Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Drew Barrymore and Rose McGowan were all part of Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher film, “Scream” — but only one of the leading ladies forgot how to yell when filming their death scene.
The Post spoke to Greg Nicotero, the special makeup effects supervisor who made Craven’s gory death scenes for the blockbuster come alive. He shared that the late director begged McGowan, now 51, repeatedly to “scream” as her character Tatum was being crushed to death by the garage door.
While the scene will go down in history as one of the most memorable “Scream” deaths from the ’90s, it wasn’t smooth sailing behind the scenes.
“And what was funny about that is while we were shooting that, I remember, you know, Wes kept saying, ‘Scream! Scream! Scream! You gotta really scream!’ And she didn’t — she wasn’t,” Nicotero told The Post in an interview on Oct. 15. “He was like, ‘I don’t understand why she’s not screaming because her head’s being crushed.'”
Nicotero pointed out the irony.
“It was just kind of a — it was an interesting note that we were working on this project that, that later would be called ‘Scream,’ and, Wes was just desperately trying to get her to scream,” he laughed.
The Post has reached out to McGowan for comment.
Nicotero — whose impressive resume also includes “The Walking Dead,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “Breaking Bad,” “Machete Kills” and more — shared his tricks on how he brought Craven’s slasher scenes to the big screen.
“So, you know, we did a dummy of Drew Barrymore, you know, we did a dummy of Rose McGowan. You know, we did a lot of a lot of different things because Wes wanted to see that sort of moment of impact,” he shared of Barrymore and McGowan’s gory on-screen deaths.
Barrymore died in the opening scene after the killer (a k a Ghostface) ripped her insides outside and tied her to a tree for her parents to discover; however, she wasn’t the first kill.
Her jock boyfriend was slashed first after being tied to a chair with his intestines exposed as she played a statistic game on the phone with the serial murderer.
“That was really for me, that was a lot of fun,” Nicotero said.
There were iconic death scenes throughout the ’90s film, which became the highest-grossing movie of the year and brought in $173 million worldwide.
McGowan’s damsel in distress act went south when she got trapped in the garage with Ghostface while getting more beer during a high school house party. While she played along with his act after he closed the automatic garage door, Rose’s character found herself terrified when the mystery person behind the white mask pulled out a knife and grazed her forearm.
She put up a good fight, but Tatum ultimately got stuck in the doggy door as she tried to squeeze through and escape Ghostface.
Tatum’s life came to a brutal end when Ghostface recognized she couldn’t inch her way out and proceeded to click the automatic garage door button.
Viewers watched in horror as McGowan’s body lifted in the air, closer and closer to being crushed with every inch — until it was too late.
However, looking back at the scene after talking to Nicotero, it’s hard not to notice that the actress hardly shrieks or screams before her head gets completely crushed.
McGowan has spoken about the kill scene before.
“That was an all-nighter. In a real garage. It was really, really cold,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2011. “I was really going up and down in a dog door, and I’ve since learned that I can fit into almost any dog door. And because I’m thin enough, I kept falling out of it. They had to nail my shirt in onto the wood otherwise I’d like, flop out. That’s how I get in my houses when I get locked out, for real. [Laughs] That’s my takeaway from Scream: I know I can fit in dog doors. You have to jimmy your body in a certain position and really hope you’re not wearing something super fancy.”
She also spilled her own behind-the-scenes tea.
“I’m known to have the worst aim on the planet, and so when I was throwing the beer bottles [at Ghostface], I shattered the lens of the camera,” McGown joked.
Craven went on to direct three other films for the franchise, “Scream 2” (1997), “Scream 3” (2000) and “Scream 4” (2011), with Campbell, Cox and David Arquette (Officer Dewey Riley) returning.
Hollywood heavyweights Sarah Michelle Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Jada Pinkett Smith, Heather Graham, Laurie Metcalf, Liev Schreiber and Luke Wilson joined the cast, with the ’97 sequel grossing $172.4 million worldwide at the box office.
The legendary director died at 76 in 2015 after a battle with brain cancer — but his slasher franchise lives on.
“Scream 5” and “Scream VI” were directed by Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, with new scream queens Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera.
“Scream VII” has a 2026 debut date, but Ortega dropped out of the film in March over scheduling conflicts with Season 2 of “Wednesday.” Barrera won’t be back either after she was fired from the movie over her social media posts regarding the Israel-Hamas War.
