Credit: Dangereous Minds / Paramount Pictures

Georgie Denborough and the paper boat in It. The titular shark’s first hunt in Jaws. The shower discovery in Terrified. Maybe more so than any other genre of story, horror has to grab the audience from the very first moment, and thus, some of the greatest opening scenes in the history of scene belongs to films that will make you scream.

Hell, a number of films like Ghost Ship and The Empty Man have opening scenes so utterly spectacular they distract from the fact that the rest of the film is a pile of boiled wank. However, when talking about the opening scenes in horror movies, there’s one that stands out above all else. One that you may have been able to see coming if you spotted my cunning use of wordplay in the opening paragraph of this very article! Or if, y’know, you read the headline.

So, fun fact, Wes Craven’s masterpiece Scream was marketed as a Drew Barrymore vehicle. She was a huge star at the time, coming directly off a major part of the movie’s press circuit, promoting the picture in interviews, media appearances and being front and centre on the very poster… Yup, that’s her covering her mouth in one of the most iconic images of 1990s horror, so a generation of movie-goers went to see the new flick from the guy that made Nightmare on Elm Street, and were immediately introduced to Barrymore’s character, Casey Becker.

It’s basically impossible to replicate what happened next. It’s a true-blue, once-in-a-generation moment of audience subversion based on the average movie-goer being clued up enough to want something different from their horror movies, but not so clued up that they expect it… As far as they knew, they were watching a star vehicle from one of the hottest actresses at the moment – so when Barrymore’s Casey starts talking on the phone with Ghostface, a conversation that starts annoyed, becomes flirtatious, and then descends into a nightmare, they knew what to expect.

Especially after her boyfriend Steve gets murdered on her porch. The whole movie then probably opened up for the audience. Drew escapes by the skin of her teeth, then the movie is her looking for justice for her fallen beau. Then Ghostface sticks a knife straight through her heart and the movie star Scream had been sold on dies 12 minutes into the movie. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

However, the opening scene of Scream is more than a shocking swerve. It still has an incredible power to it that makes it hold up even if you can quote the entire phone call from memory. A lot of that is from Craven’s unrivalled way with slasher filmmaking, but most of all, it comes from Barrymore stopping a show that’s barely started with an absolutely unforgettable performance. One who makes more from her handful of minutes on screen than many actors do with an entire performance.

Part of how they got a performance of such realistic terror was down to Barrymore very much hearing Ghostface’s voice on the other end of the phone. To get the best performance, Craven decided to have the man behind the Ghostface voice, Roger L Jackson, on the other end of the line talking to Barrymore for the whole sequence. Meaning that the phone was, essentially, a functioning telephone for the entire production of the scene.

This isn’t an issue when someone was calling her, but when Barrymore had to dial a number, she was so in character that she dialled it for real. On every take. The number she was calling? 911. So, some 911 operator in Northern California got a number of calls from someone who would start reporting that someone was trying to kill her, before screaming and hanging up. It was only discovered that Barrymore was actually dialling the numbers when, mid-take, the phone started ringing when it shouldn’t have.

One can only imagine the panic that must have flooded the set if only for a moment, before Craven himself answered the phone to find an irate local police officer demanding to know why this number kept calling them!

Must have made for a hell of a day at work for that poor dispatch officer, but still, worth it, right?