Scream: Wes Craven Responds To MTV’s New Ghostface Mask

Scream (1996) director Wes Craven is an executive producer on the MTV reboot, but in name only. He’s too busy to be involved with the show on a day-to-day, decision-to-decision basis. Basically: don’t blame him if you don’t like the new look and voice of Ghostface.

“In general, we didn’t mess with the mask at all. It’s something we didn’t try to change,” Craven recalled of his Scream franchise to The Hollywood Reporter. “With Freddy [Krueger] and the New Nightmare (below right), I felt that I probably should have stuck with the original face. [With Scream,] we just let Ghostface be Ghostface. It would have been safer [not to change Freddy]. I’m not going to speculate in public, probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it, but you know, sometimes you realize that something’s not broken, so don’t fix it. And that was the course we took on all the Scream films: Don’t mess with that, it’s just perfect.”

We only got a blurry glimpse of the new darker and more organic Ghostface mask, so it is hard to say how it will all turn out. Executive producer Bob Weinstein is excited about it because the mask has a reason for being, instead of being a mass-produced Halloween mask that caught Craven’s eye, like the original one was. “The [new] mask itself plays a story element, and that is different from Scream the movie,” Weinstein said, “It ties in specifically to the story. The mask has an importance; it’s not a mask for mask’s sake.”

Scream will premiere on MTV on June 30, 2015.