Williamson's trick, in Scream (1996), was to let the victims know the rules of the film they were in. It made one sharp horror film, three sequels of his own, and thirty years on he is still at it with less to say each time.
Fi1m perspective
The phone rings and the person who answers it knows what the call means. That is Kevin Williamson's contribution to the slasher, and it is a real one. In Scream (1996) the teenagers have seen the same horror films as the audience, discuss the conventions out loud, and then get into the same trouble anyway. Wes Craven directed it, and the film works because he takes the danger as seriously as Williamson takes the joke. It frightened us then and it frightens us now, because the people explaining the rules are the same people who bleed when the rules are applied.
"Horror films had died a little bit before Scream came around," Williamson has said. "That was one of the reasons I wrote it." He is right about the revival, and the revival is what everyone remembers. The rest of the decade was variations. Scream 2 (1997) followed within a year, The Faculty (1998) took the same knowing teenagers into an alien-invasion high school, and Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999), his first film as director, grew from the first script he had sold. Then he went to television, where the talking was the point: Dawson's Creek (1998–2003), which drew on his own adolescence, and later The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017) with Julie Plec.
The reservation was there from the start. Even in Scream the script lingers over conventions the audience has already spotted, and the pleasure of recognition wears thin. The jokes also give us a comfortable distance from the people being threatened, particularly when they sound like commentary on the screenplay. It took Craven to hold that in check, and he did it across three films with Williamson. Without him the method turns on itself: a film built out of references to other films can start to look like nothing but the references, which was the charge laid against The Faculty, and Cursed (2005) went through delays and re-shoots and was received poorly.
Scream 4 (2011) brought him back to the series, and Scream 7 (2026) puts him behind the camera on a Scream for the first time, from a script written with Guy Busick. It is watchable and it is not stupid, and it is the first entry in the series with almost nothing to say about horror films, which for this writer is the one thing that ought not to be missing. Neve Campbell carries it. She plays Sidney as a woman who has managed fear for so long that it has become habit, checking doors, choosing where to sit, and Williamson gives her room to do it without a speech. We were gladder to see her and Courteney Cox than we expected, and we noticed that our gladness was doing work the script should have done.
So the recommendation is easy. Watch Scream with someone who has never seen it and let Craven do the frightening. Treat the later entries as reunions, because that is what they are, and go in for Campbell rather than for the joke.
Biography
Kevin Williamson is an American screenwriter and director. Born on 14 March 1965 in New Bern, North Carolina, he wrote the screenplay for the 1996 slasher film Scream, which launched the franchise. He also wrote Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 4 (2011).
His other screenwriting credits include I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), The Faculty (1998) and the television series Dawson's Creek (1998–2003) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017). He made his directorial debut with Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999) and created the series The Following (2013–2015).
In 2026, Williamson returned to the Scream franchise as co-writer (with Guy Busick) and director of Scream 7.
