Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream 4 almost started with one hell of a crazy and brutal knife fight between Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott and Ghostface. This original plan for the film sounds like it would have been epic, and Sydney was going to kill Ghostface! That would have completely circumvented expectations, and I actually would have loved to see that! In the end, Craven decided he wanted to take things in a different direction with the opening.
Williamson talked about how the scene would have played out saying:
“She fought for her life. It was a big, huge, 15-minute fight where she kept stabbing the killer, the killer kept stabbing her. I think she was stabbed five times, and crawling across the floor. And then she killed the killer, and the surprise was she didn’t die. The killer died.”
From there, the film would have cut to the title card and then pick up two years later with Sidney returning to Woodsboro as part of her self-help book tour. But then Williamson had another idea that would incorporate the Stab films. He went on to discuss the opening that the filmmakers ultimately went with:
“And then one night, I remember I was just up at 3:00 in the morning, and I had this idea, and I just started writing to see where it went. I did the movie within a movie [concept] because I knew Sidney was coming in with a self-help book, and I didn’t know how that would land. I wanted to make sure that we kept Stab alive because that’s the fun part of the deconstruction of the film, and so I just wrote that in one night.
“I wrote it and sent it to Wes, and he goes, ‘Oh, no, this one’s better.’ When I brought it in, everyone jumped on that and said, ‘This is great.’ And it was. It was much better than the scene I wrote. And, by the way, pieces from that scene ended up in The Following pilot.”
I included the opening of the film below for you to watch. While I liked it, I think I would have much rather seen that epic fight between Sydney and Ghostface! What do you think?
Source: Entertainment Weekly