Scream 6 Has Easter Eggs 'Baked Into The Plot' Like A Tasty But Deadly Cake

When Wes Craven's "Scream" hit theaters on December 20, 1996, The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote, "[I]n 'Scream' [Craven] wants things both ways, capitalizing on lurid material while undermining it with mocking humor. Not even horror fans who can answer all this film's knowing trivia questions may be fully comfortable with such an exploitative mix."

Turns out they were more than comfortable.

This isn't a swipe at Maslin. Critics miscall the zeitgeist all the time. In her defense, many people in Hollywood thought Dimension Pictures' Bob Weinstein was stretching the notion of counterprogramming well beyond the breaking point by releasing a slasher flick five days before Christmas. Also, the demand for slashers in 1996 was nearly nonexistent outside of the gorehound contingent (and even they were bored with the formula).

But Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson's meta take on the disreputable genre caught fire, spawning a full-scale slasher revival as well as a long-running franchise that, with 2022's "Scream" (the fifth installment in the series), has gone from commenting on the hack-'em-up rules of first-wave slashers to examining and expanding its own legacy. Fans turned out in droves, which means the new stewards of Williamson's universe — the directing team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, and the scripting duo of James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick — are doubling down on this approach with the forthcoming "Scream VI," to the extent that there is now a Ghostface shrine.

Introduced in the trailer by Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers (the only returning member of the original cast this time out), the shrine will clearly have major significance in the understanding and, one hopes, dispatching of the latest Ghostface. But what exactly is it, and who created it? Bettinelli-Olpin isn't saying, but he's happy to drop a hint or two.

As he said in an interview with SFX Magazine:

"The shrine is looking back to the previous crimes for sure, but the way it's worked into the script creates forward momentum. We had fun with the Easter eggs in the last film, but we didn't want to repeat ourselves this time. There was something so great in this one about putting the Easter eggs literally on display and baking them into the plot."

Gillet added:

"There's this mythologising of what Ghostface is and has been and that exists in this idea of the shrine. For us, certainly as fans of the franchise, it felt like there was a fun opportunity to continue to build the mythology around this character in this movie, so that it's this sort of omnipresent force."

The "Scream VI" trailer definitely introduces some new wrinkles, including something of a no-no for slasher purists in that this Ghostface uses, among his many other instruments of murder, a shotgun. There's also a sense of something supernatural going on here, though perhaps that's just a misdirect. All we know is that running from Ghostface in New York City on Halloween sounds downright terrifying. "Of course in a city of millions of people on Halloween, anybody could put that mask on," said Gillet.

We won't find out who it is until "Scream VI" bludgeons its way into theaters on March 10, 2023.