Wes Craven was actually not the first director asked to do SCREAM. Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, first pitched the film to "From Dusk Till Dawn" director Robert Rodriguez, who apparently turned it down.

In the script, SCREAM writer Kevin Williamson only wrote of a ghost-mask worn by the killer. But nothing was said about the costume. Executive producer Marianne Maddalena suggested a black outfit because it was "scary". As for the infamous mask, Craven found the off-the-shelf item at a house where they were location scouting in California. The mask was originally created by Fun World.

When SCREAM producer Cary Woods was casting the lead in SCREAM, Drew Barrymore was the first person he talked to. After agreeing to play what later became Neve Campbell's role, she had second thoughts. Says Woods, "She called me up and said, 'I want to play Girl Number One.' And I said, 'Drew, Girl Number One gets gutted on page eighteen.' I thought, There goes my star; there goes my movie. And that's when she said, 'If you kill me at the beginning of the movie, the audience will think anything can happen. And I'll still support the movie as if I'm starring in it.'"

Freddie Prinze Jr. was one of the last contenders for the role of the comic-crazed Stuart Macher. "It was down to either Matt [Lillard] or me for that part," Prinze reveals. Although the part went to Lillard, Prinze got his chance to star in his own horror film in "I Know What You Did Last Summer," which was written by SCREAM writer Kevin Williamson.

The murder scene of Principal Himbry came as a result of Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax. Explains writer Kevin Williamson: "After he had bought the script, he felt that there was 30 pages where nothing happened. And he called me up and said, 'You gotta kill somebody, Kevin. Somebody's gotta die.' There is a thirty-minute gap where nobody's getting offed. He said, 'I don't care how you do it; just do it.'" Weinstein's idea also helped solve Williamson's problem in the script: "I didn't know how to get rid of all the partiers," says Williamson. "We wanted to isolate our core group and then once when Bob came up with the idea and said you had to kill somebody else - and that shows the principal - there was the answer. And in addition I got to carry on that hard-edge, cynical attitude that children have today."

The idea of putting the pet portal in the garage door in Tatum's death sequence actually came from Kevin Williamson's assistant. Originally when he wrote the scene, he just had Tatum getting into a fight with the killer and the garage door came down and crushed her neck.

Although a stuntman was used to play the killer in SCREAM, actor Skeet Ulrich got a chance to play Father Death during the sequence in which Jamie Kennedy is watching "Halloween (1978)."

When Randy is watching "Halloween (1978)," he says, "Jamie, look behind you!" He was commenting at Jamie Lee Curtis, but since the killer was behind him at the time, it might as well have been a comment to himself, since the actor who portrays Randy happens to have Jamie as his first name.

The sequence in which Sidney is trapped in the police car with the killer, actually existed in an abandoned script Kevin Williamson wrote in high school.

At the last second, while shooting the very end of SCREAM, Wes Craven decided to film one scene where Dewey is alive just in case the audiences loves him, and so that he would be eligable for sequel duty. Says David Arquette, "They threw me in an ambulance just as sort of a loose end."

Gale's report concluding the end of SCREAM was written minutes before the scene was shot. Kevin Williamson was there at dawn writing the speech, and Courteney Cox managed to do it in two takes.