Premise and Structure At surface level Scream follows a familiar slasher template: a masked killer stalks a small American town, choosing young victims and disrupting ordinary life. Craven and co-writer Kevin Williamson adopt familiar beats—youthful protagonists, isolated settings, a mounting body count—but they arrange those beats with deliberate self-consciousness. The screenplay opens with a now-iconic sequence in which Drew Barrymore’s vivacious and well-known actress character suffers a gruesome death, immediately destabilizing audience expectations and signaling that Scream will play with genre rules rather than obey them.