Watch: Meet the new heroine taking over for Sidney Prescott in behind the scenes look at 'Scream'

When Kevin Williamson says it's a good time to the Scream franchise back to the big screen, you better sit up and take notice. "Now is the time to make a new Scream," the creator of the self-aware film series explains in the first behind-the-scenes featurette for Scream 5 (taking after other recent horror revivals, it's simply titled Scream). "Because we had this special story to tell that connects the legacy cast members with a new cast into the world of Woodsboro."

Williamson serves as producer on the project (exclusively hitting theaters in early 2022), which doesn't focus on Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott, but on a brand-new heroine named Sam Carpenter played by Melissa Barrera. Sam's last name is most likely a tribute to John Carpenter — à la Billy Loomis being a nod to Halloween's Sam Loomis in the 1996 original.

Sam's got "a little secret," which puts her squarely in the sights of the new Ghostface killer. Luckily, she'll get some much-needed help from three people who have dealt with this sort of thing: Sidney (Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette). Despite the return of these familiar faces, don't expect a lazy rehash of the last four films. 

"I don't think it's exactly what people are expecting," says Jack Quaid (The Boys star is playing) another new character by the name of Richie Kirsch.

Watch the featurette below:

"It's about paying respect and letting people know we're honoring everything the series is with this movie," co-director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin recently said during an interview with Empire Magazine. "The world that Wes [Craven] and Kevin [Williamson] built, it's a big universe. This movie is an encapsulation of all that. It felt like the best way to honor that was to show people, 'Yep, it's the Scream that you know and love, and it's going to be something else moving forward.'"

"The most important part of bringing this franchise back to life was making sure the people that were so close to Wes, and so involved in the fabric of what the series was, were involved and gave us their blessing," added co-director Tyler Gillett. "There was no version of this story for us that would work without the three of them."

Jenna Ortega (Jane the Virgin), Mason Gooding (Star Trek: Picard), Kyle Gallner (Veronica Mars), Marley Shelton (Scream 4), Jasmin Savoy Brown (The Leftovers), Roger L. Jackson (the longtime voice of Ghostface), and model/musician Sonia Ben Ammar co-star.

Written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, Scream arrives on the big screen Jan. 14, 2022. In the meantime, we'll be eating a bowl of the official tie-in breakfast cereal every morning for the next two months until the sequel opens.