The original Scream featured a number of gruesome and unsettling sequences, though in a recent retrospective in honor of the film’s 25th anniversary resulted in the reveal that the MPAA had attempted to censor a specific and not particularly unsettling line of dialogue. At one point in the film, Skeet Ulrich‘s Billy Loomis admits, “Movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative,” with writer Kevin Williamson and editor Patrick Lussier recalling the difficulty surrounding the inclusion of this specific declaration, but that director Wes Craven ultimately managed to get the now-iconic delivery into the finished film and with an R rating.
“That was the line that I had written on a notecard and taped to my wall, and the whole movie was written toward that line,” Williamson shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “It came out of me watching Bob Dole, who at the time was screaming about the violence in cinema and he was going after Quentin Tarantino for that Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis movie [Natural Born Killers]. Articles were being written on violence in cinema and, at the time, there were no studies that really leaned into his theory. So, I wanted to answer that in my secret little way. I don’t know if I did or not, but at the end of the day I thought it was a great line.”
Lussier added, “It’s certainly the line of dialogue that the MPAA went after and wanted removed from the film. It was like, ‘You can’t speak that kind of truth.’ That, and don’t crush Tatum’s [Rose McGowan] head in the garage door or see too much dripping blood at the end when Billy and Stu stab themselves. That particular line of dialogue they wanted to censor, but they don’t word it that way. They just say, ‘Look at these areas, this is a problem, this is, this is, this is.’ Thankfully, Wes won the day with them.”
Williamson did go on to point out that, while that line stayed in the movie, the sequence in which it appears was toned down from how it was originally filmed, removing shots of Billy and Matthew Lillard’s Stu stabbing one another to try to claim they were also victims of a brutal attack.
“There’s three or four stabs that you just hear. Those were on camera originally and they took them off because the MPAA were like, ‘There’s just too much,'” the writer pointed out. “The Drew Barrymore slow-motion sequence in the beginning was a big no-no. They hated that. They did not want her running in slow motion and being stabbed. They said it was just too brutal, but we won that one because we didn’t have any other footage. He shot it in slow motion. What you see is all there was. So, they let that one slide, and I think the tradeoff was the stabs at the end.”
A new Scream is set to land in theaters on January 14, 2022.
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