Back in 1996, Wes Craven made a movie that he thought wasn’t as much as a slasher film as it was a comedic satire of teen youth films. The movie, starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Skeet Ulrich, Drew Barrymore, among others became a hit, a box office smasher and catapulted the genre into a new revival at a time when everybody thought that slasher films were just a greasy, cheesy thing from the 1980s.
Scream revived the slasher film paving the way for other franchises like “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Urban Legend” and serving as inspiration for many other horror films.
Scream spawned six films, and a legacy that began with a movie that its director almost didn’t care for. Fun fact: Molly Ringwald was almost cast as Sidney, Neve Campbell’s role. But instead of focusing on casting or plot details, we’re going to shift gears and comment about the places where the film that started it all was shot, so, let’s cover the Scream Filming locations today.
Scream Filming Locations
Scream was the first movie to start a chain of movies that still linger today, it revived the slasher genre and it even paved way for the Wayans’s brothers satire films. The 1996 film takes us to a quiet town where a teenage girl trying to cope with her mother’s death is suddenly tormented as a string of murders, all perpetrated by a figure wearing a mask and a knife takes place.
Scream was quite a challenge to make because the script required a lot of different locations, both interior and exterior for filming because the characters needed to be portrayed vulnerable from everywhere. As such, production designer Bruce Miller and his crew scouted places in Canada and the US for locations. Eventually choosing Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Tomales, , Glen Ellen and Healdsburg in California to develop the project.
Scream was filmed between April and June 1996 with the premiere taking place on December 1996 under a $15 million budget that eventually raked in well over $150 million in the box office.
Santa Rosa, California
Sydney’s house, located in 1820 Calistoga Rd was located in Santa Rosa, California. Furthermore, Santa Rosa served for several scenes like the video rental store, a store that served for interior scenes where Sydney was seen shopping and Tatum’s place. Santa Rosa served for the backdrop of a quiet-town community, and even though the production company thought that it’d be too expensive to film there, the production design team cajoled them into accepting this filming location.
Tomales, California
The movie’s climactic finale was shot in then-unoccupied piece of property in Tomales, California. The entire 40-minute sequence that encompasses the climax of the movie took nearly three weeks to complete, it was quite a feat for cast and crew, who traveled there, set up camp and shot multiple indoor and outdoor scenes. The house where the ending takes place still exists and is located at 3817 Tomales Rd.
Glen Ellen, California
The opening scene of Scream features Drew Barrymore as Casey, she’s in a house that the production team chose for both its indoor decoration and the vast outdoor space that allowed for the chasing sequences that ended Barrymore’s character as the intro of what would later become an iconic slasher film that evokes horror films like Hitchcock’s “Psycho” with Janet Leigh or “Prom Night” from the early 1980s.
Healdsburg, California
The fictional town of Woodsboro and its central downtown square, as well as the fictial Woodsboro Police Department were filmed on location in Healdsburg’s Plaza. The production design team chose these places because of their small-town, quiet-little-place vibes that make way for a lot of action.
Sonoma, California
The scenes that take place in Sydney’s high school were shot in Sonoma, but the actual filming location wasn’t a high school, it was really the Sonoma Community Center, whose vast places were the perfect setting to create an ambiance of a big high school amidst a small town. The Sonoma Community Center was chosen because the production team couldn’t get the Santa Rosa High School board to acquiesce to Craven’s desire to film there due to production costs and schedules.
