There’s a new Scream movie in theatres right now (you can find out what we thought of it by checking out the video embedded above), and while audiences are seeing a new Ghostface story play out on the big screen, we’re taking a moment to look back at a previous Ghostface story… and pondering the Ghostface we never saw. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson – who returned to write Scream 2 and Scream 4, and wrote a Scream 3 treatment that was largely tossed aside – revealed that Scream 4 was originally intended to start out with the death of some random Ghostface we had never seen before.
In that version, Sidney was the one attacked by Ghostface – but not the Ghostface that would terrorize Woodsboro throughout the rest of the film. “She fought for her life,” Williamson says of Sidney’s faceoff with the unknown assailant. “It was a big, huge, 15-minute fight where she kept stabbing the killer, the killer kept stabbing her. I think she was stabbed five times, and crawling across the floor. And then she killed the killer, and the surprise was she didn’t die [like the characters attacked in the openings of the three previous Scream films]. The killer died.”
From there, the film would have gone to the title card and then picked up two years later with Sidney returning to her hometown as part of her self-help book tour.
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Then Scream 4 would have played out like the movie we got – although that movie didn’t end the way Williamson wanted it to, either. While the ending (and the fate of the Jill Roberts character) wasn’t entirely up to Williamson, it was his idea to change the beginning and drop the idea of the “Sidney vs. random Ghostface” opening sequence. In its place, he wrote the opening that ended up in the movie, with fake-out “movie-in-a-movie” death scenes from Stab 6 and Stab 7 leading into the actual opening kills of Scream 4.
I wrote it and sent it to (director Wes Craven), and he goes, ‘Oh, no, this one’s better.’ When I brought it in, everyone jumped on that and said, ‘This is great.’ And it was. It was much better than the scene I wrote. And, by the way, pieces from that (Sidney opening) scene ended up in The Following pilot.”
Scream 4 had the following synopsis:
It’s been many years since the killer “Ghostface” left a deadly trail across the city of Woodsboro. In order to overcome the trauma of these terrible events, Sidney Prescott wrote a self-help book. She returns to Woodsboro to launch her book and is reunited with old friends Gale Weathers and Sheriff Dewey. However, Sidney’s arrival also triggers the return of “Ghostface”, putting Sidney and everyone she loves in jeopardy.
The film starred Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, and Marley Shelton… all of whom are back in the new Scream, which Williamson served as an executive producer on.
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