Freddy Krueger may have ruled the ’80s, but the ’90s belonged to Ghostface. When Wes Craven‘s inaugural Scream installment slashed across screens on Dec. 20,1996, it made an instant icon out of its knife-wielding murderer and opened the door for a new generation of self-aware slasher movies and imitators. That first movie also launched a billion-dollar franchise that spawned six sequels (and counting) plus a TV series, not to mention an ongoing parody franchise.
But that first Scream remains a generational touchstone, boosting the careers of such ’90s touchstones as Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, and Jamie Kennedy. The latter three — plus Lee Waddell, the stuntman who wore the Ghostface costume for much of the movie — reunited at New York Comic Con on Friday for a 30th anniversary panel that celebrated what they created in partnership with Craven, who died in 2015.
“He had a way of welcoming us in and appreciating what we do, and so any of his direction just felt like you were partners with him,” remembered Ulrich, who played Billy Loomis — one of the two original killers to wear the Ghostface mask. “He had a gentleness. He was incredibly funny, incredibly kind. So it was very relaxed for such a crazy movie for us. He had great ideas for scenes. I remember specifically, when Neve and I were consummating our relationship upstairs at the party, he came over and whispered in my ear to think about my relationship with [Billy’s] mother and let that influence the scene.”
“He was really incredible at letting us get one as written, and then letting us play,” added Lillard, who played the other O.G. Ghostface, Stu Macher. “There’s a confidence in that kind of filmmaking. I just feel that courage allowed that movie to breathe, and you get all these performances. If you take any single one of us out of this film, the film is completely different. If you don’t hire Jamie Kennedy, if you don’t hire Rose [McGowan], if you don’t hire Neve, Courteney [Cox], all of us… it’s like this Jenga tower that perfectly worked in that moment.”
Ulrich recalled unintentionally hitting Lillard with a phone during one shot, and the latter’s shocked reaction was genuine. Craven loved it. “When you’re filming, you’ve got to shoot it 15 different times and different angles, so I got to hit him with a phone a lot,” Ulrich said. “But that reaction was priceless.”
“I have thoughts about that,” Lillard mused. “I mean, you hit me with a phone, you’re a fucking dick. But you look at Neve’s performance in that kitchen, by the time we got to that last sequence I was so enamored with her as a person, as a friend, as an actor. Neve was rising to a pitch of 10 and running for her life for weeks on end.
“I have a very clear memory of the three of us – Skeet, myself, and Neve – covered in [sticky] blood,” the Carrie star added. “There were no phones back then, so we literally were sitting in our respective corners and playing with the blood on our hands like insane people. It was because we had been living at a 10 in the middle of the night for weeks on end. If you look at Neve having done that now for [almost six] films, she’s a remarkable final woman.”
While Ulrich had a few films under his belt when he landed his Scream role, he had never played a bad guy. “He was a very duplicitous character, so I had to learn new things in terms of his psychotic nature and how to portray that as convincingly as possible,” the actor said. He learned to set aside notions of people being black and white and embracing middle ground. “He lived in that middle ground, so for a bad guy I came up with all the reasons why he’s doing this. He was righteous in what his mission was.”
The actors had hotel suites with a bedroom and a living room. Ulrich transformed his living room into Billy Loomis’s high school room complete with black lights and posters. Being nearly a decade older than his onscreen character, he wanted to revisit those earlier days.
“I was listening to Skinny Puppy and Ministry, and definitely did a lot of research [on serial killers],” Ulrich continued. “In my mind, [Scream] was a documentary about two high school serial killers. Then I show up and Matt’s making jokes, and I’m like, ‘Wait, this is not the tone I was thinking of.’ What worked was just in what Wes’s genius had, and Kevin Williamson, and all these vibrant personalities. He allowed us to bring all that to play. It was definitely one of the seminal moments in my career.”
Unlike his younger castmates, Waddell had a long history with Craven extending back to being a stuntman on the first Nightmare On Elm Street movie, and he recalled how the director trusted him from the get-go. Waddell had also worked with Drew Barrymore before and said that was part of the reason he got that opening scene where Ghostface pursues and murders her.
“We were going to have fun regardless because Wes was fun, he had a dry sense of humor,” Waddell explained. “He had a wide lane, and as long as I didn’t go outside those lines he’d let me play a little bit and develop and bounce ideas off. Even as a stunt guy you could do that, not just as an actor, so I really appreciated that.”
Filming the opening sequence proved to be more challenging than Waddell initially thought. They had set the character of Ghostface, what he was about and how he moved.
“It didn’t really occur to me the difficulty until I put all that on and we go to actually shoot that opening sequence,” Wadell admitted. “I’m like, ‘Man, I can’t see shit in this mask. I can’t run in this robe.’ All these different elements. I threw a couple of tricks in there and it worked out.”
Lillard notes that he and Ulrich have adopted a moniker of “the first husbands of horror” due to the impact they amde on audiences. “Who knew that we were the coming out for so many people?” he said. “People approach us all the time, like ‘You are my queer awakening’. I just want to say that, for us, it’s super powerful that our relationship to these characters has nothing to do with them being gay. But if it means something to a kid out there somewhere who’s like, ‘I feel seen in this relationship,’ then it’s important for us to hold that space for this idea that these are queer icons. We were not doing queer on the day, but we’re here for it 30 years later.”
“A lot of people come up to me and say that Scream is their comfort movie,” Kennedy revealed. “And I say to them, ‘Who hurt you?’ I didn’t realize the impact of my death. It’s really affected a lot of people, and I appreciate it, but tell me at the right time. I’ll be at the supermarket, bending down [to] get some like pineapple from the bottom shelf, and some guy’s like, ‘You shouldn’t have died, man! They did you dirty, man!’”
At the time in 1996, no one in the cast had any inkling of how huge Scream would be. “I’m like, ‘This movie’s lame, nobody’s ever gonna see it,'” Lillard recalled, adding that he had already moved on to appearing in a TV pilot after wrapping the movie. “ ‘I’m going to become a television star.’ That pilot never wins, and here we are 30 years later. Nobody could have ever possibly imagined.”
“It’s a word-of-mouth film,” Ulrich added. “You guys [in the audience] keep passing it on to your kids, your friends, and I guess it had that momentum at that time as well. Thank you.”
