'Scream': The EPs Talk Ghostface and Debates With MTV Over Body Counts

Released in 1996, the original Scream launched a groundbreaking horror franchise and countless imitators. Now, MTV is hoping to turn the volume on the Scream brand back up to 11 with a television reboot, in which a whole new generation of absurdly attractive, painfully self-referential high school students find themselves targeted by a knife-wielding, mask-wearing killer named Ghostface. Like the film, the series commences with the death of a popular girl played by a recognizable actress: in this case, Bella Thorne’s Nina Patterson. That murder spurs the citizens of the small town of Lakewood to confront a troubled past. Yahoo TV spoke with Scream’s executive producers Jill Blotevogel and Jaime Paglia about the new Ghostface, the show’s body count, and what this version of Scream owes to Friday Night Lights and Twin Peaks.

How did you approach the challenge of adapting a franchise as recognizable as Scream for television?
Jill Blotevogel: It had been in development for several years by the time I came to it, and they’d gone down a lot of different roads: a supernatural road and a traditional road. What I tried to do was get back to what Scream was all about and find how to do that for TV. The thing you have to do is stretch it out a little bit. Let you get to know these characters in a way you’d never have time to in a feature. It’s also about finding a way to take the technology seen in the movie and say “What’s the 2015 version of that phone ringing?”

The show is taking Friday Night Lights — a world you recognize and characters that you love — and bringing out the Scream of it. Letting someone die, and letting that trickle down to affect the characters. The trick is finding that balance where you’ve killed someone, but the kids are still going to prom. The death of Nina Patterson in the pilot plays like the murder of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. It permeates everything that comes after that.

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Jaime Paglia: We knew that right out of the gate we wanted to be self-referential and let the audience know we were going to take them for a different ride with the show. It keeps the tone of Scream, addresses what certain expectations are, and acknowledges that we know what we’re up against.

One of the main things you’re up against, obviously, is creating a new version of Ghostface. How did you settle on the design we see in the series?
Blotevogel: He’s one of the most iconic figures in modern horror, as is the mask. But once [the Scream spoof] Scary Movie did the dope smoking Ghostface mask, the drunken Ghostface mask, and the post-sex Ghostface mask, it became hard to get back to the primal fear you had of it in the original movie. We found a way to do a new version of it that’s grounded in the story of our world. It plays in a creepy grounded way, but still has a great shock value.

Paglia: It also becomes a thematic element for us in our current day story — the whole idea of the masks we wear in social media and who we are online versus who we are in reality.

The movies always had a high body count; were you nervous about not having enough characters left over by the finale?
Paglia: Early on, we had conversations with the network and the studio about how many people we could kill in Season 1. There were serious debates about it. We eventually wound up in a place where you feel that [every death is] earned, and they have the most impact for the characters and the audience. We’re not just dropping a body every week because we can.

Blotevogel: MTV is open to pushing some boundaries. I worked on a show called Harper’s Island where we killed someone every episode, and it’s amazing what you can do with editing and with music and sound. It’s definitely going to be about trying to create watercooler-worthy moments and scares. But I feel like we get more feedback on the things that the U.S. has an issue with, which are sexuality and profanity. We get more policing on those than we do with gore and murder.

Will the first season tell a complete story or are you laying the foundation for a longer mystery?
Blotevogel: We’re trying to do both. We want Season 1 to be Chapter 1, but also have a sense of resolution in the end. We’re doing a multi-season mystery, so we’re going to be laying out a lot of side story and have the bigger revelation of “Who is behind it all” as our “You’ve got to watch the whole thing” answer.

Many of the teenagers in this Scream wouldn’t have even been born when the first movie came out. How did they react to watching the film and all the ‘90s flourishes?
Blotevogel: Some of the actors watched the original one and were like, “Phones used to have cords? What the hell!” [Laughs.] And in writing the series, we worried if a lot of the pop culture references might be outdated, even though we consider them classics. Like, we figured that everyone’s seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and Aliens. I had written an Aliens joke for John Karna’s character Noah, and when I got to set I walked into his trailer and he and some other actors were watching Aliens [for the first time]! He said, “I know I should know this.” Meanwhile, I was thinking, “These kids are watching Aliens for the first time in their trailer. You guys should be seeing this on the big screen!”

Scream premieres June 30 at 10 p.m. on MTV.