One of the most iconic movie masks of all time almost never made it on screen.
The mask that Scream forever immortalized as Ghostface was originally a mass-produced mask that bore the name “Peanut-Eyed Ghost.” Inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” the mask was released by Fun World in the early ’90s, and the story goes that Wes Craven and his production team stumbled upon it in an abandoned house while they were scouting locations for Scream. Craven loved it and wanted to use it in the film, but alas, Fun World owned the rights and they wanted more money than Dimension was willing to pay.
So Craven devised Plan B…
What was Plan B, you ask? Unable to use the “Peanut-Eyed Ghost” mask, Craven tasked KNB EFX with designing a new mask that was inspired by the Fun World mask he wanted to use. Some of the designs stayed fairly true to the original mask, while others deviated so wildly that they would’ve completely changed everything about Scream and the Ghostface killer.
Kevin Williamson recalls in a recent 25th anniversary featurette, “No one could agree on a mask, and I remember we were on a location scout and we found Ghostface… in a box of stuff in a garage. We asked the owner if we could take it because Wes immediately looked at it and said, ‘This is like the famous Scream painting.’ So we took that to our production and we said, ‘Can you make something… riff on this and see if you can make something like this. They must’ve done twenty different designs, and every one of them was rejected by the studio.”
Eventually, of course, Fun World and Dimension reached an agreement, and the “Peanut-Eyed Ghost” mask became Ghostface – or “Father Death,” as the costume is named in Scream.
“Finally we were like, ‘Why don’t we just get the rights to this mask?’ In the script it did say it was a dime store Halloween mask… so that’s exactly what we found,” Williamson recalls.
It’s interesting to note that the origins of the Michael Myers mask are much the same as the origins of the Ghostface mask, with John Carpenter and his team similarly converting an existing William Shatner Captain Kirk mask into the terrifyingly blank visage of Michael Myers. Sometimes horror icons are already out there in the world, long before we meet them.
Want to see a handful of those original KNB concepts? Below you’ll find twelve drawings of vastly different masks that were pitched to Craven (many of which are VERY wacky), and underneath you’ll see four of those designs that Scream superfan Mikey Aspinwall had artist Crash Cunningham draw up for him. Aspinwall even had an artist turn one of the concepts into an actual mask, which gives you an idea of what it would’ve looked like had it been used on screen. Huge thanks to Aspinwall for sharing these images and allowing us to publish them.
A version of this article was originally published on December 21, 2016.