How Wes Craven Pulled the Ultimate Petty Revenge in the Credits for ‘Scream’
Wes Craven reinvented and reimagined the slasher genre with Scream, blending razor-sharp meta humor with real menace. Based on Kevin Williamson‘s script, the film turned horror’s own rules into weapons, introduced the now-iconic Ghostface, and kick-started a revival that still echoes today.
But few realize the meta humor of Scream wasn’t confined to the story; it extended to the credits, where the A Nightmare on Elm Street director used the final crawl as a parting shot of petty revenge.
While filming Scream in early 1996, Craven tried to secure Santa Rosa High School in Sonoma County, California, as the film’s primary setting. The campus had already doubled for Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), so administrators were no strangers to on-location shoots. Craven and the school reached a verbal agreement, and he drafted a schedule to minimize classroom disruption.
Dimension/courtesy Everett Collection
Hands were shaken. Equipment rolled in. The crew began to set up. Then locals learned what the movie was about, and goodwill went out the window.
Residents objected to the school hosting a “gory movie” and took their complaints to the Santa Rosa City School District Governing Board, which withdrew permission, citing upcoming final exams, disruption to the student body, and missing paperwork as the reasons, instead of angry parents.
Craven did everything he could to salvage the schedule. He cut shoot days, shuffled schedules, but it was a no-go. The board wanted the production out.
Executive producer of Scream Marianne Maddalena told the Los Angeles Times, “We created a shooting schedule for when they told us it would be the best time to shoot in the school. When we got up there, they changed their minds. I think basically someone didn’t like the script.”
Frank Pugh, the school board’s president at the time, said in an interview: “The public became very upset that this type of film was going to be shot at a high school campus. But the board can’t really make decisions based on content issues of the film…Instead, the board was interested as to how this shooting would disrupt the campus climate.”
With only days before cameras were set to roll on the school sequences, Craven and the production team scrambled for a replacement. The Sonoma Community Center stepped in, and pages were rewritten on the fly to accommodate the last-minute location change. The whole fiasco cost the production time, money, resources, and a little bit of sanity on behalf of the crew and the filmmaker.
Dimension Films
In an interview with Horror.com, filmmaker Daniel Farrands, who directed and produced the 2011 documentary Scream: The Inside Story, “I remember a Dimension exec called me at the time and asked what the hell was going on with my high school and could I call up there and talk some sense into them. I tried. I failed. But luckily, Wes had the last laugh — not to mention Santa Rosa is very high on the Hollywood black list of places not to take your productions.”
As a result of the headache, the school’s decision to pull out of the film at the very last minute and the chaos that it caused on production, Craven gave the Santa Rosa City School District a very special shout-out: “No Thanks Whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City School District Governing Board.”
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