The fifth Scream film isn’t due in theaters for well over a year, but production has already wrapped. That’s a lot of time to preserve a secret. All it takes is one disgruntled intern, or one actor who’s a bit careless in an interview, to ruin the identity of the killer for everyone.

Thankfully, the folks behind the new Scream have taken this matter very seriously. In an interview with Cinema Blend, producer William Sherak reveals the extreme lengths the film went to in order to preserve its secrets. They even made “multiple” versions of the script, and gave different versions to different actors, so that no one could be quite sure who was really who. As Sherak put it:

There are multiple versions of the draft out there and most of the cast don’t know if they have the right version or not. So we’ve been playing that game with them as well. And the fun of a Scream movie is that everyone is guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. So the goal is to keep that going for as long as possible and have fun with it.

Unlike many slasher films, where the killer is widely known even before the movie begins, the identity of Ghost Face in each Scream is always a big, twisty mystery. And you’ve got to love a murder mystery where everyone is such a plausible suspect that you could write multiple drafts with different killers and everyone involved is like “Yeah, that seems right,” about all of them. Scream 5 — which is officially titled Scream — is scheduled to open in theaters in January 2022.

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