Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Scream (2022) ahead!
The identity of the killer is the biggest mystery in any Scream movie, which made it surprising when Scream 2022 subtly gave a clue to its villain as early as the opening scene. While the Scream franchise has always indulged in subverting horror tropes and twisting the expectations of audience members, the movies are not immune to utilizing some hoary cliches. However, Scream’s 2022 reboot avoids one infamous horror trope and accidentally clued savvy audience members into the killer’s identity in the process.
Before the reboot’s release, many fan theories attempted to guess the identity of Scream 2022’s killers. The trailers were reportedly re-edited countless times to avoid giving away any clues and this tactic proved largely successful when the reboot arrived in cinemas in January 2022. However, a single suspect line gave away one of the two killers very early on in the film's action.
While not unrealistic, the “cloning cell phones” trope was always overused in the Scream series and was used as something of a screenwriter’s cop-out from time to time—a tactic that reached an infamously absurd zenith when Scream 3’s voice changer allowed the killer to somehow imitate any other character’s voice. Thus, when 2022’s Scream reboot saw the killer claim that they had cloned Amber’s phone when she left it “lying around” in the movie’s opening scene, some fans reasonably suspected this was a bluff. As a result, those viewers were unsurprised when it was revealed that Ghostface never actually cloned Amber’s phone, but instead was working with her.
While the line about cloning phones was not a complete giveaway (since earlier incarnations of Ghostface have successfully cloned cell phones), the fact that the killer was looking through the window of Amber’s house mere seconds before attacking Jenna Ortega’s Tara further aroused suspicion. Unless the killer was impossibly fast, the odds were pretty high that they sent a recording of Amber to Tara and passed it off as a live feed. However, what was even more obvious was the possibility that Amber was in on this plan and using her own phone to taunt Tara while Scream 2022’s other killer Richie did the attacking.
Many viewers may not have found anything about the phone cloning claim to be suspect, but given how often the Scream movies hide their killers in plain sight, the twist was surprisingly easy to guess. Amber’s collaboration with the killer was as likely as the killer cloning her phone, and the fact that she never seemed particularly dismayed or worried by the news that the killer had access to her phone was doubly suspicious. However, while it was relatively easy to guess Amber’s involvement in the villainous plot, her co-conspirator was far better hidden. Like 1996’s original Scream, Scream 2022 had a relatively predictable villain in Amber and a much better-hidden villain in Richie, the Matthew Lillard/ Stu Macher equivalent. A comic relief, Jack Quaid’s character was an unlikely villain where Amber was a more obvious one, allowing Scream 2022 to revisit the original twist from a fresh perspective.