8) Scream (1996)
Having re-defined and then dominated slasher films in the 1980s with his A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Wes Craven was reluctant to return to the genre in the 90s. Twice he had received the Scream screenplay from Kevin Williamson (who, having previously created Dawson’s Creek had apparently lost patience with idiotic, crying teenagers and decided that killing them would be a lot more fun) and twice he had turned it down.
More specifically, Craven turned it down precisely on the basis of the opening scene, claiming that it was “too brutal.” For the man whose imagination produced a sequence in which a bloodied body bag – complete with undead corpse – is dragged down a corridor by an invisible force to reject a good-old-fashioned at-home-stabbing scene, there had to have been something spectacularly disturbing about it. And, although the rest of the script’s meta-humor and commentary on the horror genre won him over, Craven had a point.
The opening sequence of Scream basically comprises the dictionary definition of brutal, but not just because a young, pretty girl is terrorized, tortured and slaughtered. The scene takes place in a pleasant country home, at a reasonable time in the evening. Casey is trapped and invaded in the very place in which she should be safest, and her entire environment becomes the threat. In a then-failing genre, awash with straight-to-video titles and struggling sequels, the first fifteen minutes of Scream brought horror scenarios back into the realm of the possible. It brought horror closer again, it brought it near – it brought it home.
At the time of its release, Scream perhaps became most notorious on the basis that its best known star- Drew Barrymore – was killed off at the start of the movie. When Craven agreed to the project, however, Barrymore was actually signed on to play Sidney Prescott. It was Barrymore who suggested the change. She rang producer Cathy Konrad and told her that she actually wanted to play Casey, despite dying off so early. This also gave Craven chance to recreate Hitchcock’s shocking dispatch of Psycho’s only bona fide star, Janet Leigh, halfway through the film.
Craven and Barrymore began working on the character of Casey together. They wanted the shoot, which ran from a Monday to a Friday night, to run in sequence, and Barrymore didn’t want to fake any of the crying. She told Craven about something she had recently heard in the news that was guaranteed to make her cry. No one else knew the story, and Craven cracked it out whenever tears were needed. In order to give the impression of ‘hyperventilating’ in fear, Barrymore ran round and round the set.
But more was needed to create the overall suspense that would make Barrymore react organically. So Craven made the decision to keep Roger Jackson –the voice of Ghostface – away from the cast and crew at all times. Barrymore had never seen him, and he was genuinely making the phone-calls, from a completely unknown location.
On the topic of phone calls, the original pre-edit cut of this scene involved Casey at one point hysterically and repeatedly calling 911. Unfortunately however, the phone Barrymore was using was the one phone that the prop department hadn’t unplugged. Each time she dialed 911 and screamed down the phone before hanging up for the next take, the local police department were actually answering on the other end. The first the cast and crew knew of this was when the phone started ringing on its own, only for them to find a very angry set of police officers on the other end, demanding to know what the hell they were doing.
As for Ghostface himself, he very nearly had a different mask entirely from the one we all know and hate today. The location scout crew had found the Ghostface mask in a bedroom in a house they were considering as a set, but as it belonged to a Halloween costume, Craven asked the props department to make one of their own, so as to avoid the copyright problem. But the second mask just wasn’t as good, and despite still not having tracked down the makers of the original, Craven decided to take the risk and use the mask for shooting the opening scene.
When the mask designers were eventually found, they graciously gave their consent (it wasn’t like they were going to make thousands of dollars out of it or anything), and many replicas were then made for use throughout the rest of the film. Craven maintains however that the mask worn by Ghostface during the opening sequence is the original one, randomly found by someone who was (somewhat worryingly) poking around in someone’s cupboards.