Interviews
‘Scream’: Marley Shelton Recalls First Experience with Wes Craven and Teases the Evolution of Judy Hicks
Scream 4 introduced Marley Shelton‘s Judy Hicks, the awkward lemon-square baking deputy to Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette). The character served as a red herring and a source of conflict between Dewey and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) but established herself as a valuable ally by the film’s end.
During the production of the new Scream, Shelton spoke with the press about Wes Craven’s legacy and reprising her role.
This time around, the filmmaking team includes directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella, the three members of the filmmaking group known as Radio Silence (Ready or Not V/H/S, Southbound). Their involvement meant no hesitance on Shelton’s part in reprising her role.
“They did such a great job capturing that similar tone of being funny and scary at the same time, which is so unique to the Scream movies. What a perfect idea to have these guys direct this and infuse it obviously with their own style and creativity. But also carry on Wes’ legacy. I jumped at the chance to be able to work with them. Jamie Vanderbilt wrote the script, who’s a very acclaimed screenwriter. Kenny Williamson is still involved. This is a dream team. I thought the script, too, was fantastic and well thought out and captured that essence of the other Scream movies while also being its own new thing. I was like, ‘Sign me up.'”
Pictured: Scream 4
Shelton recalls her initial experience working with Wes Craven on Scream 4, “I was such a huge fan of his going into it that I was just incredibly humbled and excited to get to work with him. I remember the first day I got there, I had been traveling from Europe, and I was jet-lagged. I was in the hotel room, it was dark, and I got this phone call. I answered my phone, and the voice was, ‘Hello, Marley.’ It honestly sounded like a ghost. It was Wes Craven calling just to check in and see how I was doing. But it sounded like Ghostface to me, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. I have Ghostface on the line.’ It just felt so real. Like life imitating art. Anyway. He was the coolest. He’s so brilliant and personable. He has such a philosophy about the value of horror films. Psychologically, for audiences, he really believes that they’re a cathartic healthy thing for our psyche. It was just awesome to participate in his vision, of course. I was a huge fan of the Scream franchise, so I just felt honored.”
Where is Judy Hicks now, you ask?
“That has been the fun of this experience with Judy, to make her still very much Judy that everyone knew from the last one. But also, what has she evolved into, and a couple of things about her in this movie, is she’s no longer Deputy Judy Hicks. She’s now Sheriff Judy Hicks. She has evolved in her career. She also has a teenage son who’s amazing, played by Dylan Minnette. That adds all kinds of interesting ingredients into the mix,” Shelton says of her return.
Dylan Minnette (“Wes”) stars in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s Scream
When asked if fans can expect more between Judy, Gail, and Dewey, she answered, “Obviously, I can’t reveal too much about the twists and turns. But I will say that we definitely explore those relationships. To me, that has been the most fun part of all of this.”
As of this interview, production was still underway and under secrecy. So much secrecy that even the cast remained in the dark. Shelton shared, “The filmmakers have been very careful. They have only released the script to us up to page 77. We don’t know who Ghostface actually is. We don’t know which one of us is the killer, and we will not know that until they shoot the scenes at the end of our production. In the Scream world, everyone is a suspect, right. Everyone’s a potential suspect or potential victim. It’s been fun to try to live that out on the day when we’re shooting. It makes it fun. Judy Hicks, of course, is very righteous, and sunny side up and optimistic, and a woman of the law. But I think just human nature alone has a dark side, so I think that that is thematically a little bit what we’re playing within this. As in all the Scream movies.”
Scream returns, in theaters only, on January 14, 2022.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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