Scream’s Kevin Williamson Is Rebooting The Universal Monsters — With A Catch
The Dark Universe is getting the Vampire Diaries treatment.
Scream 7 might not be the movie that franchise fans were hoping for — or one that needed to be made at all — but it was a big step up for director Kevin Williamson. He’s been with the franchise for years, having written all but two installments. His stepping up to direct was a significant pivot, but now that the film is out in the world, Williamson is returning to what he knows best: television.
Williamson is a huge figure in the world of Scream, but that’s not his only major work. He also created shows like Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries, making him a formative voice in teen drama. His next project will see him returning to that well, only instead of creating a new world, Williamson will be playing in one of the most iconic sandboxes ever made.
In an interview with Esquire, Williamson likened Scream 7 to something of a detour from other stories he had planned. “Netflix and Universal were very kind to let me go direct Scream VII and put some projects on hold,” he said. “Now I’m focused on those.” The first, Williamson says, is a TV show “based in the Universal monster land.”
Williamson’s Universal Monster series is kind of like “an adult Vampire Diaries.”
Similar to Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the series will bring familiar characters like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster into a shared world. It won’t skimp on Williamson’s penchant for melodrama, either: he compared the project to “an adult Vampire Diaries,” which we’ve not really gotten from him before. The Vampire Diaries did sire The Originals, a more adult spin-off set in New Orleans, but Williamson wasn’t involved with it. This Universal project could split the difference between his teen-focused stories and the tales he wants to tell in his second act.
“Right now I feel like I’m getting old,” Williamson told Esquire. “My time is ticking, and I have so many stories to tell.” Despite returning to the Scream universe after 15 years, the filmmaker doesn’t want to make a habit of going back to the same well again and again: “With Scream 7, I felt like I was able to find a way to go backwards so that I could go forward.”
Revisiting the characters he created, now all grown up, might have given Williamson the inspiration he needed to embrace a new chapter. The fact that it’s the latest in many planned revivals for Universal’s world of monsters is just the icing on the creepy cake.
