From debut author Ashley Cullins, the definitive story of the Its been nearly three decades since Drew Barrymore''s iconic scream first pierced through the night, popcorn burning abandoned on the stove, blood soaking her beige sweater and blonde bob, but In Perfect for fans of <Scream<, horror movies, and general film buffs, this is the story of how a little movie about a ghost-faced killer terrorizing highschoolers overcame countless obstacles to become a historic success that still has audiences screaming over thirty years later.

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Ashley Cullins is an award-winning entertainment journalist with over a decade of experience. After graduating with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School, Ashley began her career in broadcast news before making the jump to print. Your Favorite Scary Movie is her first book.

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**INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The ultimate story of the Scream movie franchise, featuring interviews from more than eighty key players and an in-depth exploration of the creation and legacy of the films that revived a dying genre

**In Your Favorite Scary Movie, entertainment journalist Ashley Cullins examines the making and impact of the Scream films with behind-the-scenes insight from cast, creators, and crew, as well as sharp analysis on how the movies’ special blend of gruesome violence and humorous self-awareness rewrote the horror playbook. This intimate and thorough history includes brand-new interviews from Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Kevin Williamson, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Jack Quaid, Parker Posey, Hayden Panettiere, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Radio Silence, Roger L. Jackson, and so many more.

Perfect for fans of Scream, horror lovers, and cinephiles, this is the story of how a little movie about a ghost-faced killer terrorizing high schoolers overcame countless obstacles to become an historic success that still has audiences screaming to this day.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Rewriting
Horror

Scream is a love letter to scary movies, written by a disenchanted admirer who knew that the genre wasn't living up to its potential. Seeing Halloween as a kid was a defining moment for Kevin Williamson. So, when he made it to Hollywood, he took horror into his own hands. Determined to re-create that feeling, Williamson poured his frustration and passion onto the page. The result was not just a great slasher but something truly iconic.

Scream not only changed his life and career but altered the trajectory of the horror genre. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine that anyone was surprised by its impact, but the movie that is now a global phenomenon and has sparked a billion-dollar franchise started as a low-budget project from a fledgling studio that was written by a novice and starred a mostly unknown cast-and no one who was involved, even the most optimistic among them, had any idea they were about to become part of the zeitgeist.

Least of all Williamson, who was a struggling screenwriter back in 1995. He'd already sold a script, sure, but it was languishing in development hell, and he was broke.

"I had sold Killing Mrs. Tingle to Interscope with Joe Dante attached to direct," recalls Williamson, who took a job as a personal assistant to a director to make ends meet. "It was a very, very little option. I think it was $75,000, which sounds like a lot of money, but I was about $100,000 in debt. It was so sad because I thought I had made it-and, no, I had not made it. I was in West Hollywood in a rent-controlled apartment for $650 a month and it got hard to pay that bill, believe it or not."

Determined to make it as a writer, Williamson went back to the drawing board.

"I was trying to come up with another movie to write because Tingle wasn't getting made," he says. "No one was making good horror movies. So, I wrote the movie I wanted to see."

That movie was Scream, an unexpected and updated take on a slasher flick that simultaneously celebrated and satirized the films that came before it.

How Williamson wrote the genre-bending film has become lore over the decades.

As the story goes, he holed up in a condo in Palm Springs and hammered out the screenplay in just three days. "That's sort of an urban legend at this point but, yeah, it's true," Williamson says before clarifying, "I wrote an outline first, though."

The genesis of the story dates back even further.

A lifelong horror fan, Williamson had become hooked on storytelling as a kid thanks to his mother's Doubleday Book Club copy of Peter Benchley's Jaws-which was confiscated by a teacher in elementary school who thought it wasn't age appropriate. He stood in line for four hours at a small-town Texas movie theater when Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation first came out but it was a full house, and he was turned away. The next day he went back and waited even longer. "I got in, and I was in the front row," Williamson says. "I just loved the adrenaline and the way everyone reacted to that film."

After Jaws sparked Williamson's interest in movies, seeing John Carpenter's Halloween set it ablaze. "The way everyone kept screaming at the screen, the way everyone was saying, 'Don't drop the knife, don't drop the knife,' all of those things that make that film so memorable, I loved it. I went back and saw it again and again and again," Williamson says. "I knew I wanted to do that with my life. I wanted to make people feel that way."

Williamson pursued that passion at East Carolina University, where he studied theater. "In college, I had written this comedy, a one-act play, about a young girl babysitting," Williamson recalls. "She gets this creepy call and they start discussing all the tropes of horror films. It was this forty-page mess of ideas, and I never even mounted it in college. A few people read it, and then I put it away as if I'd never written it. I totally forgot about it."

Years later, while he was living in L.A. doing odd jobs and trying to break into Hollywood, a true-crime story caught his attention. He was home alone, house-sitting for a friend in Westwood and watching a prime-time news special about Danny Rolling, a Florida serial killer dubbed the Gainesville Ripper. "It was the most gruesome story I had ever heard. It was so horrific the way that he would break into their back doors with a screwdriver," Williamson remembers. "These unsuspecting people, he would just sit outside and listen to them on the phone. Then, when they'd get off the phone, he'd wait for them to go to sleep. It was terrifying."

It's not exactly the kind of story you want to discover while alone in a strange house-especially when you've got the imagination of a prolific screenwriter. "I remember getting so scared that night," Williamson says. "And I walked into the family room and the window was open. I was like, 'Wait, that window was closed. What is it doing open?' I was trying to call the homeowner and say, 'Did you leave your window open? Has it been open for three days and I've never noticed?'"

When he couldn't get ahold of him, he dialed his friend David before investigating further. "I was like, 'Okay, there is a window open in the house. I think someone's in the house.' He goes, 'Well, get out of the house!' I grabbed a knife and I started walking around, checking under the bed and behind the shower curtain, and he was on the phone with me to keep me company," Williamson says. "He was being a jerk and going, 'Kill kill kill kill.' He goes, 'Yeah, Michael Myers.' I'm like, 'No, that's Jason Voorhees.' And we got into this whole discussion about horror films."

Once Williamson was satisfied there was no intruder and relief set in, a lightbulb went off: "I thought, 'I'll deconstruct the horror film the way that Stephen Sondheim d…