Perhaps the Scream world hasn't seen the last of Jill Roberts just yet. In 2011's Scream 4, the fourth and final film in the series to be directed by late horror mastermind Wes Craven, Emma Roberts had a key role as Jill, Sidney's (Neve Campbell) teenage cousin. In the end of the slasher movie sequel, it is revealed that — SPOILER ALERT — Jill is one of the two killers orchestrating the Ghostface murders. Sidney gets revenge by shocking and shooting Jill, and with a bullet to the heart, the homicidal teenager certainly seemed to be dead.
Miracles can happen, however, and it's theoretically possible that medical professionals were able to save Jill's life. That's something that Roberts is hoping for, anyway, as she does not want to be done with the Scream franchise. Perhaps feeling left out by seeing some of her co-stars getting back together for the fifth Scream earlier this year, Roberts tells Dread Central that she's open for the return of Jill in an upcoming sequel. As the actress told the website when asked which horror franchise she'd like to be a part of next:
“Maybe I’d go back to Scream, I feel like I wasn’t done with Scream."
Seemingly Dead Characters Can Return in the Scream Franchise
It's not impossible for a character who was presumed to be dead to appear in a new Scream movie. It was just recently reported that Roberts' co-star Hayden Panettiere would be reprising her role in Scream 6, though it had also appeared that she died in Scream 4. An Easter egg in the fifth Scream also revealed that Kirby had survived, as her image was shown as a thumbnail on a computer screen for an interview with the character, described as a Scream survivor.
Roberts is also not the first person who played a killer in the series to express a desire to return for a sequel. Matthew Lillard has said that there were plans at one point during the development of Scream 3 for Stu Macher, the killer he'd played in the first film, to be revealed as the new Ghostface. It would have been explained that Stu had survived and was orchestrating the attacks on the new Ghostface victims from prison. According to Lillard, he was set to go when that version of Scream 3 was scrapped in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, leading to a complete rewrite that set the film in Hollywood without depicting violence toward high school students.
"I was supposed do Scream 3. I got paid for 3. Not really well, but I ended up getting paid for something I didn’t do because the idea was that I’d be running high-school killers from jail," Lillard explained in a Vulture interview.
He had previously said on the Bob Benedick podcast, "From jail, I was kind of masterminding this attack against Sidney and so three weeks before we were supposed to start shooting, Columbine High School broke out, and they changed everything. They kind of took the script and threw it to the side. They bought me out and I never did the third one."