Much the same way John Carpenter used an existing Captain Kirk mask to bring Michael Myers to iconic life in Halloween, Wes Craven similarly put an existing Halloween mask to good use for the creation of Ghostface in the original Scream. The “Peanut-Eyed Ghost” from Fun World became the face of Ghostface, and the rest, as they say, is horror movie history.
But how exactly did the team come across that mask in the first place? In this 25th anniversary featurette from IGN, Neve Campbell and Kevin Williamson recall the chain of events.
“No one could agree on a mask and I remember we were in a location scout, and we found Ghostface… in a box of stuff in a garage,” Williamson explains. “Wes immediately looked at it and said, ‘This is like the famous Scream painting.’ And so we took that to our production and we said, ‘Riff on this… make something like this.’ They must’ve done 20 different designs.”
Williamson continues, “Every one of them was rejected by the studio, and finally we were like, why don’t we just get the rights to this mask?”
Want to see some of those rejected concepts? Head into BD’s Scream Archives!
The original Scream is coming to 4K Ultra HD for the film’s 25th anniversary.