WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the opening of Scream VI.
As if the Scream franchise wasn’t already ridiculously self-aware, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence, are taking it to another level by referencing a past project of theirs within the Scream universe. We’d imagine that the idea was birthed from Samara Weaving‘s cameo performance in Scream VI as Laura Crane, a film studies professor who falls victim to Ghostface in the opening sequence in a callback to Drew Barrymore’s immediate death in 1996’s Scream.
In 2019, Radio Silence released Ready or Not, a comedy-horror starring Samara Weaving as Grace le Domas, a newly wed who finds herself fighting for her life on the night of her wedding after her husband’s family ritual involves hunting her down in a sadistic game of hide-and-seek. The film was praised to no end by critics and audiences alike, who particularly appreciated Weaving’s performance, Olpin and Gillett’s direction and the impeccable screenplay from Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy. Ready or Not grossed $57.6 million at the box office on a budget of just $6 million.
As far as Weaving’s cameo, although Laura meets her end sooner than we’d have liked, there’s an interesting little Easter egg later on that references her turn as Grace in Ready or Not. When the “Core Four” — Sam and Tara Carpenter and Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin — attempt to shake Ghostface loose by hiding in plain sight on public transport, their port of call ends up being the subway. As with most horrors, Scream VI is set around Halloween time, so the subway is jam-packed with locals dressed in scary get-ups. Among those, we get a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of a woman dressed as Grace le Domas walking down the stairs.
That same woman reappears briefly on the same train as the Core Four. In some sense, as Olpin and Gillett suggest, it’s as if Samara Weaving leaves her mark on Scream VI in more ways than one. In an interview with Indiewire, Gillett shared his enthusiasm for the clever nod to Weaving’s filmography and collaboration with Radio Silence.
“In a way, she’s in the movie twice, because there is a woman in a Grace cosplay in the subway scene. It was nice to have that little nod as well.”
It might not be a groundbreaking revelation, but fans of Weaving and Ready or Not in particular will be thrilled to catch a glimpse of the neat reference.
