Screenwriter of the cult 90s slashers (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer), Kevin Williamson has co-written and directed Scream 7, in theaters this Wednesday, February 25. Portrait.
He is at the origin of the first frights and the first flutterings of a generation. Kevin Williamson crystallizes, all on his own, an entire facet of 90s pop culture. We owe him the rise of neo-slashers, from Scream to I Know What You Did Last Summer; one of the greatest teen series in the history of television, Dawson; and the birth of an army of young sex-symbols who excited millions of youths around the world.
This year, the famous screenwriter brings joy to horror fans as he signs Scream 7 — in theaters on February 25. This sequel marks his big return to the franchise that launched his career in 1996. The author does not merely co-write this seventh installment; he also directs it. An idea sparked by Neve Campbell, the renowned interpreter of Sidney Prescott, who announced the news on her Instagram account in March 2024: “For many years I have dreamed of making one of these films with Kevin Williamson behind the camera (…) It is his brilliant mind that has shaped this universe.”
In Scream 7, yet another deranged killer disguised as a ghost is on the trail of the final girl, who this time is Sidney’s daughter. The sequel is well known to the devotees of the franchise: murders and frantic chases, countless film references, and shocking revelations in a bloody third act. Between the gay allusions of the first film, its heroine raised as a model of resilience, and its queer characters present in the sequels, the saga has for 30 years held an important place in the heart of the LGBT+ community. A success of which Kevin Williamson, openly gay, is the catalyst.
At the age of 10, the screenwriter receives a typewriter from his mother. A prescient gift even if it will not replace his coiled notebooks in which he multiplies macabre stories — one of them earns him a trip to the principal’s office at his high school. He links his love of horror to his experience as a gay boy in the closet. “I kept running to try to escape the truth,” he explains to Los Angeles Times.
The Closet of Horror
After growing up mainly in North Carolina, setting for part of his future narratives, he earns a theater degree and moves to New York to begin an acting career. Without success, he heads to Los Angeles and endures years of hardship filled with odd jobs. Then, in 1995, at 30, he finally manages to sell the screenplay that will change his life: Scary Movie — later retitled Scream by the time of release. The film is directed by Wes Craven, a giant in horror, and meets worldwide success. Six sequels will follow — Kevin Williamson writes three of them: 2, 4 and 7.
Although nothing is explicit at the time, the first installment is now viewed through a gay prism. At the end of the film, Sidney Prescott discovers that her boyfriend, Billy Loomis, collaborated with his best friend to commit the crimes. Kevin Williamson drew inspiration from the true story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two lovers responsible for the murder of a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924. The homosexuality of the two criminals had then been used to justify their murderous impulse.
At the time, Kevin Williamson feared revealing his sources of inspiration. He explains in 2023 to Pride Source: “I would certainly be braver today. I might not be that shy, little gay writer who felt he couldn’t pull it off like that.” But his queer gaze also appears in the figure of the final girl, the survivor of horror films, who is for him a mirror of the gay experience. “As a gay child, I identified with her and her struggle because we also needed to survive,” he analyzes in the daily The Independent. Consciously, I think the films are coded messages about gay survival.
Wave of Slashers
The Scream phenomenon is such that it rekindles the slasher craze, a horror subgenre popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 before falling out of favor. Kevin Williamson becomes one of its new masters. In October 1997, in the United States, I Know What You Did Last Summer, another major success for which he signs the screenplay, hits theaters. In this one, he draws on his own father — a former fisherman — to conceive the killer in a slick oilskin coat armed with a hook. This time, there are no homosexual criminals on the horizon, even if the appearances of Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. in white tank tops are enough to spark numerous gay awakenings.
The thrillers and horror films born under his pen follow one after another in cinema. Among them, The Faculty with Josh Hartnett, Halloween: 20 Years Later, or Mrs. Tingle, his first directing project adapted from his very first script. But it is on the small screen that Kevin Williamson closes the decade in style. He creates Dawson, an largely autobiographical series broadcast from 1998, led by James Van Der Beek — who died on February 11 last year at 48 from cancer.
The result is a triumph. Teenagers around the world become obsessed with the tribulations of Dawson, an aspiring director, and those of his friends Joey (Katie Holmes), Pacey (Joshua Jackson) and Jen (Michelle Williams). The screenwriter wants to introduce a gay hero from the first season but dares not take the step, still frightened to own his choices as did his duo of killers a few years earlier. One must wait for season 2 to see Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith) appear. The protagonist is initially in a relationship with Joey. “I created this character without telling anyone that he would come out of the closet,” he reveals to Entertainment Weekly.
The Adolescence Screenwriter
The coming out happens in two stages. First in episode 14, where Jack is forced to read a poem in class in which he half-reveals his attraction to people of the same sex. Then comes episode 15, the most powerful. Co-written with Greg Berlanti – future screenwriter of Love, Simon, another important work on coming out – it depicts the confrontation between Jack and his father. The scene places the series in the history of gay representation on American screens. Jack’s first kiss with another boy will occur the following season, in episode 23.
In the rest of his career, which unfolds mainly on the small screen, Kevin Williamson signs another major success, Vampire Diaries, an eight-season series launched to capitalize on the worldwide Twilight phenomenon in 2009. He also pursues his obsession with killers with the series The Following, Stalker and the film Sick, a new slasher in the time of covid. If he now tells his story with more adult-oriented series — the latest example to date, The Waterfront on Netflix — the screenwriter is never as effective as when he writes about youth. Those torn between primal fears and numerous questions. As if Kevin Williamson remained that eternal adolescent, passionate about horror films.
