Spoiler Warning: This article contains massive plot spoilers for Scream.
Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette weren’t the only legacy actors to return in this year’s brand new Scream…
Skeet Ulrich also made a surprise return as Billy Loomis, or rather a recurring hallucination of the very dead Billy Loomis.
Franchise newcomer Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) reveals that she fled Woodsboro at eighteen after learning that her biological father was none other than the original Ghostface killer Billy Loomis. Sam’s fear that she’s inherited dad’s psychosis is warranted; Billy consistently appears to her in visions with often murderous advice.
But how exactly did directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and executive producer Chad Villella bring Ulrich back into the fold? In a conversation with Bloody Disgusting, the filmmakers broke down how they handled Ulrich’s return and the surprising deep-cut Easter egg connected to his character.
Billy’s appearance in Sam’s visions looks just as he did in the finale of 1996’s Scream. That entailed a de-aging effect, but the decision to use it didn’t come lightly. Bettinelli-Olpin explained, “Full disclosure: Probably halfway through the edit, we thought we don’t need to de-age him. He looks great. Then we saw a test of the de-aging, and we realized, oh, now he looks just like Billy. Okay. And that’s what sold us. But honestly, we thought he looked great. He’s a very handsome man.”
Gillett elaborated, “That’s the idea though; that character is totally trapped in time. When you see him in this movie, it is exactly like you remember him from the first movie. That’s the image that’s been imprinted on his daughter’s brain. And our collective consciousness. That’s what Billy looks like. It is funny. On the day he came to shoot, we did all of that on green screen. Though he was reading opposite Melissa the entire time, and then we comped him in.“
“We also dressed him to shoot a bunch of crime scene photos that ultimately didn’t end up in the movie,” Gillett reveals of extended Billy Loomis appearances on screen. “They were going to be on the TV behind Mindy when she was doing her big monologue, but it just felt like, too distracting from that specific moment. We posed his body in the hallway where he gets shot in the original with the Ghostface mask next to him and feathers everywhere. It was a wild experience to dress, down to the droplets of blood, recreate the aftermath of the end of the first movie. It was really, really wild.”
Ulrich being on set unwittingly created another meta-moment during production, demonstrating how extensive and deep the filmmakers studied the franchise.
“When Ghostface sneaks up behind Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), as she’s watching the scene where Randy gets snuck upon, that is Jack [Quaid] in the Ghostface costume. It’s the only time in the movie he’s in the costume, which is awesome because, in the original, that’s the only moment that Skeet wore the Ghostface costume- when he’s sneaking up behind Jamie Kennedy. Skeet was on set that day.“
“He was literally five feet away. It was just in the other room, “Bettinelli-Olpin added.
Read about Scream‘s other unexpected cameos here, and stay tuned for even more extensive dives into the film’s Easter eggs and references.
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