Scream type TV Show network MTV genre Crime

Mystery

Just when you thought it was safe in Lakewood, a new killer is on the loose in the second season of MTV’s Scream.

For the uninitiated, the season 1 finale revealed the identity of the killer: Sarah Koenig wannabe Piper (Amelia Rose Blaire), the daughter of Brandon James and Emma’s mother Maggie (Tracy Middendorf), who targeted Emma (Willa Fitzgerald) because she was pissed her half-sis got the perfect life.

But she wasn’t working alone. Though not outright revealed, the finale insinuated that Audrey (Bex Taylor-Klaus) was was her partner — which proves to be a precarious position for Audrey in season 2 as someone knows the truth about their connection. With Piper dead, who’s now coming after the survivors, otherwise known as the famed Lakewood Six? EW turned to new showrunners Michael Gans and Richard Register to get the scoop:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where are we picking up in season 2?

MICHAEL GANS: It’s three months after the events on the dock with Piper. Emma has suffered some PTSD afterwards, she tried to soldier on, but the trauma was stronger than she was at that point; it was pretty mind-blowing what happened to her at the end of that season. So she winds up coming back from PTSD and the crew is on pins and needles going to welcome her back and manage her. We’re three months after and during that time she and Kieran put a hold on everything because it was too much to focus on; she had to really focus on getting better and getting over this crazy thing that happened to them. Kieran really, really misses Emma and wants Emma back.

They’re all in different places. There’s some relationships that have cooked up over that time, Brooke and Jake are together officially — at least officially amongst the group. She’s not necessarily telling her dad, because that would be a little hard to do considering what he did with her dad last season.

Audrey is, of course, wrestling with this secret that we saw in last season, but she seems to think that everything is fine. She’s working at a movie theater, which is what she wants to do with her whole life, which is to do movies. And Noah and she are as thick as thieves. Noah has picked up — because his finale piece to Piper’s podcast was so successful — he started his own podcast called The Morgue, in which he covers all things Brandon James, Piper murder story, and murder in general.

RICHARD REGISTER: And he’s also created a board where he’s tracked everything because he’s like, “There was an accomplice.” He thinks that there was an accomplice and he’s trying to figure it out and he’s kind of obsessed, he doesn’t sleep as much as he use to. He’s been really, really, really obsessing over these murders and how could the Piper been under his nose the whole time and he didn’t really see it?

What can you tease about how Emma and Audrey handle being a hero differently?

GANS: Well, it’s a very interesting thing because Emma left town basically so she fled from it. Audrey’s kind of taking it on. The interesting thing about Audrey, where she was an outcast, she’s now a celebrity in that town, but she dismisses it on certain levels because, like most celebrities, she doesn’t dig into her fame. The difference is now she can hang with Brooke, now she’s not shut out of parties, she’s a local hero, so she’s taken that on pretty strongly. Her belief, even though we know she has dark secrets, is all that is dead and buried and she wants to believe that’s dead and buried with Piper. Dead and buried and burned.

But of course that’s not true [laughs]. So all we can tease out is that although she seems resilient and on top of the world and empowered, stuff starts happening to her; there’s immediately reactions. The fact that she is now kind of a local hero for some people in a town like that, any small town is going to have people that are haters, so she also has people that are coming for her now and that happens in this season. Somebody is definitely coming for her in specific and as well as many people are coming for her to take the hero down. If you get too big, you’ve got to come down.

Have the events of season 1 brought the Lakewood Six together?

GANS: It has. They were all part of a group, but there were two groups that came together last year over the course of the series because of the situation. You had Noah and Audrey, and then you had Emma and her new friends. This year they’re super bonded because they are The Lakewood Six. Noah has given them a moniker of being the Lakewood Six. They are like, “Well, no.” A new character, who comes to town, is fixated on that. They’re tight and during the interim they’ve gotten even tighter. They hang together because they get each other, they know what they’ve been through and that group is super tight when we come into it this season.

What’s interesting is that Emma — who is really the fulcrum of that group, or the center piece of them and what brought them all together, and the cause of everything the first season — is the one that has been absent. So when she comes back her biggest desire is — also to get back to the biggest difference between her and Audrey — to be normal, is to get back to normal and to return to the life that she once had. But very soon in the story of the season, very, very soon she realizes that’s not possible.

What can you tease for the the motivations for this new killer. Was this killer involved in the events of season 1? Or involved as a direct result of season 1?

GANS: We can’t say anything about that, but we can say that this killer is motivated by season 1. It’s about the sins of the past, it’s a punishment and it is a large scale performance, it’s for the world to see.

Yeah, you’ve added a video-streaming element, like in Scream 4. What’s going on there?

GANS: Oh, you have to wait throughout the entire season to discover that, but the video-streaming element is something that is used in different ways throughout the season. It eventually becomes a giant catalyst for the closure of the season, but it’s used in different ways throughout the season and it is a constant.

REGISTER: It captures certain moments. And we find throughout the season that the [cameras] will planted all over the place, capturing things that our characters aren’t even aware of.

GANS: They aren’t even aware of that they are being watched and/or streamed or captured.

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Much like season 1, is the killer working in plain sight and we’ve already seen their face?

GANS: Yeah, well that’s a very interesting question. You’ve seen their face, yes. They’re someone in our world, but it’s so hard to talk about. Good questions [laughs]. This game, this season, is entirely psychological. In the aftermath of something like the first season, you have to realize that there are huge psychological ramifications for all of our characters. There is a big, big psychotic game in play for everyone that the killer manipulates — like hugely psychotic, dealing with their weaknesses, pushing their psychosis to the furthest degree possible, whatever their weakness, he wants to take them to the end of their strength. You realize, as an audience member, that that’s what’s going on, that he or she or they are pushing them to the edge of their stability to make them vulnerable.

Should we expect not to learn the killer’s identity until the finale?

GANS: You should not expect to learn the identity of the killer until season 6 [laughs]. No I’m kidding about that. You will know by the end of the season who the killer is. The when and the how is a little different than usual, it’s a little trickier. The thing about doing a show like this is that you always want to push it up to another level, you have to because the idea is to not know what to expect; in doing that we’ve gone in a different route with how the killer is revealed and then where we go with that at the end of the season.

REGISTER: We’re doing a different kind of revelation and a different kind of continuation from that revelation.

GANS: You will know at the end who the killer is, but it will be a slightly different revelation than you will expect, and where we go from there is very different.

How do you think Emma would react if she knew Audrey’s role in the events of season 1?

GANS: I think she would love her s—.

REGISTER: That is a huge secret that we are playing with very specifically throughout the season.

GANS: But also the idea behind what happened — like how she may or may not been involved and exactly what went on — the truth of that story is a big part of the season.

REGISTER: Yeah, that’s one huge surprise. Because at the end of season 1, Piper’s last words were, “I have one last surprise for you and you’ll never see it coming.” So we play with exactly what surprise could be. One of those surprises is definitely how Audrey was engaged.

You say one, so there might be more?

GANS: Yes, there are definitely more.

Scream returns Monday, May 30 at 11 p.m. ET on MTV.