YMMV / Scream (2022)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • At one point, Mindy follows Amber into the basement. Mindy later states that she was trying to warn Amber that it isn't safe to wander off alone when there is a killer on the loose, but given that Mindy is a Stab fan who probably knows Amber lives in Stu's old house, it's possible that Mindy suspected Amber was Ghostface and hastily thought up an excuse when she surprised Amber.
  • Hallucinations like Sam's can't say anything that she doesn't already know. So when her hallucination of her biological father Billy Loomis seems to point her towards a knife, the only way he could is if she had already seen it. From her perspective, hallucination!Billy is giving her nods of approval, it's more likely that in truth, she had seen the knife herself and chose to embrace the dark side of herself to kill Richie.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • Richie observes that the Stab films have been going downhill since the fifth installment. Is this a Self-Deprecation joke about this movie being the fifth in the Scream series, or a Call-Back to Scream 4, which mentions that Stab 5 was widely panned for introducing Time Travel to the franchise?
  • One YouTube channel took Stab going on unpopular new directions as a reference to Scream: The TV Series.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The silver/chrome Ghostface mask was just a joke prop specifically made for the in-universe Stab 8 Ghostface, right? Nope, FunWorld (the owners of the mask’s copyright) created silver variants of the mask to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the mask’s conception. Considering that the silver masks were limited edition collectors' items, it's most likely that the mask for the Stab 8 Ghostface was custom-made. The silver variant also appears as a wearable mask for Dead by Daylight's incarnation of Ghostface.
• Angel/Devil Shipping: A group of fans walked away from this film shipping the sweet and innocent Tara with one of the serial killing Ghostfaces, Amber, mainly due to their chemistry and the fact that one of the earlier drafts had them as girlfriends.
• Anvilicious: The film isn't very subtle about its message regarding the danger of obsessive fanaticism, with Richie straight up denying that fandom can be toxic even though no one brought up the subject.
• Award Snub: While Jenna Ortega won Best Frightened Performance at the MTV Movie & TV Awards—and the film itself had a nomination for Best Movie too, notably missing were nominations for Best Hero (for David Arquette and/or Neve Campbell); Best Fight; Breakthrough Performance (which also would've been for Ortega) and Best Villain (for either Jack Quaid, Mikey Madison or Ghostface/Roger L. Jackson).
• Awesome Art:
  • Two of the film's posters are simultaneously gorgeous and terrifying, abandoning the headshot style of previous Scream posters to give a sinister focus on Ghostface.
  • In addition to the two mentioned above, there is a series of posters with each cast member holding a Ghostface mask, and one happens to be a headshot, of the style that was thought to be abandoned.
• Awesome Music: "I Don't Want To Talk" by Dylan Minnette's band Wallows is the song which plays over the credits, and it's both incredibly upbeat and somehow melancholic — fitting for the end of an era.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Sam. Some think she's a badass with a touching big sister relationship with Tara and enjoy her backstory as the daughter of legacy Ghostface, Billy Loomis. Others think her actress Melissa Barrera's performance leans heavily into Dull Surprise, hate the Billy hallucinations, and find Tara to be a far more compelling Final Girl who would be a better choice to carry the franchise going forward.
  • Many fans love Mindy for being a hilarious Meta Girl and worthy successor to her uncle Randy, as well as being the film franchise's first openly gay character. Others find her to be an insufferable Jerkass with a startling Lack of Empathy towards her friends and Liv in particular for little adequately explained reason.
• Broken Base: Dewey's death has received a mixed reaction from the fanbase — not the kill itself, which was praised for being brutal and tragic, but rather the circumstances behind it. Many people blame Dewey for bringing his own death upon himself by grasping a huge Idiot Ball and leaving himself vulnerable for Ghostface to murder, but others don't have much problem with that due to Dewey still being in-character as The Ditz right until his death. There have also been opinions about how Dewey got wasted too early or if he should have survived altogether, whereas others are fine with how things went as they did.
• Catharsis Factor: Given how intensely brutal and psychotic Richie and Amber both were — especially when they killed Dewey and taunted Sam — seeing them each get violently killed at the end of the film is pretty satisfying to watch.
• Common Knowledge: It's commonly speculated that both Amber and Richie have their own unique attack style when using the knife, specifically that Amber stabs her victims multiple times for an overkill whereas Richie goes for a One-Hit Kill by delivering a single attack to his victims' necks. As such, fans who follow the kill style theory conclude that both Ghostfaces have an equal number of victims as Judy died from multiple stab wounds, supposedly Amber's style, whereas Vince, the hospital guard, and Wes died from a single neck injury, which is supposedly Richie's modus operandi.^note The other two victims, Liv and Dewey, are unambiguously Amber's as she guns down the former during her Ghostface reveal and executes the latter while her partner Richie is "escaping" with Sam and Tara. However, Word of God and the script debunk this fan theory in various ways. Notably, Radio Silence stated in an interview that Amber holds the majority of the kills, contradicting the kill style theory's claim that Amber and Richie both have three kills. The script does confirm that Richie killed Wes, but it also confirms that Amber murdered the hospital guard as Richie had an airtight alibi at the motel. In addition, Radio Silence remarked in the aforementioned interview that they had scriptwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick figure out which Ghostface did which kill, which is important since Vanderbilt indirectly verified on Twitter that Judy's killer was male, meaning that Judy died to Richie rather than Amber as the kill-style theory alleges.
• Draco in Leather Pants: One of the Ghostfaces, Amber, has a large group of fans who are easily ready to forgive her participation in a vicious murder spree, mainly due to her Laughably Evil personality and being played by the gorgeous Mikey Madison. This is best seen in how a lot of fans try to either erase or at the very least downplay her part in torturing her best friend Tara, all in the name of shipping the two together.
• Even Better Sequel: Scream saw a better critical response from its audience than Scream 4, which was regarded as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel. There are those who even say it's the best since the original, or at least definitely better than the third one.
• Evil Is Cool: Richie and Amber, due to their charming Faux Affably Evil and Laughably Evil nature. They're brutal killers, but they're brutal killers who are having a blast, and it's easy to get sucked into the fun they're having doing terrible things.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The movie usually gets called Scream 5 to differentiate it from the original movie.
  • Before the title was announced, there were rumors it would be getting the Letters 2 Numbers title treatment as 5cream, leading to fans calling it "FiveCream". This is reflected of how Scream 4 formatted its title as Scre4m.
  • Much like how Halloween (2018) is simply called... Halloween (2018), this movie is also referred to as Scream (2022).
  • With the style of the Scream 6 title being Scream VI, usage of Scream V for this movie started to go up, too.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: One of the earlier drafts of the script had Tara and Amber as girlfriends rather than just best friends. A lot of fans would have preferred to have had this kept in as a better way to explain why Amber hates Tara's sister Sam and because it adds more tragedy to the reveal that Amber is one of the killers.
• Foe Yay Shipping: There is a very large fanbase for Tara and one of the Ghostfaces, Amber, despite the fact that she attacks Tara and tries to kill her and her sister. The fact that they were girlfriends in an earlier draft of the script only adds to this.
• Friendly Fandoms: This film and Wednesday share a lot of fans, due to both being modern updates to franchises, both coming out in 2022, and both starring Jenna Ortega. In fact, they had already shared fans before Wednesday even aired.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Amber's line "You can't have a good Halloween without Jamie Lee!" became this after Neve Campbell announced that she wouldn't be returning for Scream VI due to a pay dispute. Fortunately, the film did well at the box office and received mostly positive reviews from fans.
  • This movie's Ghostface choose to stalk, harass, and kill a bunch of people because they were upset at the direction the latest Stab film took, taking it as a personal insult to the fans of the series. Following the release of Halloween Ends, Rohan Campbell (who played newcomer Corey Cunningham) was harassed on social media for "ruining" a movie that changed the formula compared to previous films. Much like Rian Johnson's fictional Stab 8, Ends was also met with a fandom campaign to have the film remade.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • For long time fans of the franchise, it was always a major disappointment that the planned second trilogy of Scream films starting from Scream 4 never came to pass due to that movie under performing at the box office. Not only was this movie a major financial success but it also led to a sequel being greenlit, meaning the second trilogy of movies ended up coming about after all, and potentially allows the writers to wrap up some lose ends from Scream 4 including bringing back fan favorite Kirby Reed and finding out what happened to her post-Scream 4.
  • The scene of Sidney relaxed in the back of the ambulance serves as a fitting Bookend for the character as a whole, after Neve Campbell announced that she wouldn't be coming back to Scream VI, effectively ending Sidney's story as of this writing.
• Heartwarming Moments: Now has a page.
• He Really Can Act:
  • David Arquette's performance as Dewey was given credit for bringing a new dramatic layer to his character, showing him as somewhat of a broken shell of his former self, yet still the Nice Guy he always was.
  • Courteney Cox also turns in some of her best dramatic work as Gale, particularly in the aftermath of Dewey's death.
  • Skeet Ulrich brings his known-and-loved natural charisma to the Ax-Crazy Billy Loomis, making him as helpful and cool (in a darkly endearing sense) as a hallucination of Sam's as he was downright despicable as one of the killers in the original film.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • An interview revealed that the filmmakers filmed (but didn't use) a line about Dewey being alive and operated on in the hospital just in case they changed their minds about his fate during filming. This might leave just the barest of hopes that he could pull off a miraculous off-screen recovery for optimistic fans. Given how Dewey is notorious for surviving even the most severe of attacks and injuries throughout the series, it's only fitting.
  • People have survived Boom, Headshot! fates in real life, making it possible to wonder if Liv is really dead, especially since her body is nowhere to be seen during a quick subsequent shot of the room (although this is likely just a production error).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Stab 8 Ghostface is seen using a flamethrower while in his costume, leading to the in-universe fans accusing the Stab franchise of Jumping the Shark. Come the next installment, and that film's Ghostface uses a shotgun to kill someone for real while also wearing the iconic costume. It was all made better by a more favorable fan reception.
• I Knew It!: A Freeze-Frame Bonus Easter Egg confirms a persistent fan theory about Scream 4, specifically that a character thought to be dead was in fact still alive. A YouTube thumbnail mentions an interview with Kirby Reed as a survivor of one of the Woodsboro massacres.
• Improved Second Attempt: A divisive point of Scream 4 was how Kirby’s fate was left unclear, with multiple people saying she died and others contradicting that statement. Here, characters such as Mindy and Chad are given quick moments to show to the audience that they’re on their way to recovery. Also, Kirby herself is finally revealed to be alive thanks to a Freeze-Frame Bonus that paved the way for her to return in the following film.
• Les Yay: Amber displays a very emphasized protectiveness of Tara when she’s in the hospital, so much so that one of the characters outright says that she could be the killer simply to try keep Tara to herself (outright naming If I Can't Have You… as motive). In an earlier draft of the script, apparently this was very much intentional and Amber and Tara were meant to be girlfriends.
• Love to Hate: Richie and Amber aren’t any less evil or selfish than their predecessors, but their portrayal as toxic nostalgic fans who started these new killings simply because they wanted to inspire a more traditional Stab sequel makes them a riot to watch. Not only are their motivations the most ridiculous, but unlike Stu, Mickey, and Charlie, both are laughably evil and thus have each other to play off of, since neither is a bad boss.
• Memetic Mutation: Amber doing a Boom, Headshot! on Liv became a popular response GIF, usually as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with an unpopular opinion or tweet.
• Moe:
  • Tara is extremely adorable, between her small stature, baby face, and kind personality. Adding to this, she’s also a major Woobie for the extreme amount of suffering she endures, between being hospitalized from multiple stab wounds right at the start of the film, and then continuing to get targeted by the killers while she’s still wheelchair-bound and with a nasal cannula in the hospital, making many viewers just want to give the poor girl a hug for everything she goes through.
  • Wes is also quite adorable, with his endearingly protective nature towards his friends and Dylan Minnette leaning into his innocent nature. His death is very much a Kill the Cutie situation.
• Most Wonderful Sound: For fans who weren't as excited about Scream: The TV Series or Scream: Resurrection and how they disregarded most of the series' main characters, Roger L. Jackson's final line of the first trailer serves as this:
  Ghostface: Hello, Sidney.
• Narm:
  • An hallucination of Billy Loomis talks to Sam at various points in the movie. While it isn’t the most ridiculous thing in the franchise, it’s still utterly baffling to watch as he offers advice to Sam on the new Ghostface like a companion in a video game.
  • Sam's line "Never fuck with the daughter of a serial killer" is a bit of a weird mouthful, and sounds more awkward than if she had just said "Never fuck with a serial killer's daughter."
• Narm Charm:
  • The killer’s motive this time around is anger over a changed direction for the Stab movies, so much so that they decide to create a new killing spree which another movie can be based on. It is definitely a little stupid, but the killer makes it believable by being the pure definition of a Loony Fan, and it’s a fitting motive for a such a meta and satirical franchise. It also doubles as a call-back, as it draws on Kevin Williamson's original plans for Scream 2.
  • The Billy Loomis hallucinations can be silly but also work as a manifestation of Sam's dark side that she's trying to suppress. And there's no denying that when she embraces it, and stabs Richie to death, it's very badass.
• No Yay: The hinted romance between Richie and Amber—confirmed in the sequel—leaves a lot of fans uncomfortable due to their age difference, with Richie being in his late 20s and Amber being 17. Most fans simply choose to ignore it.
• Obvious Judas: Amber dislikes Sam from the beginning, is especially protective of Tara and was suspiciously left alive in the opening when Ghostface was outside her house. As such, it's not that much of a surprise when she's revealed as one of the killers. The fact that her actress also played a deranged serial killer (or attempted one) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes it easier to telegraph.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Dead Meat’s quick cameo as a commentary channel blasting the in-universe Stab 8 garnered a lot of attention from their fans for being a delightful little scene for hosts James and Chelsea to play against type as caustic YouTube critics and get some recognition from one of their favorite franchises.
  • Despite being a joke character, the in-universe Ghostface from Stab 8 has received a positive response due to his chrome mask and usage of a flamethrower, which is ironic, since he’s meant to show how badly the “Stab” movies have jumped the shark. Him being voiced by original Ghostface Matthew Lillard also helps.
• Pandering to the Base: The Billy Loomis hallucinations are seen as this by many. They are not necessary to the movie but provides an excuse for bringing back Skeet Ulrich in his well-liked look and performance.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: The fans who ship Tara/Amber together refer to them collectively as "Tamber" on Tumblr and Twitter.
• Questionable Casting:
  • The filmmakers would like you to believe that the very petite Amber (played by Mikey Madison, who is 5'3" and has a tiny frame) was the one responsible for the hospital attack, when the stunt person in the costume was very obviously someone about the same size (or even taller than) as David Arquette and Jack Quaid. To be fair, the scenes where it’s implied that Amber is Ghostface display her focusing on ambush tactics, though this doesn’t explain how she’s able to charge Dewey into a wall.
  • Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding and Dylan Minnette each play high schoolers the same age as Jenna Ortega, who's younger than each by eight years, six years and four years respectively. Jasmin specifically is also only four years younger than Melissa Barrera and two years younger than Jack Quaid, and each are supposed to be much older than her. However, with Mason and Dylan, it's almost plausible, like with Mikey Madison and Sonia Ben Ammar, who are each only three years older than Jenna, but can easily be argued to still look the part despite their actual ages.

• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Judy Hicks was a fairly divisive character in 4. Some found her annoying for constantly flirting with the married Dewey and being rude to Gale, and disliked how the film went out of its way to paint her as an unneccessary Red Herring. 5 rectifies this by emphasizing Judy's love for her son Wes, giving her a more Endearingly Dorky personality, and ultimately having her die a brutal and tragic death rushing home to protect her child, thus making many of said detractors sympathize with her.
• Salvaged Story: The fact that Dewey never mentioned his sister Tatum or her death was an oft-criticized aspect of the prior sequels, making it seem like she had been forgotten. Here, we see that he still keeps her ashes on the mantle.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Most fans agree that Vince could have played a bigger role in the story. As a relative of Stu, Vince would be a good Red Herring at the very least if he lasted longer, and it would have been interesting to learn if Stu's infamy as Ghostface affected Vince in any way just as Billy's notoriety affected Sam. Furthermore, the movie emphasizes that both Billy and Stu were the original Ghostfaces, so it would have been more fitting if Richie and Amber tried to frame both Sam and Vince as the killers rather than just Sam by herself.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The fact that there are only two killers again may come as a disappointment to some who were hoping for the rule to be subverted or played with like the other horror movie rules in the series, although this is intentional, since the new Ghostface is trying to avoid changing the formula, and Sidney mocks the new Ghostface for being unoriginal and derivative.
  • While it is ultimately just an attempt by Richie to try and divide Sam and Tara, it still feels like wasted potential that Tara wasn't one of the Ghostfaces since she resents Sam for abandoning her as Richie stated.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Be real, who expected Billy Loomis to show up in this movie, albeit existing as a psychosis-induced figment of Sam's mind?
  • Randy's sister Martha, previously only appearing in a single scene in Scream 3, returns as the mother of two new characters.
• The Woobie: Right from the start of the film, Tara really gets put through the wringer, and considering she’s The Cutie, it can get pretty sad to watch. She’s terrified for her life from the first phone call, gets stabbed several times to the point that she’s hospitalized for the rest of the film, gets attacked in the hospital and ends up falling out of her wheelchair, has to crawl away from the killer while clearly in pain and begging for her life, gets taken out of the hospital for her safety, can’t find her inhaler she needs, requiring the group to stop at Amber’s party to get her backup, gets attacked again while they’re there, ends up Bound and Gagged... and after all of this is ultimately able to end up saving the day with a Big Damn Heroes moment. Though even though she finally catches a break by surviving and finally being truly safe, the best thing she has to look forward to is just the high from the stronger painkillers she’s going to get after all this, although her relationship with Sam does at least improve.

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