Production of the long-awaited Scream 5 is finally underway, and some have said Matthew Lillard should join the returning cast members to reprise his role as Stu Macher from the original movie — here's why this is a great idea. Released in 1996, A Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven’s Scream was a smash hit slasher movie that immediately carved out a place for itself in horror cinema history. Inspired by a gruesome true story, Scream's innovative slasher send-up was a fresh and chilling slice of teen horror.
The film combined a witty meta-commentary on horror tropes with deadly serious (and deadly effective) scares and suspense, spawning countless imitators and a string of sequels of varying quality. Not content with revolutionizing horror via Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson revived the slasher movie concept and gave it a new, post-modern edge with this sleeper hit.
One element pivotal to Scream’s success was its cast, which included rising stars like Riverdale’s Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Scooby Doo's Matthew Lillard. It’s that last name which has come up concerning the forthcoming Scream 5, as Lillard talked recently about an interest in reprising his role from the first film. Many of the original cast members, including Arquette, Campbell, and Cox have already been signed on to Scream 5. In Scream, Lillard played class clown/secret serial killer and, by the end of the movie, his character seemed most definitely dead. After being revealed as one half of the film's murderous duo alongside Sidney's boyfriend Billy (Ulrich), Stu is seemingly killed after a tense chase by iconic final girl Sidney Prescott. Sidney was played by the actor's then-real-life girlfriend, Neve Campbell, which prompted Lillard's immortal ad-lib, “I always had a thing for ya, Sid”. But, if the character is supposedly dead, how could he return?
Lillard teased that he thinks Stu might not be dead in what may have been an innocent bit of trolling or just an off-the-cuff comment. However, fans of the original series will remember that the Scream movies never featured any explicitly supernatural elements, but repeatedly flirted with the idea. In one of a few redeeming scenes in the critically panned Scream 3, Sidney sees her mom's ghost before the specter is revealed—post-jump scare—to just be a dream, similar to the aural hallucinations she experiences later. Now that the franchise is in the hands of new directors and the series always trafficked in subverted expectations, it could be a good idea for Lillard’s character to return, as the actor teased.
After the initial shock, the creators could then pull a double subversion by revealing that Stu’s appearance is a dream/hallucination/flashback/another bit of narrative trickery. This maneuver could serve a double purpose, shocking the audience with a misdirect and then reassuring them that the series will stay grounded in ghost/monster-free reality. It’s the sort of self-referential wit the movies are known for, as evidenced in Scream 4’s infamous fake-out opening, and exactly the kind of expectation-subverting horror that the Scream 5 directors proved they can do with their 2019 hit, the horror satire Ready Or Not.