“Twenty-five years after the original series of murders in Woodsboro, a new Ghostface emerges, and Sidney Prescott must return to uncover the truth,” summarizes IMDb. 11 years after the most recent part of the series, Scream 4, a new movie comes out to continue the original story from 1996. 

     Junior Haley Ferran says that she was looking forward to this new addition to the series, “at the end of 2021 when I had seen trailers and movie posters coming out for it, I knew I had to go see it.” The new addition being titled Scream instead of “Scream 5” keeps its connection to the legacy characters but “keeps its own voice,” states Brian Tallerico, managing editor for RogerEbert. 

     Tallerico elaborates the inclusion of hallucinations of a character from the original movie but adds  “that [the hallucinations] have some dodgy CGI that make them less effective than they probably were on paper.” Ferran also comments on this saying that the editing was “bad” but that she liked the original idea for including this original character. The editing of actor Skeet Ulrich was done to make it look like he did in the original 1996 film, “it looks like Ulrich has not aged a day in 25 years,” according to Shane Romanchick of Collider. 

     The typical theme of finding who killed the citizens of Woodsboro takes place, “always someone in the friend group” says Ferran. However, Scream took notes from the original by utilizing not one but two killers. “This one had me confused on who the killer(s) were, I was convinced it was just one of the friends,” adds Ferran. 

     The killers are revealed, true to character, at the very end. Although it was two characters, the reveal was lacking according to Benjamin Lee of the Guardian, “when killer number one is revealed – Amber – it’s met with an “Oh … that one” shrug and then in yet another callback, killer number two is unmasked – Richie, the scream queen’s boyfriend turning evil once again.”

     The “big death” was the end of the beloved legacy character Dewey, says Lee. Ferran remarks that the death of this core character was shocking because “they [the original characters] have been in so many movies that I believed they [the creators] were never going to kill off one of the original characters.” Lee describes the scene as “gnarlier than usual” due to the “hospital corridor slaying that sees the killer stab Dewey in both his front and back simultaneously, creepily bragging that “it’s an honor” to be the one who gets to murder someone so infamous.”