Scream (1996) is Wes Craven’s slasher film, written by Kevin Williamson, about a masked killer who stalks the teenagers of the small town of Woodsboro, California, and who knows every horror movie rule by heart. The film both mocks the clichés of Halloween, Friday the 13th and Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street and puts them to work. It introduced Ghostface and the franchise’s lasting heroine, Sidney Prescott. It also revived a genre that many people in Hollywood had written off as dead.
At a glance
| Release date | December 20, 1996 (US; premiere in Los Angeles December 18) |
| Director | Wes Craven |
| Writer | Kevin Williamson |
| Starring | David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, Drew Barrymore |
| Runtime | 111 minutes |
| Rating | R (MPAA), after an initial NC-17 |
| Budget | $14 million to $15 million |
| Box office | $103 million in the US and Canada; about $173 million worldwide |
| Franchise | Scream (six sequels through Scream 7 in 2026, plus a TV series) |
Plot summary
The film opens with high school student Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore), home alone, answering the phone. A friendly chat about scary movies turns into a deadly trivia game. A year after her mother’s murder, Casey’s classmate Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) becomes the masked killer’s next target, as Woodsboro’s police and the press, led by the ambitious TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), descend on the town. Suspicion falls on Sidney’s boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich), on his friend Stu (Matthew Lillard) and on almost everyone else.
Video-store clerk Randy (Jamie Kennedy) spells out “the rules” of surviving a horror movie, while Deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) tries to keep his sister Tatum (Rose McGowan) and her friends safe. Everything comes to a head at a house party on the night school closes.
Spoiler section: the ending
At the party, Billy and Stu turn out to be working together as Ghostface. Billy reveals that they killed Sidney’s mother a year earlier, after learning of her affair with his father, and they planned to frame Sidney’s father for the new murders. Gale returns in time to distract them. Sidney turns their game against them and kills Stu, and when Billy lunges at them one last time, just as Randy warned, Sidney shoots him. At dawn, Gale reports on the night’s events.
Production and behind the scenes
In 1994, Williamson was a struggling screenwriter. While house-sitting, he watched a documentary about the serial killer Danny Rolling, the “Gainesville Ripper,” and later that night he got spooked by an open window. That experience became the opening scene. His script, then titled Scary Movie, set off a bidding war among several studios. He accepted Dimension Films’ offer, reportedly between $400,000 and $500,000, because Bob Weinstein promised to start production right away. Harvey Weinstein later suggested the title Scream, after the Michael and Janet Jackson song.
Filming began on April 15, 1996, with a budget of $14 million, largely in and around Santa Rosa, California, with Healdsburg’s town square doubling as Woodsboro. Producer Marianne Maddalena found the mask while scouting locations. It was a design made for the novelty company Fun World, which had first sold it in 1991. The Weinsteins disliked it and had parts of the opening reshot with alternative masks, but Craven kept the Fun World design. Ghostface’s voice, Roger L. Jackson, was kept out of sight of the actors during the phone calls and never met the cast in person. The MPAA first rated the film NC-17. Craven trimmed some violence and argued that the film worked as satire, and it received an R.
Release and reception
Dimension released Scream on December 20, 1996, as holiday counterprogramming, a choice the cast and crew disliked. Its marketing presented Barrymore as the star so that her early death would shock audiences. The film opened fourth, with $6.4 million, and some at the studio feared a flop. Word of mouth kept it in the top ten for nine weeks. It grossed $103 million in North America and about $173 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing slasher film of all time until Halloween (2018).
Reviews were generally positive. Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli and Owen Gleiberman praised how well it knew horror conventions, and David Ansen said it “puts some fun back into a very tired genre.” It won Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Campbell and Best Writing for Williamson, and it was named Best Movie at the MTV Movie Awards. Today it holds a 78% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 66.
Legacy and influence
Scream is credited with popularizing self-aware, meta horror and with reviving mainstream horror after the genre had stagnated in the early 1990s. It led to a wave of teen horror that included I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), also written by Williamson. Randy’s “rules” became a lasting pop-culture reference, and later slashers such as Freaky and the Fear Street trilogy have been described as updating its formula. Scream 2 followed in 1997. Ehren Kruger wrote Scream 3 (2000), Williamson and Craven reunited for Scream 4 (2011), and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett revived the series with Scream (2022). Williamson himself directed Scream 7 (2026).
Trivia
- Craven has a cameo as Fred the janitor, a nod to his own Freddy Krueger.
- Henry Winkler plays Principal Himbry as a favor to Craven, since they shared an agent. Linda Blair of The Exorcist appears as a pushy reporter.
- The Santa Rosa school board refused to let the production film at Santa Rosa High School, and the end credits say: “No thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa city school district governing board.”
- Williamson’s script killed off both Dewey and Randy. The filmmakers shot alternate scenes in which they survive, in case test audiences liked them.
- The climax at Stu’s party runs about 42 minutes on screen. It took three weeks of night shoots to film.
- Sony sued over the title, claiming it was too close to its film Screamers (1995). The case was settled out of court.
Related links
- Ghostface and Sidney Prescott (characters)
- Scream (franchise)
- Scream 2 (1997) and Scream (2022)
- Wes Craven (director) and Kevin Williamson (writer)
- Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Drew Barrymore (cast)
- Psycho (1960), whose early killing of its star inspired Scream‘s opening
