The sinister real-life murders that inspired Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’
Credited with breathing new life into a genre that had become a limp caricature of itself, when Wes Craven delivered the first entry in the Scream franchise in 1996, very few could have predicted how impactful it would turn out to be. Tussling with A Nightmare on Elm Street for the title of his finest work, together with his other efforts such as 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, Scream‘s satire of the slasher genre sees Craven rightly hailed as one of the most crucial figures in horror cinema.
The series follows primary protagonist Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell, who is tormented for years by the original Ghostface killer and then a string of copycats. Satirising overdone tropes of the horror and slasher genres, the Scream movies remain ingenious examples of how a director can keep an audience immersed by toying with them and tampering with the configuration of their relationship to the screen.
For instance, Scream contains characters who are aware of horror films in the real world, so Craven attempts to subvert the expected cliches. Hilarious, frightening and surprising, it’s no real surprise that a sixth sequel is scheduled be released for this year.
Cult films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Identity, and arguably, even Hot Fuzz draw on Wes Craven’s Scream series, with its hallmarks ubiquitous across the horror genre today. From the explicit to more subtle methods, it’s an interesting prospect to consider modern horror without the late Craven series.
Interestingly, the idea for Scream originated with screenwriter Kevin Williamson and drew heavily on the story of a real – and extremely terrifying – serial killer he heard about on television. At the time of writing, Williamson was only an aspiring screenwriter, ironically developing the script under the title of Scary Movie. However, coming across the programme would be the making of Williamson and change modern horror.
As revealed in the Behind the Scream documentary from 2000’s Ultimate Scream Collection, one night when Williamson was working on his project, he was housesitting for a friend. There, he caught a news segment about The Gainesville Ripper – real name Danny Rolling – who savagely murdered eight victims. Notably, five of these were college students, as they would go on to be in Scream. In the most unsettling parallel between the murders and the films, like Ghostface, Rolling had a penchant for posing his victims after mutilating them.
“They were unique to their time,” Williamson said when reflecting on the series to the Independent in 2021. “Scream was a new way of doing a horror film, a deconstruction. And everyone on Dawson’s Creek spoke like pop psychologists, but they were very much talking about real things. Despite the Nineties sheen it has, it also has a bunch of honesty. That was the magic of it.”
