The phone rings in a quiet house in Woodsboro, and a girl who has seen every horror film ever made picks it up anyway. “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Thirty years on, that question is still the most dangerous one in horror — because in this series, knowing the answer is the only weapon anybody gets. Scream is Kevin Williamson’s meta-slasher franchise — seven films where Ghostface is a costume, every entry is a whodunit, and the rules are scripture. Williamson built the first one fast and frightened: after seeing a news story about the Gainesville Ripper murders and noticing an open window while alone in a friend’s house, he wrote an 18-page treatment — the Drew Barrymore opening — under the working title Scary Movie, then the full script in three days, with outlines for two sequels attached when he sold it. The slasher genre was on life support in 1996. This is the film that sat it bolt upright, and then, a quarter-century later, did it again.
Quick Specs
- Created by: Kevin Williamson
- First film: Scream (20 December 1996)
- Films: Seven released (1996–2026); an eighth in development
- The killer: Ghostface — a costume, not a person; the wearers change every film
- The Voice: Roger L. Jackson, in all seven films
- The mask: A Fun World Halloween costume, sold in-story as “Father Death”
- Home turf: Woodsboro, California
- Studios: Dimension Films (films 1–4); Spyglass Media Group and Paramount (films 5–7)
- Worldwide gross: Over $1.1 billion across seven films
- Also: A television series (2015–2019) in a separate continuity
The Films
Scream (1996). A year after her mother Maureen’s murder, Sidney Prescott is stalked by a masked killer who taunts his victims by phone with horror trivia. The film’s founding feint is its casting: Drew Barrymore, originally set to play Sidney before her own scheduling moved her to the smaller role, is killed as Casey Becker in the opening thirteen minutes. Wes Craven directed; the killers are Billy Loomis and Stu Macher, who murdered Maureen a year earlier and framed Cotton Weary for it. It revived the slasher genre outright and stood as the highest-grossing slasher film in the world until Halloween (2018) passed it.
Scream 2 (1997). Out less than a year later: Sidney at Windsor College, a copycat in the mask, and the premiere of Stab — the film-within-the-film of the first murders — as its opening set piece. Williamson’s script leaked online during production and exposed the killers, so the finale was rewritten in haste and the cast got the last pages only on the day. The killers are Mickey Altieri, who wants fame and a headline trial, and Nancy Loomis, Billy’s mother, who wants Sidney dead. Critics scored it above the original.
Scream 3 (2000). Hollywood: a killer stalks the set of Stab 3 and lures a secluded Sidney out with photographs of her mother. Ehren Kruger wrote it from Williamson’s outline — the one deviation in the original run — and the released film has ONE killer: Roman Bridger, Sidney’s half-brother, revealed as the secret architect who pushed Billy toward the first murders. Sold as the concluding chapter, lighter in tone in the post-Columbine climate, it was the trilogy’s critical low point on release and has been reappraised since, including for its portrait of predatory Hollywood power.
Scream 4 (2011). Eleven years on, Sidney returns to Woodsboro on a book tour and her cousin Jill Roberts becomes the new centre of the target. Williamson wrote it, Craven directed — his final film; he died on 30 August 2015, aged 76 — and Jill and Charlie Walker are the killers, Jill murdering Charlie herself to stand as sole survivor. Intended to launch a new trilogy, it became the series’ commercial low point instead; its killers’ hunger for internet fame has since been widely re-read as ahead of its time.
Scream (2022). The fifth film is titled just Scream — never “Scream 5.” A requel, 25 years after the first massacre: Sam Carpenter, secretly Billy Loomis’s daughter, and her sister Tara are targeted, and Sidney, Gale and Dewey return in support. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence directed, from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick’s script. The killers are Richie Kirsch and Amber Freeman, toxic Stab fans staging a real spree to give Hollywood source material — and Dewey Riley dies in it, the revival’s defining casualty.
Scream VI (2023). New York City at Halloween, the series’ most violent register, and the first film with no Sidney: Neve Campbell declined it in June 2022, saying in her own statement that the offer “did not equate to the value I have brought to the franchise.” She is in films 1–5 and leads 7 — VI is the only one she misses. The killers are three: Wayne, Quinn and Ethan Bailey, Richie’s family, avenging him — the series high. It became the first Scream past $100 million domestic since Scream 2.
Scream 7 (2026). Sidney, now Sidney Evans — married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans, running a coffeehouse, her eldest daughter Tatum named for the friend she lost in 1996 — is hunted by a “Stu Macher” who is not Stu at all. Williamson directs for the first time in the series, co-writing with Busick. Released 27 February 2026 as the franchise’s first IMAX entry, it is simultaneously the highest-grossing and the worst-reviewed film in the series. Both halves of that sentence are the story; its production is covered below.
Ghostface: A Costume, Not a Person
Here is the engine, and the thing casual coverage keeps getting wrong: there is no Ghostface. Ghostface is a disguise — black hooded robe, white rubber mask, a voice changer producing the Voice — adopted by each film’s killers, who usually work in pairs. The counts, film by film, are 2–2–1–2–2–3–2, and they are not interchangeable: Roman Bridger works alone in Scream 3; the three Baileys are VI’s principals, though the opening kill belongs to Jason Carvey, a film student wearing the costume to start a spree of his own before the Baileys kill him; and in Scream 7 the two principals, Jessica Bowden and Marco Davis, are joined by a third wearer — Karl Gibbs, an escaped murderer Marco put in the costume for an earlier attack. Two killers, three wearers. Print it in that form.
The face itself predates the films and was never designed for them. The mask is a Fun World Halloween costume from the 1991–92 “Fantastic Faces” line, known in-house as “The Peanut-Eyed Ghost,” which producer Marianne Maddalena found during location scouting and Craven licensed. Fun World’s R.J. Torbert coined the name “GhostFace,” and Fun World owns the design and the name — which is why the mask can be licensed separately from the movies. In-story, the costume sits on store shelves in packaging labelled “Father Death.” Anyone can buy it. That is the whole thesis of the franchise in one product.
What never changes is the Voice. Roger L. Jackson has voiced Ghostface in every film, whoever is under the mask — cast in Santa Rosa after weeks of local casting, kept apart from the cast on the early films so the voice had no face, making the taunting calls live on set. He and Courteney Cox are the only performers in all seven films: Cox on screen as Gale Weathers in every entry, Jackson on the phone in every one. The weapon, for the record, is a Buck 120 hunting knife.
The Rules of the Game
Every Scream film is a whodunit wearing a slasher’s coat, and the suspects all know it. Randy Meeks, the original film-geek, names the rules for surviving a horror movie in the first film; his niece and nephew Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin inherit the job in the revival era, updating the catechism for sequels, requels and franchises. Inside the fiction, Gale Weathers’ books about the killings became the Stab films — movies-within-the-movies that later killers treat as scripture. Richie and Amber commit murder as film criticism. The Baileys run an online smear campaign before they run a knife. The motives evolve with the culture — revenge, then fame, then fandom itself — while the structure holds: a phone rings, a voice asks the question, and the audience’s real game is guessing who is under the mask this time.
The Money and the Critics
The domestic figures are the clean part: the two major trackers agree to the dollar on all seven films. Scream $103,046,663; Scream 2 $101,363,301; Scream 3 $89,143,175; Scream 4 $38,180,928; Scream (2022) $81,641,405; Scream VI $108,391,107; Scream 7 $121,935,967 — the series’ biggest domestic gross. Worldwide, the trackers part company on four of the seven, so this page prints the pair where they differ: Scream 3 $161,838,076 or $161,843,175; Scream 4 $97,138,686 or $95,989,590; Scream (2022) $138,874,789 or $139,004,531; Scream VI $169,063,850 or $169,260,163. They agree on Scream 2 ($172,363,301) and on Scream 7 ($213,835,967, the first Scream past $200 million). The honest franchise total is therefore a pair — $1,126,161,309 by one tracker’s lineage, $1,125,343,367 by the other’s — and “$1.1 billion” in prose. With Scream 7, this became the first slasher franchise past $1 billion worldwide. Two qualifiers ride with the headlines: Scream 7 is the highest-grossing Scream film in unadjusted dollars, but adjusted for inflation the 1996 original still leads the franchise by a wide margin, at roughly $354.8 million adjusted; and Scream 4 is the low point with figures, not folklore — its $38.2 million domestic is the only run in the series that failed to cover its $40 million production budget.
The critical shape, per Rotten Tomatoes figures retrieved in October 2026: Scream 2 83%, Scream 78%, Scream VI 77%, Scream (2022) 76%, Scream 4 61%, Scream 3 45%, Scream 7 30% — the floor, by a fifteen-point margin. The peaks are the bookends of the Craven era and the whole Radio Silence run; Scream 3‘s score has climbed with its reappraisal over the years; and Scream 7‘s 30% is the settled figure — an earlier 43% reading from embargo day is a news-cycle fossil, not a rival number.
Scream 7: The Sequel That Ate Its Own Production
No entry in this series cost more off-screen than the seventh. The timeline, in order: Radio Silence exited as directors in August 2023 — their Abigail schedule, stated at the time, and months before the turmoil — and Christopher Landon was hired. On 21 November 2023, Spyglass fired Melissa Barrera, the revival’s two-film lead, over her pro-Palestinian social media posts about the Gaza war. Spyglass’s stated position was “zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion”; Barrera denied her posts were antisemitic and condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia in her own statement. Both positions stand here attributed, because that is the only honest way to print them.
Jenna Ortega’s exit has three tellings, and the hub prints them as tellings: the trade report at the time gave her Wednesday season 2 schedule; later reporting suggested a salary dispute; and Ortega’s own account, given in April 2025, is the latest and fullest — “It had nothing to do with pay or scheduling. The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart.” Landon announced his exit on 23 December 2023 — “a dream job that turned into a nightmare” — and by his later account he had actually left about a week after Barrera’s firing, because the film he signed for was built around Sam Carpenter; he also says, in his account, that fans who wrongly believed he had fired Barrera sent death threats serious enough to involve the FBI. The abandoned Sam-centred version was scrapped, and the retooling that followed carried a reported cost of around $500,000 in rewrites — a single reported figure, carried here as reported and nothing stronger. In March 2024 the film was rebuilt around Sidney: Campbell announced her return, Williamson stepped behind the camera, and the daughter became the target.
And the dead stay dead. The “Stu Macher” who video-calls Sidney in Scream 7 — aged, scarred, Matthew Lillard’s likeness — is an AI deepfake fabricated by the killer Marco Davis, built on the in-world rumour that Stu survived. He did not; Stu died in 1996. The same device carries the film’s other returning faces — Dewey, Nancy Loomis, Roman Bridger — and all four characters remain dead. Sidney’s husband, for the record, is Mark Evans, played by Joel McHale; Patrick Dempsey’s Detective Mark Kincaid from Scream 3 was reported in talks in 2024 and did not return. Two different Marks. Lillard, for his part, said in September 2026 that he felt “ashamed” about returning after Barrera’s firing and regretted not weighing her situation first — his words, and the divisions in this cast are part of the film’s permanent record now.
The Television Series: A Separate Woodsboro
The TV series is its own continuity and never touches the films. MTV’s Scream (2015–16) is set in Lakewood around Emma Duval, and its killer, the Lakewood Slasher, wears a redesigned mask — the film mask was a licensing problem, its rights sitting with Fun World outside the TV deal — voiced by Mike Vaughn. Ghostface proper, the real mask and Jackson’s voice, arrives only in the third season, Scream: Resurrection (VH1, 2019), a reboot set in Atlanta. Craven was an executive producer on the series and died during its first season; the season finale carries a tribute to him. Nothing in the series is canon to the films, and none of its killers belong in the film counts above.
Where the Franchise Stands
Seven films, over $1.1 billion, one costume. An eighth film is in development: announced 31 March 2026, with sisters Lilla and Nora Zuckerman writing. No director, cast or date has been announced, and Williamson has said he will not direct it. Barrera has said she would return to the franchise only if Spyglass no longer held it — her stated position, attributed, with no deal and no indication of one. What the series has always sold is not a killer but a question, asked down a phone line by a voice that never changes, aimed at characters who have seen all the same films you have. The mask is on a store shelf. Somebody new is always about to buy it.