With its cutting one-liners and to-die-for cast, last year's Scream spoofed its way to the top of the teen horror movie list. Its $103 million box office take puts it right up there with The Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist. So Miramax decided to put Scream 2 on more than 3,000 movie screens Dec. 12. Spending $15-20 million on promotion alone--roughly the entire budget of the original--the studio knew that a traditionally fickle teen audience would again part with their allowance simply to be terrified.



The sequel takes place two years after that wacko in a ghost mask pulled an Edward Scissorhands on the made-up town of Woodsboro. Some of the survivors are enrolled at Windsor College, a fictitious Midwestern university where this generation of all-star coeds--including Party of Five's Campbell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Nutty Professor's Jada Pinkett, Jerry Maguire's Jerry O'Connell, and Boogie Nights' Heather Graham--are majoring, it seems, in Having Great Agents and Looking Really Cute.

And this, we're afraid, is about all Miramax wants you to know about that matter of national security--the plot of Scream 2. In an age when early script drafts surface on the Internet almost as soon as they hit the desks of studio executives, the studio has left nothing to chance. "When I first got the script," says O'Connell, 23, who plays Campbell's devoted boyfriend, "two men with Uzis delivered it and stayed with me until I was done reading it."

In most cases, pumping out a horror sequel less than 12 months after the release of the original is a recipe for bloody disaster. But as any chain-saw-bearing ghoul will tell you, Scream, with its sly self-referential style (remember the line from the original, summing up horror movies? "Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act, who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It's insulting") is nothing like other horror franchises.

"Scream crosses every boundary," boasts Miramax cochairman Bob Weinstein, who two years ago bought Kevin Williamson's original spec script along with a five-page outline for Scream 2 and Scream 3. "It's not just scary, it's not just fun, it's not just clever, it's not just a whodunit. It's all that and it's something more. Like The Crying Game or Pulp Fiction, the Scream saga's a whole new approach to movies. It kills off all the old formulas."



The Scream secret is to pack 110 minutes with sexual tension, hip pop-culture references, and lots and lots and lots of blood. After all, this isn't Captain Kangaroo. "I was in the movie and I still can't watch Scream all the way through," says Courteney Cox, 33, who returns as TV reporter/viper Gale Weathers. "I think that's what made it such a success." The timing was right, too. "There just hadn't been any good scary movies in a long time until these came along," says Campbell.

Scream 2, and, for that matter, Scream 3, were part of the plan from the beginning. Says Weinstein: "This is not the classic case of going 'Wow, we made a lotta money, can we make another one quick?' We always saw this as a trilogy of movies. It's like George Lucas' plan for Star Wars, only here we're dealing with a knife-wielding killer in a mask."

Having the idea for a sequel, however, is a lot different from having the script, especially with Miramax pushing to get it out so quickly. And with Scream's raging success, Williamson was suddenly on everybody's hot list ("The last time we saw anyone like him," Weinstein says, "it was Quentin Tarantino"). Virtually every project Williamson had ever considered was suddenly getting greenlighted: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Williamson's pilot for the series Dawson's Creek got picked up by The WB network, and Miramax scooped up his early dark-comedy screenplay Killing Mrs. Tingle from turnaround. With nearly $20 million worth of new writing assignments, three weeks--the writing window Miramax gave Williamson--seemed too short a time for him to turn around a Scream sequel. "The Miramax mafia basically came down to North Carolina where we were shooting Dawson's Creek," he says. "They came to harass me, and to make sure I wasn't going to eat, sleep, or breathe anything other than the plot of Scream 2."

To maintain the suspense, every cast and crew member had to sign confidentiality agreements; scripts were printed on dark brown paper with red lines through the text so they couldn't be photocopied, and scenes were distributed in installments and filmed out of order. Even that wasn't good enough. "As soon as Kevin's first 40 pages came in," Craven says, "they went out almost immediately onto the Internet. So all that was blown and we had to go into rewrites."

"After the success of the first one," Craven says, "we could get any young actor we wanted. They were breaking down doors to get into the sequel. The idea that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a relatively minor role shows you how big this thing is."

"I so desperately wanted to be a part of this movie," says Gellar, 20, whose Buffy slayings have made her the femme fatale of the Home Alone generation. "I called my agent and I was like, 'Please, please, please, please get me in this movie.' It just had a cool feeling about it."

Adds Pinkett, 26, who "may or may not" get killed in the first 10 minutes of the film, "I have a very, very small part, but I thought it was the movie to do. It didn't really matter that it wasn't a huge role. It's a memorable one."

One of the strongest draws was Craven, whose professorial demeanor (he holds a master's degree in writing and philosophy from Johns Hopkins university) belies his bloodthirsty screen legacy. Despite killing off dozens of B-movie stars in creep-fests like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker, he can do no wrong in the eyes of his young cast.

"Most of us [in Scream 2] were around 14 when Nightmare came out," says Pinkett. "That makes Wes, like, a total hero." Adds Timothy Olyphant, who plays the opinionated film student Mickey, "Even though there's that feeling you're making a movie with your grandfather, Wes still manages to seem like a young, hip guy."

The genre was dying and Scream saved it," says hirsute director George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), who is quietly observing the action with his daughter on this late-night Scream 2 shoot. "It's great for all of us horror guys. Even my phone is starting to ring again."