Sometimes art imitates life. Other times, life imitates art. Suddenly there’s no line between what is fiction and what constitutes reality. In August of 1990, life and the art of horror collided when five students – one from Santa Fe College and four from the University of Florida – were brutally murdered in Gainesville, Florida. Their killer was a man named Danny Rolling.
His weapon of choice was the knife.
Rolling is known as the Gainesville Ripper. His crimes were like something straight out of a slasher movie – he mutilated the corpses of his victims, elaborately posing them for people to find, and even decapitated one. Over the course of several days he committed these murders, disrupting the lives of everyone across Gainesville, particularly those of the young people on various college campuses all over the city. Some students even opted to drop out and enrol elsewhere for fear there would be more slayings. Rolling’s vicious murder spree would inspire screenwriter Kevin Williamson to tell his own fictional story, writing the screenplay that started, aptly titled, as Scary Movie and later became Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).
Craven’s movie is a fantastic postmodern horror, which asks questions of itself, of the media, and even of horror movie fans – all concerning whether violent media plays a part in real violence. As such, it’s hard to lose sight of the real life serial killer who inspired Williamson to craft the story of Scream and its Ghostface villain. Sydney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) makes the clearest ethical statement of the entire screenplay when she reminds boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich):
“But this is life, this isn’t a movie.”
While Craven and Williamson gave horror fans what’s arguably one of the greatest slasher movies of all time, the fact is it’s all closely built on the foundation of real life deaths. Scream opens with Drew Barrymore’s character in the famous “What’s your favourite scary movie?” scene, which ends before the title card with her strung up from a tree, gutted with what’s left of her organs hanging over her legs. It’s a mental feat to divorce these images from those of Rolling’s third victim – Christina Hoyt, an eighteen-year-old student – whom he stabbed in the heart through her back, then decapitated, before posing her head on a bookshelf to surprise the person who would later find her. When considering a Ghostface slasher tableau versus the real life murder scene on which it’s based, the horror fan glee feels somewhat deflated.
There are aspects of how Williamson chooses to tell the Scream story that don’t exploit the true crimes of the Gainesville Ripper, rather they amplify aspects of the real story in interesting ways, such as the very concept of the Ghostface killer’s mask. At its core a mask represents anonymity, it’s a convention seen in slasher movies since the beginning of the sub-genre. Craven and Williamson use the masked killer horror trope with ingenuity, taking the fear of anonymity – such as that which thrived in Gainesville across the various college campuses in 1990 during Rolling’s reign of terror – and turning it into a more personal whodunit plot, where the killer can be anybody because the mask is commonplace, available at stores. The epitome of this idea is when students at school run around as a prank, scaring others with one of the Ghostface masks on; this cruel joke is symbolic of how the killer can be anybody, and so nobody is safe. Not only is nobody safe, there are no spaces safe from the killer, either.
A significant change from the real life Gainesville Ripper case and Scream is that Williamson transposed the actual college setting of the killings into a high school setting. In regards to a serial killer, any setting will inspire fear. That being said, a killer preying on high school students is always, for some reason, even scarier than normal. The earlier age is synonymous with innocence, and so the slasher killing teenagers is even more disturbing.
Of course it’s only optics, because murder is murder.
Williamson knows what sells, which itself is a question of ethics, too. He tells his story in a form that’s more appealing to movie studios and audiences alike. But this change from college to high school is still about more than playing to the tastes of the box office and modern moviegoers. When the killer – masked by a disguise purchasable at any number of stores around the country – invades a high school, there’s not only a question of innocence being attacked, there’s also a suggestion kids are not safe anywhere. It’s the same as any violence, real or imagined, taking place in a school: it shatters preconceived notions about safe places/spaces in society. Even considering the ethical implications of manipulating the story of real murders, it was an excellent adaptational move for Williamson to set the events of Scream at a high school in the fictional town of Woodsboro, California, as a way to challenge real life ideas about how safe societal spaces are for some of its most vulnerable groups.
Perhaps the smartest move Williamson made in turning a real life string of murders into a slasher screenplay is excluding the sexual nature of Rolling’s crimes, though he does keep some of that alive in a less explicit way. Rolling raped his victims before mutilating and killing them, as well as posed some of them in sexually suggestive and humiliating ways for people to find them later. This would’ve been even more vicious than what Craven and Williamson brought to life on screen. Williamson doesn’t make Ghostface into a raping, killing maniac. But at the heart of the motive for the killers in Scream lies a sex connection.
Sydney’s mother Maureen is the misguided object of rage which drives Billy to murder, after he blames her for ruining his family; boiled down, Billy’s mad his father had extramarital sex with Sydney’s mom. In a strange, maybe even unintended way, Williamson’s screenplay stays true to these gruesome aspects of the real life murders without having to include any graphic sexual assaults in the Ghostface killings. Other, more gratuitous slasher movies might not have been so careful or concerned with tact. It’s better for the audience, and Scream’s ultimate success, that Williamson decided to alter many of the true elements in the Gainesville Ripper case. And it’s not as if the blood and gore is lacking.
At the climax of Scream, Sydney berates Billy for his hideous murder spree saying that he’s “seen too many movies,” to which he replies: “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.” The movie’s status as a contemporary horror classic aside, its own screenplay asks the viewer to consider the ethical implications of horror movies and the violence in them, as well as, more importantly and specifically, the ethics of how Williamson has adapted the real terror of the Gainesville Ripper into a fictional slasher movie. This isn’t to say Rolling was influenced by violent media, not at all. But the violence Rolling brought down upon Gainesville, Florida during those several days in the summer of 1990, and the horror and terror he inflicted on the area’s students, brought its own media frenzy just like that of Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) in Scream. Williamson diluted the rape, mutilation, and murder of real college students to tell his postmodern slasher story, smugly poking sinister fun at the media and its role in perpetuating violence in society, or whether such a connection even exists.
Stories based on real killers are inevitable, as are stories of any other facet of life. Likewise, screenwriters will always use real events to inform and inspire their storytelling processes. However, there’s a fine line at times between exploiting the true stories and using them constructively as an influence to tell a particular story. Craven and Williamson delivered a movie that’s iconic and interesting, one which gave the slasher sub-genre of horror a needed breath of fresh air in the ‘90s. But the jury’s still out on whether telling this kind of story using the very real, gruesome murders of the Gainesville Ripper as such a significant inspiration was entirely ethical.
, from Kevin Williamson's screenplay, explores the crimes of Danny Rolling through fictionalization.){kind=link}