The Most Mind-Melting Easter Egg In The Entire ‘Scream’ Franchise

The Scream movies are “meta” horror movies, meaning they are self-referential and exist in a world where the characters are aware of horror movie tropes. The films are also meant to make some kind of commentary on the current state of horror. For this reason, they include a lot of Easter eggs for die-hard genre fans in the audience.

Most of these Easter eggs are small details, like a cameo by The Exorcist‘s Linda Blair in the first movie, two separate Scream characters named after Lindsay Wallace from the original Halloween and the heartfelt double-meaning of the “For Wes” party in Scream (2022) — as the audience and production alike mourned the first Scream film to be made since director Wes Craven passed in 2015.

But one subtle Easter eggs opens up such a huge can of worms that it is definitely the most interesting of the many, many references in the franchise.

This Easter egg occurs in Scream (2022) when Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) is watching TV in her hospital room. She is shown to be watching Dawson’s Creek, specifically the episode “The Scare”. Not only is this a fun episode to include because it satirizes horror movies including Scream, but it also stars Scream alum Joshua Jackson as Pacey and Scott Foley in his guest arc as “Cliff”. What does this mean for the universe of the Scream movies?

1. The first layer here is that Kevin Williamson wrote the original Scream script and went on to create Dawson’s Creek.
2. The second is that Dawson’s Creek starred Joshua Jackson as Pacey Witter. Scream fans saw the actor as a classmate of Randy Meeks in Scream 2. Of course, many actors study film before or after they have a recognizable role, so it’s easy enough to explain this coincidence away.
3. It’s harder to explain how Scott Foley could be a celebrity in the world of Scream when nobody mentioned this fact in Scream 3, where Foley portrayed a director who ended up being Ghostface, Roman Bridger. If he was a celebrity, Roman would have been acting in the TV show Sweet Valley High while making trips to Woodsboro to convince Billy Loomis to kill his girlfriend — which is just weird to imagine.
4. If other late 90s CW actors like Joshua Jackson and Scott Foley are famous in the world of Scream, surely they also know who Sarah Michelle Gellar is?? Why didn’t anyone think it was weird that there were two CW stars in a random small college film class in Scream 2?
5. If none of these people are celebrities in Scream, why the deliberate inclusion of Tara watching a TV show with Joshua Jackson and Scott Foley in it? Foley was only in five episodes of the entire series. Surely another TV episode could have made the same point, like a similar Halloween/horror movie spoof episode of Boy Meets World that aired in 1998. So it seems there is at least some degree of intention here in adding this wrinkle to the Scream universe.

We may never know what directors Radio Silence meant with this Scream (2022) Easter egg. Perhaps they just wanted to whip the fanbase into a frenzy or open up the future to some bizarro sequel plot like the canonical fact that Stab 5 is about time travel. We hope that this Easter egg is revisited at some point in the future. The next Scream movie will be Scream 7, which just started filming in January 2025.