Neve Campbell and the “catty” line in ‘Scream’ she didn’t want to say
When Scream emerged in 1996, the brainchild of writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, horror received a well-needed jolt of energy.
Things were starting to get stale, what with the sheer number of remakes, sequels, and repetitive entries into the genre that came to define the ‘90s. Craven, whose legacy as a horror icon had already been cemented with the likes of The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street, knew he had what it took to save the genre from complete stagnancy, with the only solution being to make something incredibly meta that would bring the horror genre’s legacy into question.
Scream emerged with references to other horror movies, including Craven’s own, with characters often poking fun at tired horror tropes, which they’d later give in to, or explicitly explaining the rules of surviving a scary movie. It was the memorable characters who formed the cast that made it such a standout, from Neve Campbell’s determined Sidney Prescott to Matthew Lillard’s Stu Macher, annoying and ultimately pathetic.
This was the first time a masked villain had so much personality in a way; Ghostface stumbles around with slapstick irrelevance, waving his knife through a crack in the door or comically falling over sofas. There was something so fresh about this self-aware film, with its punchy and endlessly quotable script courtesy of Williamson.
“No, please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!” jokes Tatum Riley, shortly before she is sandwiched between a garage door, and you can’t forget the iconic “What’s your favourite scary movie?”, which Ghostface asks Drew Barrymore’s Casey before she is brutally murdered in the opening scene, and then there’s the verbal abuse that poor cameraman Kenny is subjected to from Gale, who says things like “Move your fat tub of lard ass, now!”
Campbell’s character gets some pretty unforgettable lines, too, like when she’s facing Stu and Billy following their Ghostface reveal, resulting in her bold delivery of “You’ve gotta find me first, you pansy-ass momma’s boy!”, but there was one line she was hesitant to say, finding it a little too “catty”. The actor inevitably agreed, and the cheeky dialogue eventually came to play a full-circle meta moment later in the franchise.
When Tatum and Dewey ask Sidney who she would want to play her in a movie, the bumbling police officer offers, “I see you as a young Meg Ryan, myself”, and her response? “Thanks, Dewey, but with my luck, I’d get Tori Spelling”.
Talking about the line in Interview magazine, Campbell said, “Oh, man, so catty. But I didn’t write it, and I didn’t want to say it. I wanted to use my own name”. Spelling was never exactly considered a high-brow actor, with credits in a bunch of made-for-TV movies during the ‘90s and a long-running part on Beverly Hills, 90210, still, she couldn’t help but feel a little mean singling out the actor.
Yet, in Scream 2, when the events of the first film are dramatised in the Stab franchise, who do we see playing Sidney? Of course, it’s Spelling, appearing opposite Luke Wilson as Billy Loomis, so clearly, Spelling wasn’t too offended by the jab, taking it in her stride and assuming the meta role, much to the delight of eager fans.
