Warning: spoilers for Scream 2022
Scream 2022 introduced a new Final Girl in Sam Carpenter, and her role in the movie as well as her family background make her the best Ghostface if the franchise decides to continue with Scream 6. Joining the ongoing trend of reboots/sequels (or requels, as referred to in the movie) is the Scream franchise, which after a decade without new movies is now back with a fifth installment simply titled Scream. Unlike other horror franchises, Scream 2022 doesn’t ignore the movies that came before, and it’s a proper sequel that also goes back to its roots with some big reveals related to characters from the original movie.
Set 25 years after the events of the first Scream movie, Scream 2022 takes viewers back to Woodsboro, where a new Ghostface killer has started a new murder spree. When her sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), is attacked, Sam (Melissa Barrera) returns to Woodsboro to look after her and find out who’s behind this new wave of murders. With Ghostface’s return, old secrets also come to light, more so as the killer begins to target those related to past killers and murder sprees. This also leads Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) to join forces one more time to discover who’s behind the mask and stop the murders, again.
The biggest reveal in Scream 2022 was that Sam is actually the daughter of Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), and that was also the reason why she left Woodsboro and became estranged from Tara. Sam struggled with hallucinations of Billy throughout the movie, and he showed up in the final act to encourage Tara to kill Richie (Jack Quaid), as he was about to kill her. Scream 2022 tied the new Final Girl to the original cast and most importantly to one of the original killers, so if Scream 6 is to happen, it should give the well-known narrative of the franchise a twist and make Sam the new Ghostface.
Even though the killer/killers are always revealed at the end of the Scream movies, there have been a number of theories over the years on a potential third (or second) killer or even one of the main three characters being a secret ally to the killer. For Scream 2022, for example, it was heavily theorized that Dewey was the new Ghostface or even Sidney, so for Scream 6, the franchise could have a twist in which its new Final Girl, Sam, is the new killer. Sam now has a taste for killing after stabbing Richie multiple times (which was a lot more violent than any of Sidney’s kills in the previous movies), which along with the ghost of Billy still haunting her could push her to the edge. Sam as Ghostface could make way for the return of another but different legacy character: Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), believed to still be alive, so Sam could go after him to bring the franchise to a full circle.
If Stu is indeed alive, then there’s a lot that Scream 6 (and future movies, if the franchise continues) can cover and there are also many questions to answer about him, and making him the target now rather than the killer one more time would be a different take on the Scream series while also making him pay for what he and Billy started. Surely, using Sam’s mental health as the drive for a killing spree as the new Ghostface is very delicate territory, but the writers behind Scream 2022 could definitely find a way to make it work and bring back another legacy character to tie one of the franchise’s biggest loose ends.