When SCREAM VI opens tomorrow for Thursday-night previews, fans will see plenty of the expected Easter eggs calling back to previous entries in the franchise and its original director, Wes Craven. However, there’s one particular reference that only sharp-eyed, die-hard fans of that filmmaker might catch.
In the first half of SCREAM VI, which brings the bloody action to New York City, there’s a key scene set in a Manhattan bodega (don’t worry, no details will be revealed here). When the movie cuts to an exterior of the store, the name of the business is revealed to be “Abe’s Snake”–a shout-out to the moniker used by Craven when he dabbled in adult filmmaking with 1975’s THE FIREWORKS WOMAN.
“Good catch!” says Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, who directed SCREAM VI with Tyler Gillett, when this writer brings up the in-joke. He tells RUE MORGUE, “The credit for that actually goes to Spencer Charnas from the band Ice Nine Kills. We’ve become friends with him over the last couple of years, and he sent us a flyer for his band to put up on the fridge in the film’s opening, which we thought would be fun, and he put ‘Abe’s Snake’ on it as the club. And we basically stole it; we were like, ‘Oh, that’s great; that’s a fun nod, let’s put that on the bodega.’ Spencer did it first, and then as soon as we saw he had done it, we were like, ‘That’s a really great idea.’ ”
Like all but a few scenes in SCREAM VI, the “Abe’s Snake” exterior was shot in Montreal; the pic below comes from MTL Blog, which has more shots of the Canadian city transformed into the Big Apple. Look for our SCREAM VI review and more from the directors at this site soon!
