Your Favorite Scary Movie: The Oral History of Scream – The Ringer

Like the movie itself, the story of Scream begins with a terrifying phone call. While house-sitting one night in the mid-90s, Kevin Williamson watched a television special about a Florida serial killer. It scared the hell out of him. Then, during a commercial break, he noticed that a window was open. Except he hadnt remembered opening it.

At that moment, he felt like he was in a horror movie. For all he knew, someone was stalking him. He went to the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife. Then he rang an old friend. As they talked, Williamson canvassed the house, searching for an intruder. Their conversation eventually drifted to the kind of bogeymen that used to give them nightmares: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger.

Ultimately, there was no killer lurking inside, but the incident inspired Williamson to start writing a scary movie. His script combined everything that he loved about slasher films: gore, mystery, humor, and teen angst. But he also added something new: a host of characters who are all too aware of scary movie tropes.

Horror movies were in a big slump back then, Williamson says. The slasher films of the late 70s and 80s had sort of petered out. No one was really making great horror films.

The horror movie that he wanted to see was both an homage and a satire; something that stayed true to the genre and sent it up. And when Scream hit theaters 25 years ago this month, audiences truly had seen nothing like it. Through word of mouth, the low-budget flick became a surprise hit that not only jolted horror films back to life like Michael Myers, but also set off an explosion of teen movies and TV shows that lasted into the 2000s.

Its hard to imagine now that the franchise has been spilling gallons of fake blood for a quarter-centuryParamount Home Entertainment recently released a remastered anniversary edition on 4K Ultra HD, and the fifth installment of the franchise will hit theaters in Januarybut there was a time when no one wanted to direct Scream. At first, even Wes Craven passed. Several times. The man behind horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left was tired of being confined to the genre that hed mastered. Yet the pull of Williamsons script eventually turned out to be too much to resist, and with its elements at his fingertips, Craven reinvented big-screen horror.

It felt very alive when we were making it, says Neve Campbell, the star of the film, and very exciting.

Williamson sold his first horror movie script, then-called Killing Mrs. Tingle, in 1995. He wrote his second in just three days while holed up in a friends Palm Springs condo. He titled it Scary Movie.

Williamson designed the brutal opening scene to hook both the audience and Hollywood execs. It starts with a teenage girl picking up the ringing phone. The voice on the other end of the line toys with her, testing her knowledge of slasher flicks. Then a costumed stalker chases her through the house with a knifeand brutally kills her.

The screenplay set off a bidding war. Ultimately, the studio most interested was Dimension Films, a division of Miramax, the company headed at the time by now-disgraced executive Harvey Weinstein. But somehow, Williamsons killer script wasnt enough to attract a prominent filmmaker. That search took longer than anyone expected.

Kevin Williamson (writer): I thought one of the greatest movies in this genre is Psycho. The entire first act is Janet Leigh, and then she gets killed and youre like, Whoa, where is this movie going? I had no idea. And I wanted that. I wanted that same feeling.

Richard Potter (Dimension Films director of development): My first thought is this is going to be some kind of stupid spoof. I have no interest in that. But why dont I read a little bit and see what it is? Because youll know in a page or two what the tone is. I ended up reading it straight through. I could not put it down.

Williamson: There were a lot of different companies bidding for it. The price started going up. Oliver Stones production company had a discretionary fund and they were bidding on it. I got nervous because the price went up to a degree where one of the studios was like, Well, we dont pay this kind of money for a horror movie. Were out. And I went, OK, well, this is over.

Potter: I called Bob Weinstein at home and said, I just read a script. If you dont want to buy this or you dont want to make this, then I dont know what youre looking for.

Williamson: Sure enough, it ended up being Dimension.

Potter: Kevin asked his lawyer, Patti Felker, what she thought he should do. Patti said, These other companies will pay you more money. Dimension will make your movie. Which ones more important to you? Obviously, Kevin felt making the movie was more important. I think he made the right decision.

Williamson: Every name you could imagine came up [to direct]. Wess name came up really early. Robert Rodriguezs name came up. Quentin Tarantinos name came up. All of the Dimension stable at that point.

Marianne Maddalena (executive producer): Wes, at that point, really didnt want to do anything that was considered kind of a slasher movie.

Julie Plec (Wes Cravens assistant): Vampire in Brooklyn came out and was kind of a disaster. And that made him sad. So he wasnt in any hurry to jump back into it, into his own genre.

Maddalena: And he had just done Nightmare 7, which is pretty similar as far as being self-referential and killing people with knives.

Williamson: I do know Julie read it. And she understood it.

Plec: I didnt particularly love horror movies. But I had been an adolescent in the 80s and so I had seen them all at slumber parties. My Bloody Valentine and Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. As a kid, I was always a little bit scared of them. But when I read this, it just tapped into everything that I appreciated about the genre.

Wiliamson: And she kept pushing and pushing.

Plec: When he did read the script, which he did pretty quickly, he appreciated it. He liked it. And then we all got on with our lives.

Williamson: I remember having lunch with him, and it was just very casual. We were just chatting about it and I couldnt ever tell if he had read it or not. I mean, he seemed to have read it, but we didnt really talk about it. It was like he had already passed on ithe had just put it behind him, and he didnt want to focus on that during lunch. And we just had a really nice lunch.

Plec: I remember [Cravens director of development] Lisa [Harrison] saying to me, Theyre having a really hard time finding a director for Scary Movie, and I thought, Hmm. And at the time I was working at Wess house, so I would have lunch with him every day. And so I said, Remember that great script? Like, You met Kevin, it was so great. Theyre having a hard time finding a director and they really want you to do it.

And I was just his assistant, so I was just kind of making quote-unquote innocent small talk. And he said, Ah, well they should just make me an offer I cant refuse then. And I think he was joking, but I went back to Lisa and I said, He said make him an offer he cant refuse. And so Dimension did. And he took it.

Williamson: After he signed on, I was going to his house for lunch. And I was like, Oh, Im going to go to his house. This is super cool. I want to see how a big hot-shot movie director lives.

And so I get in my car, and I get lost driving up into [the Hollywood Hills]. And Im already late. And then I show up. He has all these pages of notes for my script. And I just see them sitting there on a table. And Im like, Oh no. This is going to be horrible. Hes going to want to change everything. Ive heard these horror stories. I know what happens now. This is the moment I get kicked to the curb. I mean, Ive always lived in fear of that. And then it turned out that he was like, Well, most of these are typos.

There were a bunch of typos. He goes, We should just fix everything, dont you think? It was a really great meeting because it was my first time with a director who was clearly taking the written word and starting to visualize it. He was starting to turn it into pictures. He was starting to paint on a canvas.

Like many of Cravens movies, Scream had a cast of up-and-coming actors. But there were a few A-listers in the mix. One was Friends star Courteney Cox, who plays tabloid reporter Gale Weathers. Another was Drew Barrymore. At first she was in talks to play the lead, Sidney Prescott. But she changed her mind and decided she wanted to be Casey Becker, who gets killed in the first scene. It was a moment of fate: Williamson, too, had always pictured a big name filling that role.

Williamson: I wanted it to be this big, huge Janet Leigh moment. And then when she dies, youre like, Wait a second. Wasnt she on the poster? Wait. Whats going to happen next?

Plec: I remember Drew calling Wes and saying she didnt want to be Sidney and that she wanted to be Casey.

Drew Barrymore (Casey Becker, to Entertainment Weekly in 2011): I just read the script one night at my house and I just said, Oh my God, there hasnt been anything like this for so long. I loved that it actually got tongue and cheeky but it was still scary and it was this great game that sort of described genres and revived them at the same time and redefined them all in one script. I went bananas.

Williamson: And the studio was really into that too. And they were very good about keeping that all a big secret. They were really billing this as a Drew Barrymore movie.

Potter: Were sitting around, you kind of see it dawn on each person: No, thats a great idea. Because youre going to see the trailer and the commercials, and youre going to be sure shes the star of the movie. Theres no way shes going to die. When she dies at the end of that sequence, youre going to go, Anyone could die.

Courteney Cox (Gale Weathers): One of the main characters was gonna die in the first 13 minutes of the film. You knew it was going to be bold.

Jamie Kennedy (Randy Meeks): Remember the elliptical when it came out, how big that was? I would try to read on the elliptical and I would do 40 minutesand Ill never forget I read the whole thing on the elliptical. Which is crazy, to read a script in 40 minutes.

David Arquette (Deputy Dewey Riley): I have dyslexia so whenever I could read a script fast, Id typically know that it worked really well.

Cox: I just knew it was funny and scary and to bring those two emotions together was something that I definitely wanted to be a part of.

Arquette: They wanted me to audition for one of the teenagers in the high school. I felt I was a little older, and I also loved the role of Dewey when I read it and the idea of acting opposite Courteney. I was a huge fan of hers. I met with Wes and I was like, I really like this role. And he was like, Wow, I didnt even consider that, because he was written as more of, like, the dumb jock character. I read it as a character thats in a position of authority getting no respect.

Cox: I just had to prove I could go from Monica to that. Its really hard to express. You dont want to say that youre not that nice of a person. But I definitely can be a bitch.

Arquette: When we all got cast, Wes had us out at his house. I saw Courteney and I was like, Hey, Im playing Dewey. And shes like, Yeah, I heard about you, or something like that. She gave me some real attitude. I think I tried to follow her home in her car but she had a Porsche and I had a hot rod that wasnt fast enough to take the turns. I wasnt going to follow her to her house, but I was going to try to roll up to her next to a red light and be like, Hey. I dont know what I was thinking.

Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott): It was still very new. I was a dancer. Id had some experience: I was doing Party of Five, and Id done some film in Canada.

Lisa Beach (casting director): We basically auditioned every girl in town, whether she was known or unknown. As far as the final three, it was Alicia Witt, Brittany Murphy, and Neve. There was just that certain je ne sais quoi that Neve had.

Maddalena: I think with Neve, shes very self-contained. It looks like she has a large inner world going on all the time.

Beach: She had that perfect combination of strength and vulnerability.

Maddalena: Shes extremely gracefulshe was a professional ballet dancer and she moves like that and she runs like an athlete.

Williamson: I want emotional scary stuff. Its not about the scares but what happens after the scare. And I really think that Neve Campbell delivered such a beautiful performance. She brought you into her Sidney universe.

Kennedy: I read for the casting director and she was like, That was really good. You hear that and youre not sure. Its like theyre being sweet to you, whatever. And shes like, Can you come back on Thursday and meet Wes Craven? And Im like, I think my schedules open.

Skeet Ulrich (Billy Loomis): My first impression when it came time to audition was how gentle Wes was, how present he was, and how interested he was in other people, including me.

Matthew Lillard (Stu Macher): I went to audition for Billy Loomis and the casting director said to me, Would you mind coming and reading for Stu in three hours? Wes Cravens going to be here. And so I went off and memorized all the words and came back and auditioned for Wes for the character of Stu. And he actually gave it to me in the room. Thatd never really happened before.

Beach: Of all the thousands of auditions that we have done over the past 26 years, I so distinctly and vividly remember Jamie Kennedy, Matthew Lillard, and Skeet Ulrichs audition. And thats three in one movie, 26 years ago. There were probably another 10 over the ensuing 25 years that I would say, Oh my God, that blew me away. But its pretty amazing that youd have three in one go.

Roger Jackson (voice of Ghostface): I was working as a voice actor living in San Francisco, and went in for the audition along with a lot of other people. The audition script was the first scene from the first film, the opener. I heard some of the other people in the waiting room saying, My agent says theyre looking for a new Freddy Krueger. And in reading over the scene, I thought, This is not Freddy Krueger. This is very subtle.

This guys got to be kind of interesting. Hes got to keep her on the phone, keep playing with her, and theres got to be something about him that draws her in. Oh, youre making popcorn. I only make popcorn when Im going to watch a movie. Oh, you like scary movies? Whats your favorite scary movie? But it had to be able toonce you turn the dialgo from being very kind of playful and sexy to much more sinister. Why, what did you think I said? Can you handle that, blondie?

Before shooting started, the producers still had to determine what the killer would look like. Finding what became one of horrors most iconic masks was pure luck.

Maddalena: We were scouting a location and we went to this two-story house on this lovely street. The lady was fine with us walking around and I went upstairs and there was a boys bedroom. It had the feeling that no one had been in it for a while. Like, whoever had moved out. And I saw the mask sitting on a chair. At the time it had a white shroud. And I thought, Oh my God, this mask, this is it.

Plec: But the studio wanted to own the mask, so they had Greg Nicotero and Bob Kirkmans company KNB and Howard Berger create a stunt version of the mask, a more shootable version of the mask. We shot it on day one, coming up in the window. Everyone hated it.

Maddalena: The renderings we got were kind of gargoyle-ish. It just wasnt happening. Wes wasnt happy.

Williamson: They mustve gone through hundreds of faces. And Wes stuck to his guns: He wanted Ghostface. Finally, the studio rolled over and allowed him to have it.

Plec: Because we couldnt beat what we had, they had to use something that they did not own and could never capitalize on. I remember that being sort of scandalous.

Scream was shot in and around Santa Rosa, California, in the spring of 1996. The idyllic wine country locale provided the perfect backdrop for the movies mayhem. For the cast of 20-somethings and the crew, filming was like summer camp. And Craven was the wise head counselor.

Campbell: He felt like a father figure. He had this really long, lean stature. He was like a gazelle. He floated when he walked. It was very strange, and he was paced and slow. Not what you would expect of someone with as twisted a mind as his.

Cox: He would make me laugh. I would ask him a direction on certain things, and hed be like, Courteney, what do you think, Ive been there? I dont know what it feels like to be chased by a knife.

Maddalena: He was a pun-meister. He did a lot of dad jokes.

Arquette: He was a bird watcher.

Williamson: He would sit in his chair, and he would be doing a crossword puzzle and reading about birds. And then he would just go, Action, and become somebody else. It was so bizarre.

Kennedy: Hes like a tenured Berkeley professor. Hes just a chill guy who would be probably teaching film theory with a masters in psychology and human psyche. Hes like a total dude.

Williamson: Wes created a very family environment. You felt like you were safe, and that you were with your uncle or your father or somebody. We had a really great time. There were a lot of parking lot parties.

Cox: We had a bonfire.

Plec: I still, to this day, dont like shooting in L.A. because I feel like when you shoot in L.A., its a job. And when you shoot on location, its camp.

Lillard: The camaraderie was established all the way through. Like, Skeet and I would go play golf. Wed hang out. Every weekend we were together.

Maddalena: We stayed at this DoubleTree in the middle of the countryside.

Campbell: Basically a motel that had cookies on your bed every night.

Kennedy: Every day they give you a fresh cookie. And I know it sounds stupid, but it was just so good. Every day I felt like I had a little treat. If I did a good scene, Id eat my cookie.

Campbell: We had basically blacked out all our windows because we were shooting nights every night. So, we would get home covered in blood at 6 a.m., and wed want to have a drink, and wed want to unwind.

Ulrich: Wed wind up in David Arquettes room where the bar was.

Arquette: I went to the local head shop and bought all these blacklight posters and lava lamps and got it all funky feeling. I just love that whole vibe.

Campbell: David is nuts, so he bought every toy possible that you can buy in Santa Rosa, and they were hanging from his ceiling. I think it was called Davids Bar or Davids Club or something. Club David.

The most important scene in Scream is the first. Casey Beckers slaying and the introduction of the killer set the tone for the rest of the movie. Getting all the details right took an extraordinary amount of effort.

Williamson: The opening scene was in Northern California in one of these houses out in the middle of nowhere. What was interesting is there were just two houses in these huge fields. And our base camp was at the other housewhere they shot Cujo.

Plec: That was our first five days of shooting.

Williamson: It was magical. I was in the rain, and we had the killer, Roger, in another tent talking on the phone outside because Drew didnt want to see him. She just wanted to hear the voice, which I thought was super smart.

Jackson: Its like old radio theater. The scariest monsters are the monsters you dont see, but the monsters you make in your mind. So just having the voice to react to made it larger in their minds.

Maddalena: You always get people who walk on the set from another reality and theyre like laughing and giggling. And our first AD, Nick Mastandrea, would yell at them like, Read the set, dont laugh, dont giggle, weve got an actress here who really has to perform.

Williamson: And she was so good. She was so prepared.

Barrymore (in 2011): I just thought, How could I make it real? Im sure its everybodys worst fucking nightmare.

Plec: You just hear Drew screaming and howling and Id be like, What the fuck is going on in there? And it was Wes, like, amping her up.

Barrymore (in 2011): Wes and I, you know, had made this great agreement on how we wanted to approach the whole thing and we couldnt have been more on the same page. I was like, I never want fake tears, I will come up with a mechanism with which to really make me cry. I will run around until Im hyperventilating. He and I had this secret story. We would just talk about it every time cause it just made me cry every time I thought about it. That worked for tearsit didnt work for hyperventilating. I would still have to run around a lot.

Wes Craven (director, Scream DVD commentary): The night before we started shooting she told me a horrible story of a newspaper article of a dog being burned by its owner. Set on fire. And she started crying as she was telling me this. So every time that I needed her to get over that edge into complete tears, I would just say Drew, Im lighting the lighter. And she would just burst into tears. Not everybody would tell you a story thats so close to the heart. Drew is very much an animal lover. That allowed us to get to that place of ultimate horror.

Plec: She would just be like, Aaaaaaah! and then hed yell, Action!

Williamson: The studio got the dailies. Thats when we had to hold their hand through it and explain to them what they were watching because theyre like, Is this a horror movie? Is this a comedy? What is it?

Potter: All the stories about them not liking what they are seeing, thats what happened. It wasnt that they didnt like the sequence. They werent sure what they were looking at.

Plec: They just had a picture of what they thought it would be and they werent seeing that in the dailies, and they were just being such assholes about it and really making Wes feel bad.

Williamson: Its not what a director needs to hear when hes shooting a movie. It just broke him.

Patrick Lussier (editor): He was very despondent a few days in when he was just like, Oh, the studio called up. Theyre very upset. They dont think its going to be good. Theyre sending me the dailies from Nightwatch and telling me it needs to look like this. He said they told him he was a TV journeyman and a hack.

Potter: The issue was they were looking at the dailies in New York, and they werent seeing what they thought was a tense sequence. It didnt look like it was going to be scary. I arranged with Patrick, Marianne, and Wes to have [the opening sequence] cut together, and set up a screening so they could see what Wes was doing.

Lussier: I cut it all together and sent it up to Wes on a VHS tape. And he watched it. He had one music note and then we conformed it on film and sent the workprint to New York.

Potter: Now keep in mind, Im confident in Wes, but theres also that 10 to 15 percent scared I am of: What if they cut this together and, oh my God, it really is bad? But they saw the pieces that we had, and Bob said to Wes, What do I know about dailies?

Plec: They were like, Oh, this is great. Youre right. Were sorry. I dont think they said, Were sorry. But they shut up.

Go here to see the original:
Your Favorite Scary Movie: The Oral History of Scream - The Ringer

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero