While speaking at New York Comic Con, Matthew Lillard recalled a moment when he was contemplating his future while covered in fake blood after a shoot:
“I’m laying in the back of a van. . . and I’m like, ‘This movie’s lame. Nobody’s ever gonna see it. I’m going to go become a television star’. . . and here we are 30 years later. I mean, nobody could’ve ever possibly imagined.”
Sometimes you hear stories about cast and crew working on a movie set and having the feeling that they know they’re working on something special. I bet if you asked a bunch of different people on the Scream set, you’d probably have at least a few who felt that way.
But for context, Scream was released in the mid 1990s. The slasher franchise was all but dead in the view of general audiences. There were certainly still slashers being made, but they weren’t taken seriously by anyone except dedicated horror fans. For reference, new slasher movies that had come out slightly before Scream was filmed were movies like Ice Cream Man, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and Leprechaun 3 (all released in 1995).
Even having Wes Craven as the director wasn’t a sure way to make a hit at the time. For the record, I was a big fan of his at the time and was very much looking forward to the release of Scream. But for mainstream audiences, their most recent frames of reference for Wes were Vampire In Brooklyn in 1995 which didn’t fare well with audiences, and New Nightmare in 1994 which is an awesome movie that many people didn’t give a chance at the time.
So I can see why Matthew Lillard, at the time, might have thought the movie was lame. Especially since it sounds like these thoughts came to him sometime during the infamously grueling shoot for the party scene of Scream. Being tired can lead to less-than-optimistic thoughts.
Still, I do imagine that many people on the Scream sets knew they were doing something special. Would they have expected the series to grow and endure the way it has? Probably not. Those things are nearly impossible to predict.
