It’s hard to imagine now that the franchise has been spilling gallons of fake blood for a quarter-century—Paramount Home Entertainment recently released a remastered anniversary edition on 4K Ultra HD, and the fifthinstallment of the franchise will hit theaters in January—but there was a time when no one wanted to direct Scream. At first, even Wes Craven passed. Several times. The man behind horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left was tired of being confined to the genre that he’d mastered. Yet the pull of Williamson’s script eventually turned out to be too much to resist, and with its elements at his fingertips, Craven reinvented big-screen horror.
Needull in a haystack 