Screamwriter

In “Scream,” the gory, goofy thriller that made horror movies hip again, a stalker is on the phone with his next victim. He gets right down to business.

“What’s your favorite scary movie?” he says with a nasty hiss. Neve Campbell, who plays the film’s plucky teen heroine, tells him that horror films are a drag. “They’re all the same,” she says. “Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.”

Give Kevin Williamson credit for changing that. Having written two consecutive horror hits, “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” the 32-year-old screenwriter has breathed new life into the hoary teen-horror genre with a sly, self-referential style that has made him the pied piper of the Pop-Up Video generation.

Of course, it isn’t just Williamson’s characters who are endlessly self-conscious. Their creator views his sudden success the same way. “I can’t handle it--I’m slowly self-destructing,” he says in a self-mocking tone. “Soon I’ll be totally burned out, another hot new writer will come along to take my place and I’ll be back at the bottom, having to stage a comeback.”

For now, however, he’s in the supernova phase of Hollywood heat. Williamson has a deal at Miramax’s Dimension Films that could earn him as much as $20 million. His workload includes scripts for two “Scream” sequels, the first due in December, plus projects that he’ll write or produce for film and TV. He’ll make his directorial debut in the spring with “Killing Mrs. Tingle,” about how some high schoolers plot to kill their English teacher. He’s also created “Dawson’s Creek,” a coming-of-age drama that premieres Jan. 20 on the WB network.

Raised in a tiny North Carolina fishing hamlet, Williamson admits that L.A. is “a scary place for a small-town guy like me.” It was barely three years ago, having given up acting, that he found himself in Los Angeles, so broke that he had to borrow money from a friend to take a screenwriting course at UCLA Extension.

Now, when he returns to his new West Hollywood suite of offices, Williamson has messages from Jamie Lee Curtis--his childhood heroine--and from his agent, offering Fleetwood Mac tickets. The real sign of how much he’s been seduced: Williamson has gone on a low-carb, high-protein diet.

A voracious reader, Williamson laments that he barely has time to pick up a book anymore. In his office, the only book visible is one of two recent biographies of Steven Spielberg--Williamson has the other one by his bed. The acclaimed director is, along with John Hughes, his biggest hero. In “Dawson’s Creek,” the teen hero’s bedroom is a Spielberg shrine, adorned with posters of the director’s films.

In fact, Williamson has something in common with the young, “Jaws”-era Spielberg: He speaks his audience’s language. For a generation steeped in pop culture, “Scream” was a film swimming in subtext--a movie that wittily commented on horror-movie conventions as its own bloody tale was playing out.

“I’m a product of the whole self-aware pop culture of the Reagan era,” says Williamson, an earnest, likable guy who arrives at a West Hollywood deli wearing black Levis and a pair of shiny black shoes he bought at Barney’s for the “Last Summer” premiere.

“To my generation, pop culture is everything. When I sit down to write, I don’t think, how many pop culture references can I fit in? The characters are just like me, they relate life to the movies.

“In ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ when a girl and her boyfriend have a fight, she tells him, ‘Look, even Steven Spielberg outgrew his Peter Pan syndrome.’ Well, to me, that has just as much emotional resonance as anything you’d hear in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ”

Even though it’s a commercial success, having made about $30 million in its first two weeks of release, Williamson views “I Know What You Did Last Summer” with less enthusiasm than “Scream,” noting that it’s an adaptation of a book, not an original script.

He has even less to say about Miramax’s much-publicized legal offensive against the Sony film’s ad campaign, which touted the movie as being “from the creator of ‘Scream.’ ” Even though Miramax is in business with Williamson, the studio claimed that “Scream’s” real creator was director Wes Craven.

Industry insiders have followed the legal wrangling with barely concealed amusement, since Miramax is famous for its own guileful marketing schemes. Williamson says he’s been asked by both sides not to comment, saying that personally he has no complaints: “Miramax is protecting their investment and Sony is trying to promote its movie.”

His preferred topics are his favorite films, his parents’ influence on his writing and how at age 12 he talked his town librarian into subscribing to Variety so he could learn about show business.

Question: How small was this small town you grew up in?

Williamson: It was a little fishing village named Oriental that really had a place called Dawson’s Creek, out by the water. It was our high school hangout, where kids would go to party on the weekend and skinny-dip and make out. The town had one stoplight, one gas station and two restaurants. I pumped gas at the station and worked at both restaurants.

Q: It sounds a lot like the fishing village in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Your father was a fisherman; did he help you when you were adapting the script?

A: Absolutely. He was my consultant. He took me out on his boat and showed me the engine, the ice hold and the winch--and how you could get your hand caught in the winch, which we used in the film. I even tried to name the film’s fisherman after my dad, but we couldn’t clear the name.

Q: Even though the fisherman is a dark character in the movie?

A: He wouldn’t have minded. I got my sense of humor from my dad. He’s a sly-witted fisherman.

Q: And what’d you get from your mother?

A: She’s the storyteller in the family. You could listen to her talk about washing clothes or finding the right cabbage for hours.

Q: So what was the first movie that really had an impact on you?

A: “Jaws.” I’d read the book first, but I was still terrified. I sat in the front row and my neck hurt so much that I kept turning my head around, and what I saw was really amazing. A theater full of people, totally involved, screaming in terror. I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life.

Q: What did you do once you got the movie bug?

A: At age 12, I talked our town librarian into ordering a subscription to weekly Variety. And I started reading all of Syd Field’s screenwriting books. At 13, I was making my own movies with an editing slicer I got out of the Sears catalog.

Q: Isn’t “Killing Mrs. Tingle” inspired by your high school English teacher who said you’d never be any good?

A: She said my grammar was terrible and I was just a kid from the sticks who’d never be a writer. She paralyzed me for a while. In fact, the best moment of my career was printing out “Mrs. Tingle” for the first time, binding it with three brads. I jumped up and down on my bed for an hour. It topped everything, from the spec script sales to meeting Jamie Lee Curtis. Because I’d done something I’d been told I couldn’t do.

Q: Is it true that you wrote “Scream” in three days?

A: Well, it took three days--and a lifetime. I wrote the script in a weekend in Palm Springs. But the story had been percolating in my head ever since I saw “Halloween.”

Q: Why are teenagers so fascinated by horror movies?

A: Kids like being scared because when you’re a kid, everything is high and low, hot and cold--it’s hard to find any calm or middle ground. So a scary movie is a great release for all that pent-up tension and sexual insecurity. For two hours, you can let yourself go. It’s relaxing, like having a two-hour therapy session.

Q: You’re committed to writing “Scream 3,” but after that, you want to move away from horror?

A: I really don’t have any more horror movies left to tell. For me, what connects my stories isn’t the scary stuff, but writing about what kids talk about. I’m really dying to write a “Breakfast Club” for the ‘90s.

Q: How are you dealing with success?

A: I’m forced to be an adult and I hate it. Drawing on my childhood has become my career, but at the same time, it’s taken my childhood away from me.