One of the most anticipated films of 2022 is the upcoming 5th installment of the Scream franchise and throughout the last couple months the killer marketing campaign for the film has taken many stabs at the 25 year legacy of the series. However, a new featurette released by HelloSidney.com that acts like a true crime documentary takes the nostalgic meta aspect that fans love from these films one step further.
The footage, which has various news reports throughout setting up Woodsboro’s current dyer situation, has Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers in character recapping the dark past of the town in a segment of her show “Tonight with Gale Weathers.” She talks about the 2 killers who started it all in 1996, Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, played by Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard in the original film and are credited in the video for creating the Ghostface persona. Gale then goes into how this spawned a series of copycat killers for the next 15 years which were seen in the prior 3 Scream sequels and that there has not been a “Ghostface killing spree” in over a decade.
However, that has quickly changed as more news reports are heard in the video describing a “mysterious cloaked figure” being seen in Woodsboro. Gale ends the video by inviting fans to join her to, “finally uncover the truth of the Woodsboro Murders”, which just so happens to be when the new Scream movie slashes its way into theaters.
In a marketing campaign that has included over a dozen posters and a handful of featurettes, this was probably one of the coolest pieces released thus far as it treated these fictional events as actual real life tragedies. Like another horror franchise The Blair Witch Project, Scream is once again blurring the line between fact and fiction. True crime documentaries are all the rage these days and, from the eerie music to the past series murders made to look like old crime scene photos, this featurette emulates the tone of that type of dark programming perfectly.
Gale has written a series of books based on the “true crime” events of the movies and this gruesome walk down memory lane taps into that while mirroring her news report that ended the original film. Lines heard in this ominous retelling like “real life scary movie” are even similar to classic quotes from the franchise. Also, since Scream’s original screenwriter Kevin Williamson was inspired by the real life murders of The Gainesville Ripper Case, this featurette adds an extra layer to this franchise’s meta goodness and brings the series full circle in an amusing way.
With a week to go till the film’s release, this slasher sequel’s story is still clouded in mystery with the filmmakers hiding a lot under Ghostface’s iconic mask. However, this new look into the film may hint at a legacy killer's involvement or it just very well may be some more classic misdirection from this hair raising franchise. You can watch the full blood soaked featurette down below as you anxiously wait to find out who is terrorizing Woodsboro once again when Scream releases in theaters on January 14.