Scream VI picks up a year after the events of Scream 2022. The survivors of the latest Ghostface attack have left Woodsborough for a fresh start in New York. However, when a new Ghostface begins to terrorize them, they will have to fight to survive and protect their loved ones with the help of other Ghostface survivors, Gale Weathers and FBI Agent Kirby Reed.
Scream VI is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, with a script penned by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. Scream VI stars Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Courteney Cox, and Hayden Panettiere, who reprise their past Scream roles. Josh Segarra, Jack Champion, Devyn Nekoda, Liana Liberato, and Dermot Mulroney also join the star-studded cast.
Screen Rant spoke with editor Jay Prychidny about working on Scream VI. He reveals some of his favorite Easter eggs and how he approached the Ghostface reveal and subway scenes. Prychidny also shares how working on Orphan Black and Wednesday helped prepare him for Scream VI.
Jay Prychidny on Scream VI
Screen Rant: Scream VI might be the biggest, bloodiest, goriest of the franchise. Can you walk me through your process when it comes to balancing humor, horror, action, suspense, and even elements of comedy into a larger story?
Jay Prychidny: I’ve always been such a huge fan of this franchise. I’ve seen every movie multiple times, which I think is really useful when you’re creating something for a fanbase who has that encyclopedic knowledge. I’ve always been really familiar with the movies that came before, with Patrick Lussier’s work, who edited the first three movies. I really was inspired by him a lot when I was younger. It was really awesome to step into this new world.
Balancing all those elements is about being aware of what came before, what the audience’s expectations are, and what the fan expectations are — and paying homage to that. You want to be in the lineage, but you want to take it in new directions too. I want to try new things., push the boundaries, and expand the scope of what a Scream movie is all about.
Scream VI feels so different because it’s set in New York, which feels like its own character. How did you capture the feeling of New York through the editing?
Jay Prychidny: I think the touchstone for every department was taking New York as an inspiration; being a bit dirtier, grimier, and more visceral.
The other movies are set in California, so they’re sunnier. They’re more picturesque and, from the production design to the costuming, we wanted it to feel different. We didn’t want that California sound.
The editing is a part of that. It’s a bit rougher; a bit grimy in the action scenes especially. There are more quick cuts to make it a little more visceral. That was the intent anyway, to make it as New York-inspired as we could.
Did you look at any other films, especially horror films set in New York, as inspiration?
Jay Prychidny: Well, the classic one is Jason Takes Manhattan. But we didn’t look at that so much as inspiration. We talked about it a lot, and for a long time, we didn’t know what the title of the movie was going to be. We joked a lot of times that it would be Ghostface Takes Manhattan.
It’s one of those jokes that became reality. Jason Takes Manhattan made it into the movie; in the opening scene when Jason is in his apartment. That was not the original intention; they actually didn’t have a plan for what that would be. I originally put a Giallo movie on his TV, which worked really well. But we couldn’t get the rights, so we went to Friday the 13th.
There are a ton of Scream Easter eggs in this. Do you have a favorite, and what do you think most people have overlooked in terms of the Easter eggs?
Jay Prychidny: That’s a tricky one. Our fans are so smart. What’s gone overlooked? It’s actually probably my favorite Easter egg, and no one’s seen it yet. At the beginning of the third act, when they’re going into the theater for the big showdown, you see the marquee of the theater that they’re going into. The side that’s lit says Final Show: Rocky Horror Picture Show, or something like that.
But on the other side of the marquee, which you can’t really see… Maybe when our fans have it on VOD, they can enhance the footage and find it. But it says that there’s a Jennifer Jolie Retrospective, which is a Parker Posey character from Scream III who is one of our favorite characters in the Scream franchise. I was really excited to do that little Easter egg for her.
I love that! Horror has such a unique build and rhythm. How do you approach that style of editing?
Jay Prychidny: For me, one of the areas that the previous Screams has never really gone is more psychological. Really getting inside someone’s head and getting their subjective reality. In this movie, we got to do that with Sam a lot, especially in the shrine and with her visions.
The visions were in the last movie too, but they were more objective. But this, I really wanted to feel like we were getting inside of Sam’s head, seeing through her eyes and playing with that crazy, mental psychosis a little bit. It made the audience feel a little bit crazy, hopefully. I’m always trying to bring something new to the table.
I actually went through the Screams through V and noticed they all fit into the same visual language. Did you go back to Scream IV and V just to make sure that VI fits visually with its predecessors?
Jay Prychidny: For me, it’s more about the characters and really making sure the legacy characters, primarily Courteney Cox as Gale and Hayden Panettiere as Kirby, feel right. Maybe it sounds obvious. “I want Gale to feel like Gale,” but depending on how you cut it, she could not feel like Gale. There’s a whole variety of performances, and there’s a ton of ways to cut it. When I’m looking at Gale scenes or Kirby scenes, I’m really looking for those moments that speak to the previous movies.
Being a fan and having such a very intimate knowledge of those previous movies, that’s what I drew on. When you’re looking at the footage, where are those really sparkly Gale moments or Kirby moments that really show this is a character that we know and love?
What was your initial thought process when you knew that you were going to be working on Scream VI? Do you jot down your thoughts or just wait till you get the script or the dailies and then start mapping it out?
Jay Prychidny: No, I had a lot of ideas going into it. Scream fans know a lot about the films, and they are also very critical of the films. I’m no different. I’ve seen the films; I’ve had my own criticisms of things I didn’t like. For me, there were several things that I wanted to make sure that this film had that I thought some of the other sequels had.
One of them was playing things on the idea that Ghostface in some of the movies is almost like a Greek tragedy kind of figure; the harbinger of death. Wes Craven loved the mythological side of a lot of the stories that he told. And so I knew for sure I wanted to get that in this movie.
I think where I did that the most was in the latter idea, where the Ghostface is the harbinger of death coming. The audience knows that Anika’s going to die on that ladder; the audience knows ways before it happens. It’s just about living in that moment. When I first got the job, the thing that came into my head was the tragic inevitability, which is what a lot of those previous movies have. They play in that kind of zone.
Another thing that I really wanted to bring when I first got the job was that some of the best Scream moments are in the setup of set pieces and that excitement. What’s really cool about the Scream franchise is the fun and excitement before the action happens. It’s in the setup. It’s in the audience. “Oh, this is going to be crazy.”
And not all the Scream movies have that, but they really pop when they do. Scream II did that so well, in almost all of its kill scenes. The setup, the geography, and giving it room to breathe so the audiences see the setup. Then once that’s solidly in place, you can get scared of the stuff that comes after.
The subway scene was a big one like that. A lot of it is setting the table there, just the geography. “Where’s Ethan? Where’s Mindy? What can Ethan see? What can Mindy see? Who are the people around Mindy?” You don’t really need to set that up, but setting it up is the fun, and taking your time with it.
How much footage of the Stab movies exists for you guys to play with? Just out of curiosity, because it’s a reoccurring thing in these Scream movies. Obviously, other directors may have shot for the Stab stuff, but how much exists? Could there ever be a Stab cut?
Jay Prychidny: The answer to that might be kind of disappointing. In this movie, Stab didn’t play a big role, but there’s a scene with the psychiatrist in the final cut where he’s watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the original script, it was a lot more clear that that psychiatrist was a horror hound. You can see in his office that he had all these horror dolls. And no one comments on them, but it used to be a lot more of his character that he was a horror hound. He was actually a fan of the Stab movies, so in the original script in that second scene, he was watching Stab VIII, which is the Rian Johnson one.
I got all that, but we eventually just ended up changing it because we felt it would be more fun to do something else. We just ultimately felt it would be better to do something different. But I’ve got all that Stab VIII footage, and I watched it all. There’s not a lot of it, though so you can’t really cut it together. It would have to be a Stab VIII teaser.
The only footage I’ve seen involved Ghostface with the flamethrower. There was also him with machetes chasing a guy. There was some random footage of people running from Ghostface, but it’s just these isolated moments. I never saw the Stab footage that they used for Scream V, but they had a lot more of that because they redid the whole Jamie Kennedy scene for Scream V. There might be a cut of that.
Can you talk about the Ghostface reveal? Because it’s so pivotal in these films, and the horror movies playing in the background really elevate the moment.
Jay Prychidny: That was really fun, and it was all live. There were no visual effects there. They shot that stuff and had it projected during the scene, which made it feel really real. They got all that old footage of Jack Quaid, and it was really awesome for him to be involved in this movie in that way.
At the 11th hour, maybe a couple of days before we locked sound on the movie, they sent Jack Quaid a whole bunch of lines of dialogue to read. A lot of that has also ended up in that act 3 sequence. I think it’s primarily him doing the Ghostface voice. When you hear the Ghostface lines of dialogue, that’s all Jack Quaid actually reading that, which is just another fun Easter egg. There; I got another one. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed that either. I haven’t seen anyone notice that Jack Quaid’s doing the Ghostface voice there.
But after editing that whole reveal, with them taking off the mask and doing their motive and all that? I’m really happy with how it turned out. That was definitely the hardest scene in the whole movie. Which is interesting because it’s not even an action scene; it’s a dialogue scene. It’s a complex dialogue scene, but it’s really just a dialogue scene. But I was up all hours of the night when they were shooting that. They shot so much for days and days and days. I think I have scene 84C burned in my memory.
There was just so much footage and so many takes. Dermot Mulroney just performed so many different takes of that scene. Quieter, louder, insane. He did so much improvisation. Not a lot of it made it in, but he was improvising left and right. Getting that all together and giving it a core emotional character focus and making it make sense and entertaining and fast-paced was by far the hardest scene in the movie to edit.
I think it was the same case on Scream V too. That act 3 reveal was the hardest scene for them to edit.
Now, I’ve got to talk about the subway scene. It is my favorite scene in the film. It feels claustrophobic as the tension builds. Can you walk me through the process of working with the sound design, the music, and the directors all in that scene?
Jay Prychidny: Yeah, that’s a lot of people’s favorite scene, which is cool. And it’s a scene with so many Easter eggs. I have to mention, as a Canadian, that our costume designer was also Canadian. One of her mentors was David Cronenberg’s costume designer back in the day. She borrowed an actual onscreen costume from Videodrome, which was in the subway sequence. I think that’s the only actual onscreen movie costume. The rest are all recreations and stuff. So, we have that one real costume from Videodrome, and me being a Canadian who loves David Cronenberg, I had to feature that.
From Mindy’s perspective, when she’s looking across her car, it’s panning across the sleeping ladies and across a whole bunch of characters. The camera lands on a woman at the end, and she’s wearing Deborah Harry’s onscreen costume from Videodrome.
Yeah, the subway scene was awesome because, in terms of the action set pieces, it’s probably the one that’s actually most similar to my first cut. I just cut that scene together, and the directors just loved it. When they saw it, they said that was in the best shape out of all. They loved it in terms of how I had cut it. It didn’t change a lot.
Of course, we made changes, but it’s still quite similar. A lot of the bits are pretty much my first cut there. It’s all about taking your time, right? And in all of the moments, it’s really drawing it out as much as you can. It’s that feeling I really wanted to generate of things feeling overlong.
Because the scene is quite predictable, and our fans are so savvy that they can guess what’s happening before it happens a lot of the time. You really want to try to surprise them and subvert their expectations. One of the ways we found to do that was to play scenes a bit longer and really wring out that tension. Even if something’s coming, you start to second guess if it’s coming. That was the idea I had going into that scene; that was just something we continued to enhance when I worked with the directors on it.
Can you talk to me a little bit about collaborating with Tyler and Matt on this film to form your visual language?
Jay Prychidny: The normal process in a movie is that the editor works a lot of time on their own. It depends on the directors, but on this film, I was working largely on my own. I’d send them stuff now and then, but they wouldn’t really give feedback during shooting. It was more or less that my first cut was what I thought and my best take on the material.
And then, when a director first sees it, there’s a lot of questioning, “Ooh, is this working?” Some things work; some things don’t. They’re trying to sort out for themselves how they feel about it, but it was a really straightforward process.
The great thing about Matt and Tyler is that if they think something’s working, they don’t try to tear it apart just for the sake of it. They don’t worry about, “Oh, is there something better? Let’s look through. Let’s try this.” If they feel something’s working, then we just go with it. We just trust that it’s what we want.
When I started working with them, we just started at the beginning and watched bit by bit. When they’d have a note or a concern or a question, we’d stop. We’d work through it. And then we did two whole passes through the movie like that. That probably took about five weeks, and then we invited the writer and producer to come in and join us. It was the four of us and Chad, the other producer of Radio Silence, working through the cut.
The five of us — Chad, Matt, Tyler, Jamie, and myself — got through a cut of the film that we were really happy with after about 8 or 9 weeks, which is pretty fast. Normally, directors are given 10 weeks contractually to work on their cut. We finished a little bit earlier than what they were contractually allowed to take, and then we pretty much just went straight into previews from that cut.
For the first preview, we didn’t really change all that much. We made some changes, but the preview went so well that we didn’t have to muck around with it that much. The studios were happy with it. They didn’t ask for us to change a lot of stuff that we loved, so it was great.
And here you are with the biggest Scream opening of all time. Are there any scenes left on the cutting room floor that you wish were included in the film? Or any scenes that ended up in the film that you really had to fight for?
Jay Prychidny: There were a few scenes cut out of the movie that we had discussed because Paramount wanted to put them on the Blu-ray. We looked at them and were just like, “It really doesn’t enhance anyone’s love of this film to see these scenes.” We took them out for a reason; we didn’t really think they served the movie or the characters.
Jamie, Matt and Tyler, Chad, and I just edited the movie that we liked the best. We took out the things that we thought weren’t working. I mean, we were prepared to fight for stuff, and we really thought that there would be a lot of stuff that would come under fire.
Especially what I was talking about with the slow setups; the slower pacing and the character scenes. The character scenes really take their time, and they have these long endings; Tara just lying on the bed and thinking, or Sam just standing in the quad alone.
We thought that the studio would say, “Two hours and three minutes? Let’s get this under two hours.” But thankfully, after we did the previews, everyone just rallied behind the movie. There wasn’t that usual pressure to get the running time down. The studios, Spyglass and Paramount, just really rallied behind the movie and behind what we all wanted to do with it. It was really great. We really came out with the movie that we wanted to release.
Scream is very practical effects-driven, especially compared to some of these bigger blockbusters. How do these more practical effect-driven movies versus the CG-heavy ones impact your process?
Jay Prychidny: I mean, it is a joy, really. My last project was Wednesday, the Netflix show, which was a similar kind of approach. It’s mostly stuff done in camera, with visual effects used mostly for cleanup. This movie had around 400 visual effects shots, but you wouldn’t even know. The majority of them are all cleanup, wire removal, adding knives, or enhancing blood.
The great thing is that when you’re editing, it doesn’t require a ton of imagination because you try to make it look good without any visual effects. We previewed the film with a lot of knives missing, and the audience didn’t even really notice because of the action and the visceral quality of it. People were gasping and cheering and screaming even when there were no knives.
If something works without visual effects, you know it’s only going to get better when the visual effects are in. That’s the difference from those other movies you’re talking about, where you require a lot of visual effects to be in, or else the audience just can’t even follow it.
You mentioned Wednesday, which features Jenna Ortega and falls within the horror genre. Does having that prior knowledge of an actor’s performance help you going into something like Scream? Do you detach what you did from Wednesday and come in with fresh eyes on something like Scream?
Jay Prychidny: Yeah, Wednesday and Tare are such different characters. I actually saw Scream V in theaters before I knew who I was going to be working on this film. It shocked me because I’d been so used to Jenna being this very contained, very quiet, very small character, and expressing so much was so little. To go in to see Scream V and see her screaming and crying and wailing and in distress? It was like, “Whoa.” It totally surprised me and really took me off guard.
That was something I did think about, in terms of Jenna’s performance. Not to make it Wednesday or anything like that, but just to get her to be a bit more internal as well. I like that aspect, and she’s so good at it. And so, I did tone Tara a little bit differently than in Scream V for that reason.
Orphan Black’s one of the best series is ever been out there, and I know you worked on that. That show’s very technically impressive and is a very intensive series. Did you take any of your experience from Orphan Black over to Scream VI?
Jay Prychidny: Orphan Black was the first really big scripted show that I did. It was really how I learned how to edit these kinds of shows. But that’s more just in my learning process.
How did it prepare me? I don’t know about the technical elements so much, but Orphan Black has just such a fast pace. It really has a fast, energetic, visceral feeling. And also, it has wildly different shifts in tone. It can go from comedy to horror in a second.
I’m thinking about this for the first time, but it’s those two things. That fast pace and the wild shifts in tone, and how you transition between them to keep the audience surprised and engaged. That’s something I really learned on Orphan Black, and it’s something that I really do take into a lot of the projects that I work on.
Are there any other genres or directors that you want to work with in the future?
Jay Prychidny: One of my favorite genres is musicals, and I love movie musicals. They’re so hard to get right, though, so there are a lot of movie musicals that I wouldn’t want to work on.
But I would absolutely love to work on a fun, fast, energetic musical because I love cutting dance. I love cutting music, and that’s definitely a dream of mine: a big-budget, amazing musical with big dance sequences, and all that. I’ve cut a lot of dance scenes. I worked on a kid show that was all about dancers in a studio, and I cut Jenna’s big dance scene in the Wednesday series.
About Scream VI
The survivors of Scream 2022 have moved to New York City, but a year after the attack in Woodsborough they are terrorized by a new Ghostface. Sam, Tara, Misty, and Chad try to escape the grasp of a new killer with the help of Gale and now FBI Agent Kirby Reed. Everyone is a suspect as they fight to survive and defeat the person or people picking off their loved ones, one by one.
Scream VI is in theaters now.