) was Scream 2, where Randy dismisses it purely because it would just be rehashing the original, despite "rehashing the original" being the formula for slasher sequels until. . . well, until Scream 2, really.
• Here's one that's a bit of a headscratcher. How does Sam know what Billy looked like towards the end of his life, let alone what he sounds like? She was born after Billy's death, and if any pictures that exist of Billy would have been past photos from before the events of his and Stu's murder spree. So, she wouldn't know what he looked like during the final act of the events from the first film (and even then, it's not accurate either, as he's not seen with a bullet hole in his forehead. And if she had watched the first Stab film, it still wouldn't explain the missing bullet hole and the in-universe film wouldn't have gotten the fake blood spatter on Billy correct). But what about how Billy sounds? How would Sam know know how Billy looked during the final night of his life, let alone what his voice was like?
  • There may have been home video footage of Billy from around that time, which, given what a True Crime sensation the Woodsboro massacre turned out to be, would probably be featured in documentaries and news stories. Even a scant amount of footage would be dissected and analyzed by a lot of people, especially in subsequent years. Between that, Gale and Sidney's books, and eyewitness testimony from other survivors, the public has a relative, Broad Strokes idea about who Billy Loomis was and how he sounded. Recall the scene from the first Stab movie with Sidney and Billy in the school hallway, which is a sensationalized but largely faithful recreation of an actual conversation that happened in Scream. As for the blood/corn syrup splatter, it being so accurate is probably a stylistic choice, but it's reasonable to assume that Luke Wilson's Billy Loomis looked fundamentally the same during the climax of Stab. There's some Fridge Brilliance at play; Sam really doesn't know that much about Billy Loomis. She's never met him and never will, and by the time she found out he was her father, he'd become a cult figure on the scale of Charles Manson, inspiring several copycat killing sprees. Her version of him is a combination of his mythologized public persona, and her own idealized version of a mentoring father figure who could help her with her mental illness. For all we know she's not seeing him as the audience does at all. Maybe what she sees and hears is Luke Wilson with a mid-'90s haircut.
  • Maybe Billy showed up on Gale's hidden camera that filmed the events of the party in the first movie? Gale would have happily broadcast any footage or evidence from that night that she could get away with, so if anything of Billy that night survived, it would be on the internet and easy for Sam to find.
• I can totally buy Stu's house still being up for sale in the Scream universe, but I do question why that wouldn't be a bigger deal among the characters as far as suspicion on Amber goes. Whilst it is just a house, I have a feeling that if the characters knew it, it would have been brought up. Especially since due to the re-quel concept, it could have been assumed that there'd be a history repeating aspect that would make Stu's house come up as a likely connection. And if Mindy, Chad, Wes and Tara didn't know, then how comes they didn't know? Whilst not the most recent Ghostface attack, the events of 96 would still be a part of the town's history that it's occupants would remember.
  • The Doylist answer is that Stu's house is supposed to be the surprise plot twist, which is why no one brings up Amber living in Stu's house (although Amber's friends could have discussed Amber's house off-screen). Another possibility is that most modern Woodsboro residents remember Billy as the original Ghostface but overlook Stu's involvement since Billy was the leader of the two. In fact, Tara mistakenly believed that Billy was the sole killer in Stab, and Amber's friends didn't know that Vince was Stu's nephew until Amber told them, meaning there is a precedent for them forgetting important details about Stu.
• Why was Billy Loomis retconned as Sam's biological father? Wouldn't it make more sense if it was Roman Bridger instead?
  • Billy was the first Ghostface, so making him the new protagonist's parent fits the requel's Revisiting the Roots premise.