What marks Scream out as pretty much unique in the slasher genre is that every movie is also a whodunnit as the characters, and the audiences, never know who’s under the Ghostface mask this time around. With the series revitalized for a new decade with this January’s Scream reboot, the hunt to discover the identity — or identities — of the latest masked killer to slice their way through Woodsboro is back on.
With every Scream fan desperate to know the truth, the movie’s ending was kept top secret during production… which made things a little disorienting for the cast. While speaking with Bloody Disgusting, Jack Quaid revealed that he and his co-stars received various different versions of the script at first, meaning they were left guessing who the real killer was. Or even if their character would make it to the end of the film or not.
“In terms of my character… especially in the beginning of filming, we all got different scripts,” Quaid explained. “I was never really quite sure what the situation was. In some versions some characters die, in other versions other characters die. In some versions somebody’s the killer, in other versions someone else is the killer. It was like a big game of Among Us.”
Radio Silence directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who have taken over the franchise’s reins from the much-missed Wes Craven, have clearly learned from Scream‘s past here. 1997’s Scream 2 is infamously the first film to really suffer from internet leaks, with the full script ending up online during production. This forced the filmmakers to throw out that screenplay and develop a new one. Similar cloak and dagger tactics were also used on Scream 4, as the cast wasn’t allowed to read the script past page 75.
Well, after all that hard work to keep spoilers under wraps, the new Scream is out in theaters this weekend, so it’s time to find out who lives and who dies and who’s responsible for all of it. Early reviews have called it a “brutal” “masterpiece” and perhaps the best one since the original.