Vince Vaughn Almost Starred inScream:20 Things You Didn't Know About the Teen Horror Classic

Mar. 15, 2025

‘Scream’ (1996).Photo:Miramax/Kobal/Shutterstock

Miramax/Kobal/Shutterstock

In addition to being a stone-cold slasher classic, we have 1996’sScreamto thank for many things. It codified the rules for horror movies for future generations, revitalized the career of late legendary filmmakerWes Craven, launched 1,000 film school lectures on meta-textualism, coined an annoying new voice for people to imitate (“What’s your favorite scary movie!?”), and generally did for phones whatPsychodid for showers.

It’s also the movie that launchedNeve Campbellinto the cinematic stratosphere as Sidney Prescott, who goes hand-to-hand with the masked ‘n’ murderous Ghostface. In addition to haunting our dreams in perpetuity, the ghoulish white mask will be a staple of Halloween costumes forevermore — yet another thing we owe this wildly innovative and stylish entry into the scary movie canon.

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The story ofScreambegins with a man namedKevin Williamson. After graduating from college in North Carolina in the late ‘80s, he moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He got a small part on the soap operaAnother Worldin 1990 before moving to Los Angeles in 1991 and picking up small roles in projects likeIn Living Color, music videos, and films like 1994’sDirty Moneyand 1993’sHot Ticket.

He then began taking screenwriting classes at UCLA, writing a script calledKilling Mrs. Tingle(later retitledTeaching Mrs. Tingle) that was picked up in 1995 but wasn’t produced until after the success ofScream. The titular teacher was based on Williamson’s less-than-pleasant experience with an educator who told him he had no hope of ever becoming a writer.

ButScreamhelped pave the way for bigger projects on Williamson’s résumé. Fearful that the film was going to flop,he toldThe Ringer, “I said yes to a lot of stuff before the movie came out.Dawson’s Creekwas happening. AndI Know What You Did Last Summerwas happening. And they sent me the script forThe Faculty, like, on the set ofScream.”

This string of hits ensured that Williamson’s tone and dialogue would mold the next decade of teen-related horror, concurrently with Joss Whedon’s run onBuffy the Vampire Slayer. He would also later go on to create a bloodsucking property of his own:The Vampire Diaries.

Williamson was house-sitting in Palm Springs when he watched the March 9, 1994, episode of the ABC news seriesTurning Point,chronicaling the Gainesville Ripper, who murdered five college students in Florida over four days in August 1990.

“During the commercial break, I heard a noise and I had to go search the house,” Williamson told CNN in 1998. “I went into the living room and a window was open. And I’d been in this house for two days. I’d never noticed the window open. So I got really scared. So I went to the kitchen, got a butcher knife, got the mobile phone, [and] I called a buddy of mine.”

That buddy, David Blanchard, also told CNN: “[Kevin was] looking under the beds. He’s going out to the garage and looking in the garage. I’m like, ‘Well, don’t go outside. If you go outside, you’re going to go outside and the killer is going to sneak in the door while you’re outside.’ And [Williamson] was like, ‘What do you mean? What do you mean, the killer?’ "

The pair’s conversation drifted to the iconic slasher stars of their youth, but Williamson told CNN, “I went to bed that night so spooked I was having nightmares and I woke up at like three or four in the morning, and I started writing the opening scene toScream.”

3. The early script forScreamwas initially intended to be a one-act play.

Williamson didn’t even have a full-length feature in mind when he started writing in the middle of the night.

“What people don’t know is that [the] opening … I wrote it as a one-act play,” he toldComicBookin 2021. “It was just a young character on the phone talking to us, but could it be a killer outside? That morphed into the opening scene toScream.”

Williamson worked quickly and banged out the rest of the script in three days.

4.Screamwas legendary horror director Wes Craven’s comeback after vowing to quit the genre following the failure ofVampire in Brooklynstarring Eddie Murphy.

Julie Plec, Craven’s assistant at the time, toldThe Ringer, “Vampire in Brooklyncame out and was kind of a disaster. And that made him sad. So he wasn’t in any hurry to jump back into it, into his own genre.”

Producer Marianne Maddalenasaid that Craventold her he “wanted to get out of the horror ghetto.”

“A couple of months later he read it again and they had attached [Drew] Barrymore and he just felt like, well, why not?” she continued toThe Hollywood Reporter. “He really enjoyed that work and he knew he was good at it, so he never thought twice about it once he accepted the job.”

5. Drew Barrymore was initially considered for the lead role of Sidney Prescott — and so were Reese Witherspoon and Brittany Murphy.

With the lead role of Sidney Prescott vacated production began their search for a new star.Vinessa ShawofHocus PocusandReese Witherspoonwere considered, but 19-year-old Witherspoon looked much younger than the rest of the cast. Williamson’s first choice was ‘80s teen movie royaltyMolly Ringwald, but she turned it down, saying that (at age 27) she was too old to play a high schooler.

The final choices came down to Alicia Witt (then of the sitcomCybill),Brittany Murphyand Campbell. But Williamson toldTHR, “By the time we got to the screen test process, we all wanted Neve. So I remember we front-loaded the reel. We put her first so that everyone had to top her. No one did. She was Sidney. It was so obvious.”

6. Vince Vaughn was initially eyed for the leading male role that went to Skeet Ulrich.

“I just remember thinking, ‘What are they doing? Don’t they know?’ “he toldEntertainment Weeklyin 2021. “Like, ‘This isn’t funny. This isn’t supposed to be funny.’ And man, was I wrong.”

7. Wes Craven told Skeet Ulrich to hit Matthew Lillard with a phone in the climactic scene, and Lillard’s angry reaction is authentic.

In Ulrich’s defense, Lillard admits that his maniacal performance at the film’s end is 100 percent scenery-chewing.He toldVulture, “We were crazy! If I ever saw somebody do that on a set, I’d be like, ‘Dude, bring it down 58 percent.’ "

Lillard has one of the film’s most hilarious ad-libs when Ulrich throws a cordless phone at him — which wasn’t in the script — and Lillard genuinely reacts, “You hit me with the phone, dick!” Ulrich alleges Craven told him to do that to see what Lillard would do.

8. Matthew Lillard and Skeet Ulrich’s characters are (possibly) queer-coded.

Williamson came out to his friends and family in 1992, and he toldPrideSourcein 2022 that at the time, he was “very hesitant to present the gay side of me in my work,” resulting in the queerness of characters Billy and Stu being “a little coded and maybe accidental.” Looking back, he told the site, “[Now,] maybe I’d be braver. Maybe I wouldn’t be that shy little gay writer who felt like he couldn’t get away with it.”

Williamson elaborated on the queer readings of the genre: “It’s always the survival tales that connect us … I think that’s one of the reasons Final Girls are so important to us as a gay audience.”

Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy, Matthew Lillard in Scream (1996).Miramax/Kobal/Shutterstock

Prior toScream, he said he related toJamie Lee CurtisinHalloween, because, “I know what it’s like. I think gay kids everywhere understand that survival element that we have to sort of create in ourselves. And when we’re watching that Final Girl have to prove herself and rise to the challenge and save her life, I think that’s something gay kids anywhere can relate to.”

Lillard, with much less subtlety, addressed the rumorsat Seattle Comic-Con in 2023. “Stu and Billy were definitely gay,” he proclaimed. “I said it at the 20th anniversary with Kevin [Williamson], the screenwriter. Somebody asked, ‘Are they gay?’ I was like, ‘They are definitely gay, right Kevin?’ And Kevin was like, ‘Probably.’ So that’s my take.”

9. Rose McGowan deliberately dyed her brown hair blonde to contrast with Neve Campbell — and chose her own wardrobe.

“I hated that color,“McGowan later admitted toEntertainment Weekly.“But it was perfect for the role … I immediately went down in the social strata of dating. From a sociological perspective, it was actually fascinating. Any guy that I liked wouldn’t give me the time of day. Anybody who had a jacked-up pickup truck was all over me. It was hilarious.”

“[Bergstrom] goes, ‘They’re very now,’ and I looked at her and said, ‘They’re very never,’ and walked out of the room,”McGowan toldElle. After flagging down a cab, McGowan headed to the nearest mall, where she bought  “quadruple of everything,” selecting cloud pajamas, a lime-green turtleneck sweater and the other pieces that made up her character’s wardrobe.

10. Courteney Cox and David Arquette started dating on the set ofScream, and their burgeoning romance charmed the cast.

Lillard and Campbell weren’t the only couple to come out ofScream.David Arquette, cast as good-natured if ineffectual deputy Dewey, metCourteney Coxat the first read. Though Dewey was written as more of a dumb jock, Arquette decided to play the character as a frustrated John Wayne-wannabe whose authority is constantly being undercut, and he’s said he was excited to act with Cox — who played the craven tabloid journalist Gale Weathers.

Courteney Cox and David Arquette in Scream (1996).Miramax/Kobal/Shutterstock

She was less enthused: “When we all got cast, Wes had us out at his house,” Arquette toldThe Ringer. “I saw Courteney and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m playing Dewey.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, I heard about you,’ or something like that. She gave me some real attitude.”

Nevertheless, the pair got together over the course of filming. Kennedy toldEntertainment Weekly: “We had a table read, and their characters just had a lot of interaction. And I just said, ‘Jesus, that’s really good chemistry.’ Afterwards, we were going home to the airport … so we all shared a limo … And it was literally like, ‘Okay, that wasn’t acting.’ … It was actually very beautiful. It was very nice to see people fall in love.”

Cox and Arquette got married in 1999 and had a daughter, though theyultimately split in 2013.

11. The voice of Ghostface did his calls with the cast live in the room with his “victims” while watching them from a hidden place on the set — leading to some extra creepy improvised lines.

Roger L. Jackson has voiced the killer in every single entry in theScreamfranchise. He initially auditioned with Barrymore, who wanted a real actor to play against.

“I was working as a voice actor living in San Francisco, and went in for the audition along with a lot of other people,” Jackson toldThe Ringer. “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 they’re looking for a new Freddy Krueger.’ And in reading over the scene, I thought, ‘This is not Freddy Krueger. This is very subtle.'”

Jackson’s read on the voice was something more seductive than scary. “I knew it had to be a sexy voice and something interesting enough to keep the girl on the phone,“he added toVICEof the Ghostface voice. “Even though she clearly wants to hang up. He sounds interesting. There’s this texture and erotic color to his voice. It’s like a cat that seems sweet and playful, but then all of a sudden the paw comes down onto the mouse’s tail. I wanted the voice to change color as Ghostface goes in for the kill, sort of like a cat does.”

Jackson was kept isolated from the cast during the production but always did his scenes live, which meant the actors knew someone was watching them as they talked, but didn’t know who or from where. For the opening scene, shot on location at an actual house, he was “outside one of [the] windows, crouching in the shadows and taking shelter under a canopy because it was raining outside.”

“I was watching Drew [Barrymore] through the window while I was on this cell phone that was completely mic’d up,” he said. “It was a live conversation. My view was what the killer’s would have been. It was genius.”

Craven gave Jackson leeway to adapt lines on the spot, and even come up with new dialogue altogether.

“He let me improvise so I could be really creative,” Jackson recalled. “I remember I said something not in the script, like: ‘Have you ever felt a knife cut through human flesh and scrape the bone underneath?’ Another one I was proud of was when I told Neve that I would cut out her eyelids so she couldn’t blink while I stabbed her to death.”

12. Drew Barrymore thought of a heartbreaking true-life story about a dog when she wanted to summon real tears.

The opening scene took five days of night shoots to capture and was more or less shot in sequence. When Barrymore and Craven sat down to plot it out, they came up with an interesting strategy to draw real tears out of the actress.

“We couldn’t have been more on the same page,“she toldEntertainment Weekly.“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 I’m 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 tears — it didn’t work for hyperventilating. I would still have to run around a lot.”

13. There was drama over the creation and credit of the iconic Ghostface mask.

But while Fun World legally owned the design, it was a team effort from a group of talented artists, many of whom gathered at a party on Halloween to show off their work.

“My costume idea was an advanced take on the classic Halloween costume of a bedsheet with eye holes for a ghost, which integrated a formed buckram ghost face mask with a long jaw,” Loren Gitthens, a special effects makeup artist working in Los Angeles at Tony Gardner’s Alterian Studios, recalled toFangoria Magazine. ”During a slow period for movie work, the company decided to make a collection of Halloween masks and self-market them.”

In 1991, Gitthens and fellow Alterian artist Jim Eusterman drove cross-country to the annual Halloween trade show in Chicago, the largest event of its kind in the U.S., to promote their line of masks. Within months of that show, Fun World gave a brand-new in-house designer, Brigitte Sleiertin-Liden, marching orders to essentially copy the Alterian designs.

“I was given a picture of something similar to what the finished masks would eventually look like,” she toldFangoria, “[and] was asked if I thought these could be made as masks and to do some drawings with a similar look and feel. So I did a bunch of sketches of different faces with that same white, melty face with simplistic black facial feature shapes.”

Gitthens was surprised when, a year or two later, he came across what appeared to be his own design while shopping. “I was in a drugstore and saw Fun World’s mass-produced, knock-off versions of my ‘Wailer,’ ” Gitthens toldFangoria. “Clearly, it appeared to be a direct rendering of my original creation. I was a bit amused but didn’t pursue looking into it any further as I had left that part of my life behind and was on to a new one.”

“I really enjoyed the movie and thought it was a great compliment that ‘Wailer’ was up there on the big screen and in such a great film,” he toldFangoria. “I was a bit naive at the time and assumed that since it had been years since we created the mask, there would be no way to fight for it. I also assumed that the movie was a one-time deal and that the ship had already sailed.”

He was correct: In 1996, presumably in response to Dimension Films licensing the design forScream, Fun World trademarked the design and named it “Ghostface.”

14. The production got into a feud with the town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and took a dig at them in the film’s credits.

TheScreamproduction wanted to use Santa Rosa’s high school as well, and claim that they got a verbal agreement from the principal, which they based their shooting schedule around. But they never made it.

First, the city claimed that the crew hadn’t filed the proper paperwork, and after that had been resolved, the school reneged on its supposed offer, saying it conflicted with final exams.

The movie was relocated to the Sonoma Community Center, with entire scenes rewritten to accommodate the switch. Craven was already at odds with Dimension Films about budget and production matters, so the extra expenses were not appreciated. He estimated the move cost production $350,000. This is perhaps why the end credits of the film include a very pointed message: “No thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City School District Governing Board.”

15. David Arquette made a nightclub for the cast in his hotel room.

Because of the relative isolation of Northern California from Hollywood, the cast bonded easily during the shoot. Many had fond memories of staying at the DoubleTree Hotel, mostly because they had fresh-baked cookies daily.

“I know it sounds stupid, but it was just so good,” Kennedy recalled toThe Ringer. “Every day I felt like I had a little treat. If I did a good scene, I’d eat my cookie.”

Campbell remembered, “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 ‘David’s Bar’ or ‘David’s Club’ or something.”

While the crew grappled with the logistical headaches, the actors dealt with their own special kind of discomfort.

“Literally, they wouldn’t wash my costume,” Campbell toldThe Ringer. “I would take it off in the morning, and then in the evening when I went back to work — because the continuity of the blood had to be the same — they would just wet it. They would dampen the blood. I wanted to burn that costume at the end of the movie.”

“In the scene with Skeet and Matt when I’m against the counter and they’re about to kill me, I’m about to get my strength, [Wes] came up and he just whispered in my ear, he said, ‘Imagine you’ve got 1,000 bullets ricocheting through your body,’ and he walked away,” she told the outlet.

Ulrich added, “Courteney came to the set, getting ready to shoot it, and Matt and I are like caged animals, in that zone, and just pacing the set. Courteney comes in, and we make eye contact, and Wes is like, ‘Okay, all right. All right.’ She’s freaked out, and we’re not even filming yet. And I distinctly remember Wes being like, ‘All right, guys. Just calm down for a second.’ "

17. Skeet Ultrich was badly hurt during the final scene.

The finale also had a very real scare for Ulrich: He’d had open-heart surgery as a child, and it left him with a spot on his chest with a stainless steel wire extremely sensitive to touch. Though he was padded up for when Campbell hits him with an umbrella, the second stab accidentally connected with the spot, and his pain reaction is visible.

18. The MPAA wanted to giveScreaman NC-17 rating — but not for the reason you’d expect.

Production predictably had to battle the MPAA over certain gory aspects of the film. The ratings board sent it back nine times as NC-17 before allowing it to go out with an R. Surprisingly, one of the biggest points of contention was actually a portion of the dialogue.

19. The film was originally going to be calledScary Moviebefore changing it toScream— which resulted in a lawsuit.

The film was still titledScary Movieuntil late in production, when the Weinsteins of Miramax insisted on rechristening it toScream, which prompted a quickly settled lawsuit from Sony Pictures claiming it infringed on their copyright of 1995’sScreamer.

Most people actually hated the title, though a few did begrudgingly admit that it tied in with the Edvard Munch painting the mask resembled quite well.

20.Screamhelped popularize Caller ID … for obvious reasons.

source: people.com