Foreshadowing / Scream

Films

Scream (1996)

• When Casey sees Steve tied to the chair outside, he looks first to his right, then to his left. Because there's actually two killers, one standing on each side of him outside of Casey's view.
• When Casey's parents return home, they notice that the front door is slightly ajar. This hints at there being multiple killers because the killer Casey saw entered through the broken patio doors.
• In the beginning of the film when Billy and Sidney discuss their relationship, a cover of "Don't Fear the Reaper" is playing, which is rather fitting because Ghostface's costume in-universe is known as the Father Death costume.
• When Sidney asks how it’s possible to gut someone, ominous music plays as Stu explains the process in graphic detail. Billy then gives him a disapproving look afterwards and later, shoots him another one during his “liver alone” joke. This foreshadows that Stu and Billy are the killers, and that there are two of them.
• It happens pretty early on, but after Ghostface mysteriously disappears, Billy conveniently happens to be going in Sidney's window, and Dewey also finds the mask nearby. At this point in time, it was Stu as Ghostface, but the timing is impeccable and too convenient to not have been set up.
• Billy's talk with Sidney right after being jailed is rather pointed as well. "I was in jail, I couldn't have done it, remember?"
• Gale Weathers states that she thinks that Cotton Weary was framed for murdering Sidney's mother. Turns out she's right; Billy and Stu did it.
• In the video store, Randy correctly states that Billy is the top suspect and that Sidney's dad is the Red Herring. Not only that, he calls Stu a "little lapdog" when he's the accomplice to Billy's rampage. In addition, scary music plays when Billy and Stu gang up on Randy.
• Stu celebrates the closure of the school after the principal is murdered, though that was not the reason classes were postponed in the first place.
• Tatum admits to Sidney that the Slut-Shaming rumors about her mother go further back than Cotton Weary and that there was talk about other men. She even speculates that it might have been because Sidney's father was always out of town, or that she was just a very unhappy woman. She's proven right in two out of three. Her mother wasn't just having an affair with Cotton Weary, but Billy's father, which caused his parents' separation. The third movie proves that she was indeed a very unhappy woman.
• After the rules speech, Stu's mocking "I'll be right back!" and Randy's response "I'll see you in the kitchen, with a knife!" foreshadow that Stu is able to break Randy's rules for survival because he's a killer. And guess what he's holding in what room a short time later?
  • An even smarter one with the same sentence. Stu was going to "be right back!" after he grabbed some beers from the garage. Given this was the location where Tatum was very recently killed, and that Stu didn't feel like her fresh corpse hanging from the doors was worthy of a mention, this foreshadows both that there is more than one killer, and that Stu is one of them.
  • And finally: the fact that Stu says "I'll be right back!" not once but twice foreshadows that he's going to be pushing up daisies before the credits roll, albeit delayed somewhat.
• The serial killer has an obsession with horror movies, right? Billy, before the sex scene, compares Sidney's situation to The Silence of the Lambs, a horror movie which spawned the Psychological Thriller genre, and also says, "It's all just a movie."
• When Principal Himbry catches the pranksters wearing the Ghostface masks, he unmasks two kids.
• At one point, Stu grabs Tatum and puts her on his shoulder. Unable to escape, she has one arm over Stu's shoulder and her other arm trapped behind Stu's other shoulder, which is uncannily the same position Tatum is found in when she dies.
• Before Randy explains the "rules", he pauses Halloween (1978) at the exact point when Michael raises his knife to stab Bob. Throughout his explanation of the slasher rules, Randy stands in front of the television with Michael's knife pointed ominously at his back. This foreshadows a later scene in which Ghostface raises his knife to stab Randy in the back but stops midway through his attack, allowing Randy to survive.
• In an example that wouldn't be paid off until the fifth film, you can see Billy in a split-second clip talking with a couple of random girls in the video store. It's a very subtle hint that he's probably not a faithful boyfriend to Sidney. His activities with other girls is given payoff in the form of Sam Carpenter, his daughter who takes over as the protagonist of the series starting with the fifth film.
• Tatum's death has shades of this. First, the song that plays before Tatum enters the garage is "Drop Dead Gorgeous". Second, Tatum upon entering the garage immediately activates the garage door for light, and the camera notably has a lingering shot on the garage door and its smaller cat flap.
• Done with an actual thirty-second delay (but only five for the audience) when Sidney and Kenny the cameraman are watching surveillance footage of the party and notice Ghostface creeping up on Randy. Kenny starts to head out of the van to warn him, but sees the front door open and remembers the delay just in time for Ghostface to appear and slit his throat.

Scream 2

• In Randy's conversation with Dewey, Randy correctly guesses that Derek is the Red Herring and that Mickey is a good fit for the killer, although he drops the latter guess because he and Mickey are both obsessed film students, making them not so different.
• After theorizing that the new Ghostface is trying to do something new, Randy suggests that Hallie, a black woman, is the killer because slasher villains are usually white men, so Hallie as the killer would be a twist to the usual standards while staying within the slasher rules since "Mrs. Voorhees was a terrific serial killer". By citing Mrs. Voorhees, Randy also unintentionally predicts that the new killer is the mother of one of the previous killers.
  • There's also a further reference to Friday the 13th (1980) that foreshadows the twist when the drunk sister talking to Cici says "killkillkilldiediedie" on the phone, mimicking Jason's leitmotif from the franchise. And the killer is the grieving mother, like Pamela Voorhees in the first Friday the 13th (1980).
• Randy also speculates that Gale is the killer, reasoning that a copycat massacre would provide material for a new book and that news reporters stage the news. Gale is not the killer, but news reporter Debbie Salt is indeed the new Ghostface and is framing the new Ghostface rampage as the work of a fame-hungry copycat instead of a vengeful mother.
• When Ghostface calls Sidney, he asks if she remembers him. While one may assume that the new killer is speaking figuratively to describe the return of Ghostface, it turns out to be a Literal Metaphor since the caller is Mrs. Loomis, a forgotten figure from Sidney's past.
• Randy states at one point in film class within earshot of Mickey, "I'd let the geek get the girl." Later in the film, Ghostface taunts Randy by stating that Randy will never get the girl.
• Debbie Salt remarks that if the killer is repeating Woodsboro, the killer could be from Woodsboro.
  • Another one: After Debbie Salt introduces herself as the "one in the front row, asking all the questions" at Gale's seminar, Gale snidely remarks that she thought Salt looked familiar. Later on when Salt is revealed to be Billy's mother, Gale says that she's seen photos of Mrs. Loomis, but didn't recognize her.
• In the film class scene, Mickey argues that violence in film inspires violence in real life; furthermore, he contends that movie sequels can be superior to the original when Randy scoffs at the idea of someone making a real life sequel to the Stab movie. Later, when revealed as the killer, Mickey tells Sidney that when he goes on trial, his defense would be to blame the movies.
• A minor example would be the Woodsboro survivors' argument over the motive of the recent murders. Initially, Gale and Dewey believe the the murders to be a copycat crime due to the Significant Name Overlap of the first three victims from both the original Ghostface murders and the new copycat murders. However, the attack on Sidney prompts Dewey to point out the inconsistency and Randy to note that the killer is "trying to finish what was started". This is due to the two killers' different motives for the murders.
• In the sneak preview for Stab, "Billy" reiterates to "Sidney" that his mother left his family, as a subtle As You Know clue for viewers who have not seen the first movie or might have forgotten about Billy's mother. So subtle to the point that it's one of the most brilliant examples of foreshadowing ever.
• Mickey carries a camcorder around early on, and at one point, Derek informs Sid that Mickey "had to edit". This becomes important later on when it is revealed that the killer recorded the victims.
• When Randy speaks with the new Ghostface on the phone, he angrily asks if the copycat killer is trying to become an infamous murderer like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and O. J. Simpson. Indeed, this turns out to be Mickey's objective as the killer, and Mickey later talks about how he will hire members of Simpson's Dream Team to help him get a lighter sentence or possibly an acquittal.
• Likewise, in his talk with Ghostface, Randy calls Billy a Momma's Boy, yet another reference to the lead Ghostface's identity.
• After Randy dies, Dewey tells Sidney that he already broke the bad news to Randy's mother.
• Sidney plays Cassandra in a theater play. In a twist, Cassandra is Derek rather than Sidney, and ironically it's Sidney who doesn't believe Derek.
• When Dewey goes against Gale's idea of figuring out Ghostface's kill pattern, Gale angrily asks him if they should "wait and see who drops next". She says this immediately before Randy answers a call from Ghostface and becomes Ghostface's next victim.
• Sidney distracts Ghostface by asking "Isn't Mickey supposed to be dead?" Minutes later, when Sidney and Gale question if Nancy is truly dead, the Not Quite Dead Mickey pops back up for one last scare.

Scream 3

• The sudden appearance of Randy's previously unmentioned sister foreshadows the sudden appearance of Sidney's previously unmentioned half-brother as the killer.
  • Likewise, in Randy's videotape, Randy talks about trilogies and how "true trilogies" are about going back to the beginning and discovering something that wasn't true from the get-go. When he notes examples of "true trilogies", he uses Return of the Jedi, the film in which Luke discovers that he has a secret sibling, and The Godfather Part III, the film that revealed that Sonny Corleone had an illegitimate son. This point is driven even further home with the cameo of Carrie Fisher, who appears as an actress who nearly got the Princess Leia role.
• Milton admits to Gale that Maureen Prescott may have been raped at one of his parties. He was right, since the killer is one of Maureen's own children, a Child by Rape.
• About halfway through the film, Jennifer is worried that she'll die next because Gale Weathers - whom she's playing - dies following Sarah Darling's character Candy in the script. However, she reveals before her murder to Ghostface that Gale was the killer of Stab 3, implying she faked her death. This Ghostface, Roman, faked his death in order to throw the group off his scent.

Scream 4

• The movie begins with two false openings and thus ends with two false endings.
• As a name, Jill is very similar to Billy, give or take a few letters. As a character, Jill is the remake vrsion of Billy, give or take a few differences.
• Early on, Jill warns Kirby not to talk about Sidney in front of her mother since Sidney's fame is her mother's Berserk Button. Later, after Jill unmasks herself as the killer, Jill reveals that she has a similar Berserk Button as she complains how her familial relation to Sidney means that she will always be overshadowed by her more famous cousin.
• Jill puts the speaker on when Ghostface calls her in the car. Since she's the other killer, it wouldn't make a lot of sense if she continued the call on her own but letting Kirby and Olivia hear it to "confirm" her innocence does.
• A lot of Ghostface's conversations with Sidney fall into this. In the first call, he taunts Sidney by asking her if she still thinks she's the star of Ghostface's new "movie". In the second call, he talks about how important family is after Sidney angrily asks for Ghostface's motive.
• Charlie calls Sidney "the star", the same words Ghostface uses to taunt Sidney.
• Charlie hosts a party while there is a killer on the loose to parallel Stu's party in the first Woodsboro killing spree.
• At the afterparty, Charlie tests Kirby's horror movie knowledge as preparation for a second, more deadly horror movie quiz.
• When Trevor meets everyone else at Kirby's house, his clothing is similar to that of Neil Prescott when Neil is revealed as the scapegoat in the original film.
• Between the Stabathon and the afterparty, Jill messages Kirby that her mother is driving her crazy in order for Kirby to pick her up and bring her to her house for the next wave of deaths. Thing is, Kate doesn't get back from the store until after Jill leaves, subtly indicating that Jill is lying about her reasons for wanting to rejoin the others.
• In the classroom, when the students get the text message informing them of Jenny and Marnie's death, Jill doesn't reach for her phone. Because she already knows what happened.
• Ghostface talks about Peeping Tom and how said movie told its story through the killer's point of view. This is because Peeping Tom featured a Villain Protagonist as its most important character.
• Ghostface tells Rebecca that he intends to send a message to Sidney by killing her. Later, Jill brings up Rebecca's death when having a personal talk with Sidney.
• When Olivia arrives home, Kirby calls her, inviting her to Jill's house. Olivia turns it down after hearing Sidney is staying at Jill's house because Sidney is the "Angel of Death". A little later, Kirby tells Jill that Olivia fears the reaper. Olivia soon becomes Ghostface's next victim.
• Sidney tells Jill to hide under the bed and wait for Sidney to get her, but when Sidney comes back for Jill, she's missing. There's a reason for that.

Scream (2022)

• When Ghostface calls Tara, he pretends to be her mother's friend from an unspecified drug addict group, to which Tara asks if he's from Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. Later, Richie and Amber reveal that they know Sam's familial link to Billy Loomis because Mrs. Carpenter said some things while drunk at a bar.
• When explaining the rules, Dewey correctly assumes that Richie is the killer since he is the protagonist's suspicious boyfriend. Normally, it would be easy to dismiss Dewey's guess since his reasoning only applies to the first Ghostface, but Mindy indirectly backs up Dewey by noting that a requel will follow the original film's structure for nostalgia points.
• There's something fishy about Ghostface's threat in the opening. He sends Tara a video of him watching Amber and threatens to kill her if Tara loses his "Stab" trivia game. However, he sends Tara a video file, meaning that he's not really watching Amber, because if it was a live feed, he would have most likely started a video call or sent a link instead of a whole file, and the video would also have some sort of watermark indicating that it was recording live. Furthermore, Amber is revealed to be alive after the opening; since when has Ghostface ever let their target live after failure to win one of their games?
• Richie claims to have never seen the Stab films, which is meant to indicate Genre Blindness in regard to slasher movies. However, Richie also makes meaningful allusions to Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th and watches a YouTube video bashing Stab 8, which foreshadows that the Genre Blindness is an Informed Flaw.
• After meeting Dewey for the first time, Richie says that he's much nicer in the Stab movies than in real life, despite having earlier claimed to have never seen any of them.
• Richie's interest in a video insulting Stab 8 gives away his and Amber's motive in conducting a new murder spree.
• In one of her hallucinations, Billy tells Sam to let loose and “cut some throats”. By the end of the film, Sam has finished off one of the Ghostfaces, Richie, by cutting his throat.
• When Ghostface calls Sam, the caller ID on her phone guesses that it could be Amber instead. Apparently, the number might have belonged to her after all.
• When they attack Tara at the hospital, Ghostface verbally berates Sam for being a "selfish bitch," saying that she doesn't care about her sister's life. Earlier, Amber had cited Sam's "selfishness" as a reason for their distrust of her, supposedly out of concern for Tara's well-being.
• Amber, like Stu, hosts a party while a killer is on the loose.
• Richie says that he'll "be right back" before getting a beer like Stu.
• Ghostface attacks Mindy while the latter is watching the Stab recreation of Ghostface sneaking up on a similarly distracted Randy. In the original Scream, Randy survives that very exact scene, meaning that his niece is going to pull through too.
• The Stab 8 Ghostface uses a flamethrower as a new weapon. The new Ghostfaces hate Stab 8 for diverging from the formula, and Gale and Sidney use fire to severely injure Amber.
• A subtle one. All of the new major characters have either established (Sam, Chad, Mindy, Wes, Vince), tangential (Tara being the sister of Sam, the daughter of Billy Loomis), or possible connections (Liv having the same surname as Casey Becker’s neighbors) to characters involved in the two previous Woodsboro killing sprees, with the exceptions of Richie and Amber. Guess who the killers are.
• Amber claims to like elevated horror movies, even stating "Jordan Peele fucking rules". The problem is that the movie playing at her party is Stab instead of something like It Follows or Get Out (2017).
• After Mindy deduces that Ghostface is going after people related to the legacy characters, everyone else looks at Dewey, who is related to Tatum. That said, Ghostface kills three more people before finally murdering Dewey.
• The Ghostface killer is brutally efficient, using surprise and fear in order to kill their victims. This because most of the murders were done by Amber, a 5'3" petite high school girl, who can't overpower most of her victims. It would make sense that she would need to sneak up on most of them, as well as take advantage of their fear-stricken states. While it may seem improbable that she's able to take Dewey by surprise and overpowers him, that can be handwaved by Dewey being practically disabled at this point from surviving so many stabbings.
• Sam’s first hallucination of Billy Loomis at the hospital immediately leads to the revelation that Billy is her biological father.
• Richie limps down the stairs like Billy immediately before revealing himself as the killer.

Scream VI

• Unlike previous Ghostfaces, who are all obsessed with horror films, this film’s Ghostface outright yells “Who gives a fuck about movies?!” and is shown to be far more interested in getting to the point with killing their victims rather than toying with them first, using firearms in-costume and forgoing questions about scary movies altogether. The Bailey family’s motive is less about creating a real-life horror film and more about getting revenge for the death of Richie, their son/brother. In particular, Detective Bailey doesn’t care for horror movies themselves, though acknowledged his late son Richie’s interests, and only used the Ghostface moniker to make it easier to frame Sam for the new killings.
• Quinn mentions that she had a brother who recently died and their father became overprotective afterwards, having moved to New York after she got accepted into college. Said brother was Richie Kirsch, one of the Ghostfaces from the previous film.
• Danny sees the killer in Quinn’s room, somehow having gotten into their apartment. Considering Quinn is one of the Ghostfaces, it is pretty clear who let them in.
• It's very easy to miss (and may have even been unintentional), but Quinn's body moves after her supposed death. It seems that she wanted a better look at Anika getting stabbed.
• Additionally, Quinn fails to notice Ghostface is in her room, seemingly distracted by a phone conversation. As it turns out, she didn’t have anything to worry about.
• Meta-example. Most of the major characters who die in the franchise are usually killed onscreen. Here, major character Quinn is Killed Offscreen with only a video documenting the kill and her body getting thrown on Mindy and Anika as they try to escape. Quinn is actually faking her death with the help of Ghostface, and in the chaos of the assault in the apartment, none of the group members have any time to really check for signs of life on Quinn.
• Tara mentions that Quinn became her and Sam’s roommate as the result of an anonymous advertisement. So did Ethan, who mentions that the ads could get hacked into online.
• Related to the above, Mindy points out that anyone can hack into online advertisements. Ethan later confirms this was the case.
• The killer first contacts Sam and Tara via calling them from Richie Kirsch’s cell, indicating the person whom the Ghostfaces are avenging.
• During Mindy’s speech about requel rules, Quinn points out that she and the other Woodsboro survivors could be potential suspects as well, which Ethan quickly agrees with. This is not only to drive attention away from herself and Ethan, but also place it on Sam — whom they intend to frame for their murders; Bailey later uses the same reasoning to convince Sam that Kirby is one of the killers, buying himself the element of surprise during the climax.
• After Quinn dies, Detective Bailey tells Sam and Tara that anyone who fucks with his family will die. He specifically eyes Sam when he says this — which makes sense as he holds Sam responsible for his eldest son Richie’s death a year before and wants her dead as a result.
• Sam tells Bailey of her alibi, that she was with her therapist during the double murder of Jason and Greg and gives Bailey his info and address. Not shortly after, Dr. Stone is killed by Ghostface in his home and Sam's files are stolen. Bailey was the only likely suspect as he had the therapist's location literally handed to him, and no one else except possibly Kirby would have known this information.
• Bailey shows to Sam and Tara a video of the former reacting badly to a bunch of college girls’ accusations about her. It’s later used to demonize her in the media, which was part of Bailey’s plan.
• Mindy's rule-explaining monologue specifically mentions how similar the setting makes things to Scream 2. Just like that movie's main Ghostface was Mrs. Loomis, seeking to avenge her villainous son's death in the first movie, the killers this time around are Richie's family avenging his death in Scream (2022).
  • Further allusions to Scream 2 can be found in Jason and Greg turning out to be crazy accomplices to the revenge scheme who are subsequently killed by said vengeful parent, similar to Mickey in Scream 2, but this time they are betrayed in the opening rather than the ending. Fitting to this reversal, the ending takes place in a movie theater as a Stab movie plays on the projector (in this case, Richie's Stab fanfilm), similar to Scream 2's famous opening scene. Furthermore, there is a scene where Mindy is attacked in public in full view of other people but nobody recognizes that she's being attacked, in a scene that strongly parallels her uncle's death in Scream 2, as well as Maureen Evans' death in that movie. However, this time, the Meeks family member is not actually killed from this. In addition, the film also features an Understanding Boyfriend who tries to do his best to help the main characters while still acknowledging the odds of him being suspected as the killer and keeping his distance for exactly that reason. The main difference is that Danny lives while Derek doesn't.
• In the opening sequence, as "Greg" talks to Jason on the phone in his apartment, Jason's suspicions start to grow and they aren't alleviated until he asks Greg where they met and Greg answers correctly: 8 years ago, in junior high. Such information wouldn't be easy for the general public to get, but a police detective would have no problem by running background checks.
• Kirby is floored at how Gale managed to find the theatre shrine when she couldn’t find it in Jason and Greg’s financial accounts despite working on their case for a while. In reality, it’s Detective Bailey who moved the shrine to the theatre and afterwards put it in the duo’s names to cover up his tracks.
• Kirby and Mindy make special note of the TV that killed Stu while looking through the shrine. Kirby later uses it to kill the final living Ghostface, Ethan.
• For the subway scene, everyone in the group is freaked out by all the Ghostface costumes around them, since they could be the killer. Everyone except Ethan, that is. Why? He doesn't have anything to worry about.
• Of the cheeky meta gag/Dramatic Irony type. Dr. Stone is sitting in his home, watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) on TV. There's a knock on his door just as a character on the TV screams, "They're here already! You're next, you're next!" You can guess just who is at the door for Dr. Stone.

TV Series

Scream: TV Series

• In the pilot episode, Noah explains to Riley how slasher TV shows use the personal lives of their characters to make you care about them so that it'll hurt when they get murdered. Two episodes later, Riley get killed by Ghostface and Noah is very heartbroken about it.
• At the start of "Betrayed", Emma has a nightmare in which Ghostface kidnaps Kieran to get to her. At the end of the episode, Emma's other Love Interest, Will, is kidnapped by Ghostface as part of his latest 'game' for Emma.
• Early in the series, Jake and Will have a discussion about collecting the money from Nina and Tyler's blackmail operation. The camera lingers on the tractor Will is piloting. In "In the Trenches", Will is hooked up to a similar device and hacked to pieces.