Scream 5 Rian Johnson Reference Explained by Co-Writer

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This story contains SPOILERS about the new “Scream” film.

Like any great “Scream” movie, the fifth film in the franchise is movie-literate and wildly self-aware. The new film has fun with toxic fandom and the idea of a “requel,” or a movie that remakes the original film while pairing new characters with legacy, fan favorites — just like this film does and proudly wears on its sleeve.

But it also makes a sly reference to a real-life director whose own movie has become the poster child for attacks from toxic fans and the trend of requels: Rian Johnson, or as “Scream” refers to him, “The ‘Knives Out’ Guy.”

James Vanderbilt, one of the film’s co-writers along with Guy Busick and a producer on the film for his Project X Entertainment banner, explained to TheWrap why name-dropping Johnson in one of the film’s key scenes was “kind of too perfect.”

Fans of the “Scream” sequels know that there are a series of fake movies within the movies called the “Stab” franchise. The “Stab” films tell the true stories of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the Ghostface killers and the residents of Woodsboro.

The premise and running gag of the new “Scream” is that Hollywood has decided to make its latest “Stab” movie a “requel” and revert everything back to the original by bringing back the original characters. And to drive home the point even more, the new “Stab” movie is called quite simply, “Stab,” not unlike how “Scream” (2022) rips off the title of “Scream” (1996) or “Halloween” (2018) has the same name as “Halloween” (1978).

There’s only one big difference with this new “Stab” movie: people HATE it.

“We loved the idea that someone had made one that was not well received. Much like certain directors have made big IP movies that fandoms have rejected in an enormous way,” Vanderbilt explained. “There is a very tiny percentage of people who feel such an ownership over an IP and have such anger toward people that if they don’t do things exactly the way they want to, spew this [stuff], and that feels like something that didn’t exist 10 years ago.”

Rian Johnson of course directed “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi,” which is a follow-up to one of the most famous requels, “The Force Awakens,” and was also the target of massive amounts of online vitriol from toxic fans. But Johnson also directed the eighth Star Wars film, and guess what “Stab” movie was up next in the franchise lineage? “Stab 8.”

“I think watching how people attacked him as a person was, oh we’re in new territory here,” Vanderbilt said. “In ‘Scream’ 1 they talk about Wes Carpenter movies, in ‘Scream 2’ they talk about Robert Rodriguez directed Stab. There is a great tradition of commenting on other filmmakers who are peers of the time, and that felt like a very natural thing. Rian directed this big IP that was divisive. We felt like if someone directed the ‘Stab’ movie and it were divisive, it would be fun if it were Rian.”

“Scream” breaks down the idea of a “requel” in a terrific scene where Jasmin Savoy-Brown, the film’s horror “expert,” explains the trend of soft remakes of a franchise as seen in everything from “Ghostbusters” to “Halloween” to “Star Wars” and beyond. The characters all seem to realize that the drama they’re playing out is its own requel story, and Vanderbilt had the goal of making a movie that he as a fan would most want to see and that could comment on where the movies and the horror genre specifically has gone in the last 10 years since “Scream 4.”

“The thing about the original ‘Scream’ was that it got to have its cake and eat it too. It deconstructed the slasher while also being a great slasher [film],” Vanderbilt said. “We wanted to deconstruct the requel while hopefully making a really great requel.”

Fan-Favorite Scream 4 Character Confirmed Alive in New Movie

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It’s been ten years since audiences went back to Woodsboro and the financial failure of 2011’s Scream 4 almost made it seem like the meta-slasher franchise was finished forever. Just like the killer at the end of the movie though, they always come back, and this week saw the release of Scream, the fifth in the series. For the most part the new Scream movie makes references to the original trilogy in the series, and spends a lot of time setting up the new crop of characters, but a lingering plot thread from Scream 4 was officially confirmed in the movie in the most subtle way possible, specifically that one character actually survived. Potential spoilers follow!

Though the return of the legacy characters was a big part of Scream 4’s appeal top fans at the time, but just like the new movie some of the fresh faces that appeared ended up becoming franchise favorites. Among those in Scream 4 was Heroes star Hayden Panettiere as Kirby Reed, the best friend of Emma Roberts’ Jill and the new movie-obsessed expert for the 2011 sequel. During the events of Scream 4 it’s sort of implied that Kirby died, having been stabbed by Rory Culkin’s Charlie and left for dead, but 2022’s Scream confirms that Kirby is alive and well.

(Photo: Dimension)

In a moment that lampoons YouTube accounts dedicated to tearing down major movie franchises, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter egg on the side confirms Kirby’s fate. On the side of the main video being played is a recommended video titled “Interview with Woodsboro Survivor Kirby Reed” and featuring a photo of Panettiere as the thumbnail.

No further mention of Kirby is made in the movie and it’s possible that this Easter egg was just there to give fans of the series some closure for a character whose death was left incredibly ambiguous. To take it a step further though, perhaps it’s a seed being planted for a potential sixth Scream movie, one that brings Panettiere’s Kirby together with Jasmin Savoy Brown’s Mindy Meeks-Martin, the film-obsessed character in the 2022 movie.

“This new cast of characters is so wonderful. The legacy cast, they’re so wonderful,” co-director Tyler Gillett recalled to Total Film previously. “I think what we discovered, and what [screenwriters] Guy [Busick] and James [Vanderbilt] did, is they found a real reason for the next story to exist. We know that there is more gas in the tank. There are more stories to be told in Woodsboro, and about these characters, for sure.”

Scream is now playing in theaters.

Do You Like Scary Movies About Scary Movies Laughing at Scary Movies? Then You’ll Love the New ‘Scream’

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There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie: You can never have sex, never drink or do drugs, never say you’ll “be right back.” But there are also certain rules that characters have to adhere to in order to navigate a meta-horror movie, like: Be extremely well-versed in the rules of horror movies, especially the classic slashers (your Halloweens, your Friday the 13ths, your Nightmare on Elm Streets). You should be enough of a fan to recognize potentially stabby situations — don’t go in the basement or the woods! avoid bloody valentines, terror trains and prom nights! — but not so much of a fan that you put on creepy masks and murder your classmates. And if you’ve lived through a franchise’s first entry, make sure you watch the movies that exploit your “real-life” trauma playing within the movieverse you’re in, just in case art imitates life imitating art imitating…say, just how deep does this rabbit hole go?

A quarter of a century ago, Scream winked and nudged and butchered its way into pop culture by assuming folks were fluent enough in genre conventions to know how those movies worked. It’s a hell of a tightrope act that screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven nimbly tiptoed, balancing in-jokes for a generation raised on VCR horror binges while still delivering thrills, chills and adrenaline rushes. Even in a decade characterized by pomo self-consciousness and mondo meta virtuosity (the ’60s got Godard and Dylan, but the ’90s gave us Tarantino and Beck), this 1996 hit relied as much on a shared knowingness as it did that signature Ghostface mask. And when the series started inserting their own reflective rip-offs within the franchise itself. i.e. the Stab movies that dramatized those horrific teen massacres seen in Scream, you got a bonus M.C. Escher buzz — the joy of watching a slasher eat its own tail.

Fast-forward a few decades, and brand-name nostalgia is even bigger business; the nature of franchising and fandom, however, has changed. Scream 2022 is nothing if not extremely up-to-date, knowing very well that it’s re-entering a poposphere in which the conversation is less “how cool were those movies!?” and more “how can I keep permanently reliving my childhood?” After a suitably snarky update to the original opening — another phone call in which the voice of Roger L. Jackson sinisterly asks a babysitter if she like scary movies…only now they’re arguing about the merits of “elevated horror” — word goes out that there’s a new Ghostface killer in Woodsboro. A potential victim, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), ends up in the hospital. Her long-estranged sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), rushes back to her old home town to take care of her. They both have a connection to that first wave of killings way back in the day, though only one of them knows it.

Tara’s high school friends, made up of the usual assortment of pop-savvy jocks, geeks, kooks and mall-goths, are ready to play amateur detectives and find out who’s behind the Gen-Z Ghostface masks. Ditto Richie (The Boys’ Jack Quaid), Sam’s boyfriend who’s along for the ride. Meanwhile, a visit to the ex-lawman Dewey Riley (David Arquette) after more bodies drop prompts him to reach out to both Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), now a bigshot TV anchor in New York, and former final-girl extraordinaire Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). It’s around this point that the smartest member of this would-be Scooby Gang, played by Yellowjackets‘ Jasmin Savoy Brown, figures out that these aren’t just copycat killings. They’re all in the middle of a “requel.”

Yes, a requel — the distinctly 21st century Frankenstein’s monster of a franchise entry in which legacy characters from beloved series pair up with fresh blood in the name of breathing new life into an old but highly beloved intellectual property. It’s somehow both a reboot and a sequel, a “return to basics” and a reset after diminishing returns. If your film is part of a series [cough] but you ditch the numbers after the title [cough, cough] and simply name your new entry after the first movie [cough, COUGH, sputter, dead], then you may be a requel. God forbid you anger those who worship the brand like a religion, and feel that those who somehow mess with the integrity of such canon fodder be subject to a campaign of online harassment, name-calling and worse. You might get Mary Sue-d.

And while it may be spoilery to say much else, it’s safe to note that this type of toxic fandom is exactly what Scream ’22 is sharpening its knives for as it goes in for the meta-kill. It’s a smart way of tackling a topic that’s plagued both long-in-the-tooth franchises and relatively new cinematic universes — that some sort of purity of essence must be maintained, and that fans are entitled to protect their cherished memories because, say, tweaking a detail or letting a POC character enter their pop culture sandbox is a personal attack. And the concept of taking such folks to task acts as a through line to the countless in-house callbacks and references to other movies, even when this particular house of mirrors feels like it’s about to collapse in on itself. It’s hard to say what the directorial duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (the same guys who gave us the equally cheeky Ready or Not) and screenwriters James Vanderbilt (Zodiac) and Guy Busick (Castle Rock) might have at stake here. But they all definitely have an axe to grind, and are more than willing to take said axe to a slaughterfest set on sacred genre ground.

Do you like scary movies about scary movies that somehow laugh at yet pay reverence to other scary movies? Then you will love this new Scream. Do you prefer your horror to not be so back-pattingly clever about all of that, and to remove tongues from mouths rather than place them firmly in cheeks? Then you’re shit outta luck here, my friend, though that’s been some purists’ beef with the series since Drew Barrymore first put the Jiffy-Pop on the stove and picked up her phone. It also runs out of steam long before it runs out the clock, which has also been a staple of the series as well. Yet you have to applaud how boldly this fifth entry tries to flip the bird to the entire rinse-repeat-regurgitate idea of trapping film series in amber, while also delivering you the thrill of the familiar and those dopamine bumps that come with the pang of recognition. It wants to eat its cake and stab it repeatedly, too. And if you don’t like it, watch out. They might come after you in the next requel.

25 Secrets About Scream Revealed

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1. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson came up with the idea for the movie while watching a 1994 episode of ABC News’ Turning Point about the serial killer dubbed the Gainesville Ripper. House-sitting at the time, Williamson was spooked when he saw a window was open that he was convinced he had closed.

2. The script caused a bidding war in Hollywood, with Dimension ultimately landing the movie. But finding a director proved to be an unexpected challenge before horror legend Wes Craven signed on after initially passing on the project.

“Every name you could imagine came up [to direct],” Williamson told The Ringer. “Wes’s name came up really early. Robert Rodriguez’s name came up. Quentin Tarantino’s name came up.”

Ultimately, it was Craven’s then-assistant Julie Plec, who would go on to co-create The Vampire Diaries among other TV hits, who helped convince him to return to the genre after the filmmaker’s New Nightmare failed to perform at the box office.

“At the time I was working at Wes’s house, so I would have lunch with him every day. And so I said, ‘Remember that great script? They’re having a hard time finding a director and they really want you to do it,’” Plec recalled to The Ringer. “I was just kind of making quote-unquote innocent small talk. And he said, ‘Ah, well they should just make me an offer I can’t refuse then.’ And I think he was joking, but I went back to [director of development] Lisa [Harrison] and I said, ‘He said make him an offer he can’t refuse.’ And so Dimension did. And he took it.”

3. The original title was Scary Movie, with the studio deciding to change it to Scream after production had wrapped, much to the creative team’s initial dismay.

‘[Scary Movie] was on all our wrap gifts and all our fanny packs," Plec told The Ringer. “They wanted it to be Scream and we were like, ‘That’s terrible.’ We were all outraged. Turned out to be a good choice.

New documentary details how Louisiana serial killer inspired the original ‘Scream’ movie

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Discovery+ will be launching a two-hour documentary as part of their Shock Docs series in honor of the new entry into the “Scream” franchise titled “Scream: The True Story” on Jan. 14.

In December of 1996, Wes Craven’s “Scream” made its silver screen debut and revitalized the slasher film genre. This now-iconic piece of cinematic history was greatly inspired by a drifter in Florida who murdered five college students over the course of three days in August of 1990. The drifter? Shreveport native Danny Rolling.

Rolling’s reign of terror began in Shreveport in November of 1989, when he broke into the home of 24-year-old Julie Grissom where he killed her, her 8-year-old nephew and her father.

Fleeing to Florida after shooting his father, a Shreveport police officer, in May of the following year, Rolling committed the crimes that would later earn him the moniker “The Gainesville Ripper.”

When finally caught and charged for the Florida murders nearly two years later, Rolling claimed to have been driven to do so by an alternate personality named “Gemini.” In February of 1994, Rolling pleaded guilty to his crimes while his mother recounted the abuse Rolling had received at the hands of his father to the jury. Several psychiatrists testified that a Rolling suffered from a severe personality disorder, but stated that Rolling understood what he was doing at the time of his crimes.

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Rolling was found guilty on all five counts in late March and sentenced to death in April 1994. He was executed at Florida State Prison on Oct. 25, 2006.

In 1994, an episode of ABC News’ “Turning Point” about Rolling inspired screenwriter Kevin Williamson to write “Woodsboro Murders,” which later became the script for “Scream.”

The cult horror classic draws on various “horror movie rules” to explore the story about two teenage boys who terrorize a small town.

In the new documentary, paranormal investigator Steve Shippy and psychic medium Cindy Kaza team up to uncover the truth behind Rolling’s insanity claims.

The duo will be the first to ever conduct a paranormal investigation at the campsite near the University of Florida campus where the murders took place and in his childhood home, where current homeowners complain of aggressive poltergeist activity.

The “Scream” film finds a new set of teenagers being terrorized by the infamous Ghostface to resurrect secrets from the town’s past 25 years after the original series of murders. While this will be the fifth installment of the franchise, it is being marketed as a relaunch and will be the first to not be directed by Wes Craven after his passing in 2015.

“Scream” and “Scream: The True Story” will both premier on Jan. 14. You can catch the new film in theaters everywhere and the documentary on Discovery+ with a subscription.

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Meredith G. White is the arts and culture reporter for the Shreveport Times. You can find her on Facebook as Meredith G. White, on Instagram and Twitter as @meredithgwhite, and email her at mgwhite@gannett.com.