Highlights
- Kevin Williamson is directing the new Scream 7 after Neve Campbell requested him for the project.
- Williamson admits the original Halloween influenced him greatly, contributing to his work on Scream and Halloween H20.
- Despite his significant rewrites on Halloween H20, Williamson was not given a writing credit for his work on the script.
Kevin Williamson is preparing to direct the upcoming Scream 7, after being personally asked to helm the project by Neve Campbell, who is returning to the franchise to play the iconic final girl, Sidney Prescott. Williamson created the Scream series back in the 90s, and saw his star rise rapidly, and he actually ended up being hired to rewrite large chunks of Halloween H20, but was never given a co-writer credit for it.
Kevin Williamson has often stated that the original Halloween in 1978 was his favorite horror movie, so when he got the job of working on the 1998 sequel, it was a full circle moment. Scream had many references to Halloween, with actual footage of the movie appearing in the final sequence of Scream, when Randy and the other party guests gather to watch it at Stu's house. Halloween H20 is better than people think and possibly the strongest sequel in the Michael Myers saga, and this was largely down to Williamson's work on the project.
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What is Halloween H20 about?
Halloween H20 | |
|---|---|
Starring | Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Alan Arkin, Michelle Williams, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Janet Leigh |
Written By | Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg Kevin Williamson (uncredited) |
Directed By | Steve Miner |
Halloween H20 is set twenty years after Michael Myers' brutal killing spree in Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night, and it sees Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) living in Summer Glen, California, with her son, John (Josh Hartnett) under the new name of Keri Tate. She is now the dean of Hillcrest Academy High School, when Michael Myers returns to hunt her down.
Laurie Strode's trauma in Halloween H20 is evident by her paranoia and severe alcohol problem. However, she has the support of school counselor and lover, Will Brennan (Alan Arkin), but he's initially totally unaware of her past. When John and his friends skip the school trip to Yosemite, they end up getting caught up in the new murder spree, and Laurie must protect them from her evil brother.
What happened during production on H20, and what did Williamson rewrite?
Halloween H20 was ready to roll with a screenplay written by Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg, but after production had started on the project, Dimension weren't happy with what they saw, so Halloween H20's director, Steve Miner, called up Kevin Williamson to see if he'd rework the screenplay, as he was a hot property in the horror genre at the time after the success of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Miner had worked as a director on Williamson's hit television show, Dawson's Creek, so they had an existing working relationship that should've made persuading Williamson to work on Halloween H20 fairly straightforward, but that wasn't the case. Kevin WIlliamson revealed more about what happened in an interview with the Happy Horror Time podcast:
(Steve Miner) called me and said, can we please do it, and I was like no, I can't. And then he did the move that he knew would work to get me to do it. He had Jamie Lee Curtis call me. You don't say no to Jamie Lee Curtis.
The Jamie Lee Curtis trick worked, as Williamson was a huge fan of the original 1978 classic, and he agreed to work on the script after they'd already shot for a week. They had filmed the opening sequence, before shutting down production. Williamson elaborated on his experience on Halloween H20 in the same interview with the Happy Horror Time podcast:
I talked to Jamie (Lee Curtis) and Steve Miner, and we started discussing where the script was at and where they wanted to take it, what it needed. And then I wrote it. I took a week to write it and I kinda kept some stuff and re-arranged things.
It was a dream for Williamson to work on the franchise that he loved so much, and to get the opportunity to put his unique take on it. He expanded LL Cool J's character, Ronny, and also worked on an idea Jamie Lee Curtis had come up with, to include her mother, Janet Leigh, in the movie. Leigh was the original Scream queen after her famous role as Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
This is my love letter to John Carpenter. This is gonna be my love letter to the franchise, and say 'Dear Halloween, I love you so much.' That was the goal.
Janet Leigh plays Laurie Strode/Keri Tate's receptionist, Norma Watson in Halloween H20, and her character is seen leaving the private school in the same car that Marion Crane owned in Psycho, with the eerie re-working of the famous music from the 1960 movie playing in the scene. It's a nice little tribute to the actress who is arguably responsible for the existence of Halloween, as not just the original final girl in Psycho, but for literally giving birth to the actress who portrayed Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise.
Why wasn't Williamson given a writing credit for Halloween H20?
Despite Kevin Williamson's vital re-writing of the Halloween H20 screenplay, he wasn't given a writing credit for the movie, and this was down to an epic failure on the part of Dimension Films. Williamson elaborated on why he wasn't given credit for his work on the script in the same interview with the Happy Horror Time Podcast:
Well, that's an interesting story. Originally, we didn't submit me for arbitration, cos i did a week rewrite and that was it. I just handed it to them, and no one thought it through. The executives at Dimension were just completely clueless.
Williamson wasn't even focused on what he was being paid for the project, as he was just happy to be working on the iconic Halloween franchise he loved so much.
It paid me to go to Hawaii for a week.
Halloween H20 was all ready to go when Dimension realized Williamson's name wasn't on the script, but when they submitted it to the writer's guild, the timeline was up. Zappia and Greenberg took the writing credits for Halloween H20 despite some rather extensive work by Williamson.
I really did some heavy lifting. If you read the first script and the one I wrote, they're different.
As a way of softening the blow of Williamson not being credited on Halloween H20, Bob Weinstein gave the Scream writer a producer credit on the movie, so at least he received some recognition for the work he did on the seventh movie in the franchise. It'll be interesting to see if Williamson does any additional work on Gus Busick's Scream 7 script, as he will have the final say as the director of the upcoming sequel.
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