Turns out Kristen Stewart might have had a run-in with Ghostface between “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” films. The Oscar-nominated “Spencer” star revealed to Slant Magazine that she was approached to play a fictional “Stab” actress in the “Scream 4” opening kill, first made famous by the star-studded casting of Drew Barrymore in the original film. “So it’s the Drew [Barrymore] character that gets killed in the beginning, and they created a whole sequence where a lot of people got killed to emulate the Drew thing,” Stewart said of her would-have-been role. “But it was just going to be one person, and I was like, ‘I can’t do a Drew. I can’t touch that.’ Do you know what I mean? But, yeah, so then they ended up doing, if I’m remembering correctly, a larger sequence and not just one victim.”
That “larger sequence” referred to from “Scream 4” involved Lucy Hale, Shenae Grimes-Beech, Kristen Bell, and Anna Paquin in a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie kill sequence for the “Stab” installment. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson told Entertainment Weekly at the time that Wes Craven preferred the meta-opening and said it was “better” than Williamson’s original idea of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) killing one iteration of Ghostface.
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“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,” Williamson said. “And then she killed the killer, and the surprise was she didn’t die [like the characters attacked in the openings of the three previous Scream films]. The killer died.”
Williamson eventually opted for the “Stab” reference to keep that running parody “alive because that’s the fun part of the deconstruction of the film.”
So, will Stewart ever venture into the “Scream” franchise?
“Maybe. I would read the script,” Stewart told Slant. “I love Neve Campbell so much. She was very nice to me, and it was very satisfying that she’s a very nice person. I love that movie. I’ve watched it recently, as an adult though. It’s so gnarly. I love the movie because it loves movies.”
She added, “The coolest part of ‘Scream’ is what it says about film. It’s so self-aware. It folds in on itself like six times. I love how much [Wes Craven] loves movies and how embedded that is. It’s a total film nerd type of movie. It’s not just a flasher flick. It’s a beautiful movie. It’s so hard to watch. I’m like, ‘I don’t have the stomach for that shit anymore.’ I was like, ‘Oh, man, this is very, very, very intense.’”
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