‘Legacies’ Had a Surprising Crossover With ‘the Flash’ and ‘Scream’ In “Hope Is Not the Goal”

With Legacies being part of The Vampire Diaries universe one doesn’t expect to fan-favorite The Flash villain or Scream‘s Ghostface to show up at the Salvatore School but that’s exactly what happened in a very unlikely crossover.

In Legacies’ most recent episode, “Hope is Not the Goal”, MG (Quentin Fouse) had a series of nightmares in which he faced off with The Flash‘s Gorilla Grodd as well as Scream‘s iconic, stab-happy serial killer Ghostface in a clever, nightmare-in-nightmare opening. First, MG dreams that he’s face to face with Gorilla Grodd, only to wake up having fallen asleep with his Flash comic book. However, he quickly discovers that he’s not awake. Ghostface shows up, too!

But how did either of these villains show up on Legacies? Turns out, showrunner Julie Plec simply asked.

“We wanted MG to have a nightmare about a monster from the comic books he was reading, so we asked [Greg Berlanti] and [the DC universe] if we could ‘borrow’ Grodd,” Plec explained on Twitter. “They were VERY gracious. The first TVDU-DCU crossover!”

“As many of you know, I was Wes Craven’s assistant on Scream,” Plec continued (via TVLine). “I remember the day that his producer found the mask in the kid’s bedroom of a house they were scouting. The studio tried to have a different version of the mask designed so they could own it for merchandising. Alas, every different version sucked. Wes was stuck with the store-bought mask and Fun World held on to ownership. Making Scream was one of the highlights of my life. It was the very first movie I worked on and it’s where [Kevin Williamson] and I fell in love and years later, [Brett Matthews] was hired to be the showrunner of Scream Season 3. We were both excited to give Ghostface a shout-out.”

While the Grodd and Ghostface shout outs were both a fun way to start the episode, the central characters on Legacies have real monsters that they have been dealing with. Thus far, they’ve dealt with a dragon and a gargoyle and there are plenty more on the way now that The CW has given a full season order for the freshman series of 16 episodes total.

“I hope what they love is the familiarity and the nostalgia of the way that we tell these stories,” showrunner Julie Plec told reporters during a visit to the show’s set in Atlanta. “The way that we live, deeply rooted in emotion and friendship and love and all those great things. I hope what they appreciate is how new it feels tonally and so different from what we’ve done in the past as well. I think that the show we’re pushing humor a lot harder. We’re hoping, as you see in episodes to come, we really brought it out our tone. We’re embracing our inner comedians and having a lot of fun with that. We’ve never gotten to do that before. Just be blatantly funny. And then hopefully the monsters, I think, will get everybody excited but I can’t talk too much about those.”

Legacies airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET after Supernatural on The CW.