Matthew Lillard and Scott Foley Return for Scream 7
Ghostface is coming back, but not in the usual way. Scream 7 has been percolating for a while now, with the biggest news being that Neve Campbell would return as Sidney Prescott, the original heroine of the series and the greatest final girl of all time. Courteney Cox will also return as Gail Weathers, making Cox the only actress to appear in all seven Scream films. (Although Scream 5 and Scream 6 don’t really count because they’re awful and not about Sidney, but I guess she deserves something for powering through the dark days of the franchise – combat pay or some such.) Now, a couple of other actors from older Scream films are returning as well. First, Deadline exclusively reported that Scott Foley, who played movie-within-a-movie director Roman Bridger in Scream 3, will be back. Then, in another exclusive report, Deadline revealed that Matthew Lillard, who portrayed Stu Macher in the original Scream, will also return. Lillard posted confirmation of his participation in Scream 7 on his Instagram account:
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To talk about this, I’ll have to get into spoilers for Scream and Scream 3. I know they’re 29 and 25 years old, respectively, but these films are mysteries that are much better experienced if you don’t know anything, and I happen to love them, so just in case anyone hasn’t seen them:
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In Scream, Stu Macher was the killer, or one of them; he and Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis, Sidney’s boyfriend, took turns being Ghostface, killing various teens and one principal-amundo, with Sidney as their main target. (When you rewatch it, you pick up on lots of clues that suggest why the victims were chosen and who killed whom; Scream is such a great movie.) After they were revealed as the villains, Sidney outwitted and ultimately killed them as they chased her around Stu’s house, with Sidney finishing off Stu by dropping a TV on his head (while it was playing Halloween!) and electrocuting him. Likewise, Roman Bridger was the killer in Scream 3 – the sole killer, the only time in the franchise where Ghostface wasn’t two people. Roman was Sidney’s long-lost half-brother who was abandoned when she returned to Woodsboro after a sojourn in Hollywood, where she had a run-in with a producer who totally wasn’t supposed to be Harvey Weinstein and his depraved fellow scumbags. Roman was the secret mastermind behind Billy and Stu’s murder spree, letting Billy know about the incident that set him off and mentoring him in the art of murder. (I like Scream 3, but it has some problems, mostly because Ehren Kruger took over writing duties from series creator Kevin Williamson.) Roman was killed as well when Dewey Riley (David Arquette, whom the idiots who made Scream 5 killed off) shot him in the head… eventually, after wasting almost a whole magazine firing into a bulletproof vest.
You see the confusion here, right? Both of these characters are dead, so unless they do something really stupid (which I wouldn’t put past the post-Wes Craven portion of the franchise), Stu and Roman’s appearances will have to be dreams, flashbacks, or some other method of bringing back dead characters. As Deadline mentions, Scream 6 did this with Skeet Ulrich, having him play Billy Loomis in the hallucinations of the awful character with whom they tried to replace Sidney (who was Billy’s long-lost daughter, because sure.) But this is me operating on the assumption that Scream 7 won’t just resurrect a ton of dead characters, which may be giving the filmmakers too much credit. This series has already decided that Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby Reed didn’t really die in Scream 4 and is now an FBI agent, so they’re happy to bring back dead characters and do dumb things with them. And the writers of the last two trash heaps, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, are back this time, so despite Kevin Williamson directing, I don’t have much faith that this will be a return to Scream’s glory days.
Let us know what you think of Matthew Lillard and Scott Foley returning for Scream 7 in the comments!
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