For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our interview with writers James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick about scripting Scream VI from Backstory Magazine’s issue 49 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick on the twists and kills in the latest entry of the legendary horror franchise
By Danny Munso
During postproduction on 2022’s Scream—the horror franchise’s fifth film and the first in over a decade—its writers, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, began to plot the next entry. Their script for the fifth Scream film was reverential, both to the iconic characters portrayed by actors Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette and the series’ shepherds, writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, the latter who passed away in 2015. So when the time came to design the sixth installment, the scribes decided to break the mold. “Our thinking was that it was time to take some big swings,” Busick says. “It’s time to do something really different. 5 was about reminding the audience what Scream is and why it’s cool and really paying homage to the first film and honoring what Kevin and Wes had created. We felt we did a good job with that but that it was time to do something that was a little more ours.”
Scream VI is more than just an improvement on the last film. It’s one of the best entrants in the entire franchise and gives new life to the series in numerous ways. A large part of that can be chalked up to the first big chance taken by Vanderbilt and Busick: moving the franchise out of the small town of Woodsboro, California—the setting for the majority of the films—and into New York City, an urban playground Ghostface never had before. “New York happened very early in the process,” Vanderbilt says. “We loved the idea of getting out of Woodsboro and the idea of all of them leaving the scene of the crime and getting out of the place where bad things happened. That was really appealing to us, and it immediately inspired, Oh, we could do this or this. It inspired certain possibilities for sequences. About five seconds after saying New York, we looked at each other and said, ‘Subway!’”
As with the 2022 film, Scream VI focuses on Samantha Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) and her younger sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), the latter of whom in New York to attend college with her twin friends—and fellow Ghostface survivors—Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding). Sam has become the subject of online conspiracy theories that she was actually the perpetrator behind the crimes that occurred in the previous film while also dealing with Tara’s desire for independence and her insistence on forgetting the trauma they endured. The quartet soon realize a new Ghostface killer—or killers, as it is a Scream film after all—has followed them to New York, and this one has a flair for history, leaving behind the masks of previous Woodsboro killers at the scene of each death. They partner with allies from the franchise’s past, among them Gale Weathers (Cox) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), a survivor of the fourth film who is now an FBI agent. Thanks to the Big Apple setting, Ghostface terrorizes our heroes in a bevy of such new locations as a small city bodega and, yes, a crowded subway car.
The writing process for Scream VI was the same as the previous film. Vanderbilt and Busick make notes individually about characters, scenes, themes and other things they would like to work into the film, and then they meet to share ideas—ones that, it turns out, aren’t very different. “It’s crazy because 90 percent of the time, they’re the same thoughts,” Vanderbilt says of his compadre. “Guy and I have known each other as friends for almost 25 years, and we’ve read each other’s stuff for years and years. We sort of share a Scream brain.” From there, the pair craft a treatment and receive input from the film’s directors, their longtime collaborators Matt Bettinelli-Opin and Tyler Gillet. Upon approval of the treatment from Spyglass Media Group, which owns the rights to the franchise, they split up the scenes to write individually before swapping them for rewrites. “There are certain scenes we gravitate to on the first draft, then we end up rewriting everything and making it all tighter. It’s a very give-and-take process in a really great way.”
One of the first ideas the two had for the Scream VI script is the film’s opening scene. Scream as a whole is known for its iconic opening kills, none more famous than Drew Barrymore’s cameo in the franchise’s first film. This opening might rank just behind that because of their willingness to try something new. The first few minutes play out like a standard Scream kill: a film professor (Samara Weaving) receives a phone call while waiting for a date and is lured into an alley, where she is killed by Ghostface. What comes next is decidedly not standard: Ghostface removes his mask and reveals himself. He’s a guy named Jason (Tony Revolori), and we follow him back to his apartment, only to learn he’s a friend of Tara and that he and his roommate are planning the next series of Ghostface kills. That’s when Jason gets a call from another Ghostface. He thinks it’s his roommate pranking him, but it’s actually the real killer, who dispatches Jason. The sequence is almost 15 minutes and nothing like what had ever been done in the Scream universe. And that’s exactly what appealed to the writers. “It’s one of the things I’m proudest of that we pulled off,” Busick says. “It was part of wanting to see something different. Once he takes his mask off and we’re following him, we want the audience to be wondering, What is this movie? Why are we following the killer? Is it going to be from his perspective? Then to see him come home and get that phone call excited us because we hadn’t seen that before.”
The New York setting heightens the surprise of the scene, particularly since the previous opening kills mostly took place in remote areas. “We really loved the idea of starting with the first shot of someone in a crowded restaurant,” Vanderbilt says. “Is this person the victim? How are they going to become a victim if they’re surrounded by a hundred people? That was really interesting to us.” The scene is made more special by the inclusion of Weaving, who played the lead in the phenomenal 2019 horror film Ready or Not, which was co-written by Busick, produced by Vanderbilt and directed by Bettinelli-Opin and Gillett. “Matt and Tyler called Samara and pitched it to her as, ‘Do you want to be Drew Barrymore for a few minutes?’ It was really fun.” This was the first scene they penned for the film and also the only one in the entire script that the writers split between them in crafting the first draft, with Vanderbilt handling the first kill and Busick taking the apartment section. “Normally we do a little pass on each other’s scenes, but after we swapped, we really didn’t touch each other’s stuff on that scene. I didn’t have any desire to mess with what he’d done, and he left mine alone, so we knew we were off to a good start.”
One of the many features of the Scream series that sets it apart from others in its genre is while other horror classics are all about the killer, this has always been about the survivors. With a new set of killers in each film, the stars of this franchise are those left behind who get bloodied up along the way but thwart Ghostface time and time again. That’s why, as important as the kill scenes are, Vanderbilt and Busick took special care in crafting the emotional spine of the film: the relationship between new leads Sam and Tara. “We loved the sister story in 5, and we felt it was a very natural progression to go from two siblings who were estranged in that film,” Vanderbilt says. “Now a year later, it would make sense that the older one is overbearing and hovering on the younger one to try and make up for lost time. Really early on, we came up with the line [spoken by Tara] where she says, ‘You’ve been out of my life for five years, and now you can’t leave me alone for five seconds.’ That felt real to us. Even though it’s a Scream movie and it’s heightened and there are killers running around, there has to be something emotionally relatable in it, too. So if we tell this story of two siblings trying to work out the differences in their relationship in the midst of all this, it will feel real.” That extends to twins Mindy and Chad, whom the audience gets to know a lot better in VI, cementing the passing of the baton to this new quartet. There is a genuinely touching scene set in Sam and Tara’s apartment where the four are at a table and Chad labels them the “core four” for all they have been through. It is Scream, though, so such a tender moment can only last so long. “That scene wasn’t there for a few drafts, and once we put that in, it felt like the right place for it,” Busick says. “Of course, what the characters don’t know as they’re bonding is that the killer is in their apartment in the next room, so you get to undermine the sweetness almost immediately.”
Scream VI also continues the franchise’s running commentary on popular culture with the prescient subplot of Sam becoming the subject of Internet conspiracy theories that she was actually the mastermind behind the Woodsboro killings of the last film. “Scream is always in conversation with pop culture and just culture in general,” Vanderbilt says. “We loved the idea that people online would think, Actually, maybe she did it. Maybe it was a false flag operation. We’re not getting the full story. That felt very 2023 to us. There’s some meta conversation going on in there about where we are culturally, not in a hit-you-over-the-head way, hopefully, but in a way that feels realistic to our times.” The idea that some would blame Sam for the murders was there from the first draft, but halfway through the process the writers really upped the conspiracy theory angle and came up with the Scream VI killers being the ones who started the rumors about Sam in the first place to try and ruin her life. “Once we really leaned into it, it felt right—commenting on how you can destroy anyone’s good name and that people are ready to believe the worst about you,” Busick says. “It just takes the right doctored footage or theory, and you’re vilified and your reputation’s ruined. Everyone would have a theory about what happened in Woodsboro last year, and it all wouldn’t be kind to our heroes. So let’s have the killers weaponize conspiracy culture so they can pin all the murders on this poor girl.”
In addition to Cox’s Gale—the only character to appear in all six films—this entry sees the return of Kirby, a supporting character from Scream 4 whose fate was up in the air at its conclusion. When plotting possibilities for the fifth film, the writers took their cue from Wes Craven himself as to whether Kirby was on the table for future films. “Wes says on the Scream 4 audio commentary that in the last shot, she is still moving and he thinks she’s not really dead,” Vanderbilt says. “So that was permission from the master to mess with that little bit.” There was talk of Kirby being a part of the fifth film but Panettiere was taking a break from acting and they admit there wasn’t really room for the character in that script anyway. But Panettiere loves the franchise and allowed the team to put a small Easter egg in that film that hinted her character indeed did survive. When VI came along, Kirby was always part of the plan. “Because of the conversations we’d had with her already, we had a pretty good suspicion she would be open to coming back. So in writing her, [we asked] what makes the most sense and how can we fit her into this movie where it doesn’t feel like we’re jamming her in?”
The answer turned out to be a powerful one. Kirby ended up joining the FBI as a direct result of the trauma she incurred in Scream 4, a decision she eloquently describes in the film: “I didn’t want to be afraid of the monsters anymore. I wanted the monsters to be afraid of me.” That plot point was particularly pleasing for the writers. “We loved the idea—that this experience she had in 4 really sent her life in a different direction. I think we were all excited to see what Hayden could do with that.” Due to the script’s perfect plotting, the scribes even turn the tables briefly on Kirby, as there’s a five-minute stretch of the film where it truly appears she is one of the killers chasing after Sam and Tara. When Vanderbilt is asked about that thought, he can’t hide his giddiness: “Good! I talked to Kevin [Williamson] about this on the last movie, [and he said that] these are mysteries, so everyone has to look guilty at some point. That means we did our job correctly, so thank you.”
No conversation can be had about Scream VI without acknowledging who is not onscreen. Early on, Campbell bowed out due to what she felt was an unfair financial offer considering her importance to the franchise. While her issue is with the studios and not the creative team, who don’t hesitate to give her their full support, Campbell’s absence did throw a wrench into the writing process. Vanderbilt and Busick were several drafts in when they discovered she wouldn’t be returning to the iconic role of Sidney Prescott. “When it didn’t work out, it was disappointing, but we knew we had a strong story. We were able to focus in a little more on other characters and had a little more real estate,” Busick says. “I don’t think it changed anything structurally. Her role took place in a lot of the existing scenes that are in there.” That said, they acknowledge the open question of her inclusion in a seventh installment, which hasn’t officially been greenlit but, given Scream VI’s opening-weekend box office, feels like a fait accompli. “As a lifelong Scream fan, I miss Sidney and I love Sidney. We love Neve. I hope she is in a future Scream movie, and I hope we get to make it.”
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