Few horror franchises have remained as relevant and enjoyable as Wes Craven’s masterful Scream series. Many credit the 1996 meta horror film with reviving the slasher genre, and spawning countless self-referential horror films in its wake. On the 25th anniversary of Scream, the Hollywood Reporter interviewed the cast and crew of the film to discuss director Wes Craven’s legacy and the cultural impact of the film.
Neve Campbell, who plays series heroine Sidney Prescott said, “I feel like the memory of making Scream doesn’t come in single moments. It comes in a feeling of an entire perfect, beautiful, fun experience which I knew would change my life somehow in a big way. And, of course, it did.”
Courtney Cox described the film as, “It was the first genre-crossing film I remember seeing. It blended comedy and horror with motifs drawn from pop culture. It was a meta masterpiece.”
But what everyone kept coming back to was working with Craven himself. Producer Marianne Maddalena said, “He was such a gentleman and a gentle man, and we were very close. We were partners for 20 years, and we decided early on that if we were going to be working all the time that we were going to make it fun. He was a genius, such an individual auteur, but just really easygoing and fun to work with.”
Campbell added, “Wes was a tall, graceful, calm man. Not the kind of figure you’d imagine would be able to think up such dark stories. He was funny and somewhat shy, yet brave and clear in vision at the same time. He pulled us into his imagination and took us for a ride.”
Matthew Lillard, who played Stu, said “For me, personally, I had a moment with him where he said to me, ‘You’re going to win an Academy Award some day.’ So as my career ebbs and flows and I have these moments of thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll never work again,’ I have this incredible touchstone of somebody I respected and revered telling me I was special. It’s those little moments that get you through the really crappy parts of this industry.”
David Arquette, who plays Sergeant Dewey, agreed, saying “The first impression is just like, ‘Wow, that’s Wes Craven?’ Because he’s so soft-spoken, and he’s so intelligent, and he just doesn’t seem like this scary figure at all. He really was a guy who just loved movies and loved scaring people. He understood the fun of being scared but being in no danger. Wes really made such an impression on me. There’s not a lot of people that have had that much of an impact on me. He sat me down during Scream 2 and just had a real father-son caring moment where he was just there for me, and gave me some really sound advice that I firmly believe kind of saved my life. My mother was passing away, and it was just a really difficult time, and he said, ‘I really want you to get yourself together, David, so you can make the most of your life and potential relationship.'”
Cathy Konrad, a producer on the film, described how making the film was like lightning in a bottle, saying “What’s always fun about these kinds of gems is that some of the best work gets done when nobody’s looking. This was little. The budget was low. A lot of the actors in it were not really known. You could fly under the radar a little bit because the stakes weren’t that high. It was a great script, but it could have gone either way. In the wrong hands, it probably wouldn’t have winked as much. Would people have understood it? I don’t know. Wes is such a great, classic storyteller that I think it really needed his classicism on top of Kevin’s postmodernism to really make it synergistically what it was.”
(via The Hollywood Reporter, image: Dimension Films)
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