A Call From Ghostface

The Scream opening scene turns 30 this December, and the scariest thing in it might be the phone.

By Jack Malacat

Content note: This article discusses murder, including a real case from 1990.

Of all the ways to die in Serial Killer, my card game, only one begins with a ringtone. The card reads "A Call From Ghostface," and when I went back into the research behind it, I expected the answer to be the mask. It turned out to be the phone. The Scream opening scene works because a teenage girl answers a phone with no screen on it, in a year when most American homes still had no way to see who was calling. That detail is easy to miss today, and it made the scene feel possible in 1996. The fear it planted has outlived the technology.

I first saw Scream on cable TV as a kid, alone, from the first ring to the end credits. That was the night I learned I love horror movies. Scream is my slasher movie, my awakening. Oddly, it never taught me to fear the phone. I never got a scary prank call growing up, so the danger in that kitchen stayed on the screen. What stuck with me was how easy it was for the killer to get in. He just called.

The killer on the line wasn't new. For decades, an urban legend has traveled from sleepover to sleepover about a babysitter tormented by calls that turn out to come from inside the house. Black Christmas (1974) built a sorority-house horror film on that idea, and When a Stranger Calls (1979) opened with an almost direct telling of the legend. Both films understood that a phone lets a stranger into your home while every door stays locked.

Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, made the caller chatty. Ghostface flirts, asks about favorite scary movies, then turns small talk into a horror trivia quiz where a wrong answer costs a life. The girl holding the receiver was played by Drew Barrymore, the most famous face in the film's marketing, and she doesn't survive the opening. Audiences lost their safest bet in the first scene. Even the killer's face came with a cheap origin. Producer Marianne Maddalena found the mask, a store-bought Halloween costume made by the novelty company Fun World, while scouting locations a few weeks before filming. One of horror's most recognizable faces was something you could have pulled off a Halloween rack.

A night in someone else's house

Williamson has told the story of where the idea started many times. He was house-sitting for a friend, alone in an unfamiliar home, watching a TV news special about the 1990 murders of college students in Gainesville, Florida. It frightened him enough that he called a friend and walked through the house with a knife, checking under the bed and in the shower.

Look at what he did next. Scared and alone in a stranger's house, he picked up the phone. The scene he went on to write is about a girl who does the same thing and gets the wrong voice on the line.

A phone with no screen

Watch the opening again and look at the phone. It tells her nothing. The only way to learn who's calling is to keep talking, and every extra second on the line is a second Ghostface uses.

That was normal in 1996. Caller ID had been offered to American homes since 1989, but it spread slowly. By 2001, only 43% of US households had it. California, where the fictional town of Woodsboro sits, didn't get the service until the summer of 1996, about six months before Scream reached theaters on December 20.

The franchise noticed the change almost immediately. Scream 2 arrived a year later and introduced its heroine screening her calls on a caller ID display. When a crank caller tries to frighten her, she reads him his own name and number. My reading, and it is an interpretation, not something Williamson or director Wes Craven has said, is that Scream caught the last moment when you had to answer a call to find out who it was. Today, picking up without knowing who's on the line is hard to imagine.

Thirty years later, nobody picks up

The screen won, and most of us now use it as a wall. In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, eight in ten Americans said they don't generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls. Two-thirds said they let it ring and check the voicemail later.

That's me exactly. I don't pick up, period, unless it's family, and my family texts. If a call matters, the caller leaves a message, and I decide whether to call back. I'm a millennial, and my generation has a reputation for hating phone calls. I live up to it. Pew's numbers suggest the habit isn't ours alone: in that survey, adults under 30 were more likely than older Americans to answer an unknown number.

The ringing never stopped, though. In February 2026, Williamson himself directed Scream 7, which opened to $64.1 million in North America, the best start in the franchise's 30 years. Ghostface still calls, and audiences still show up to watch someone answer. Caller ID changed what we do when the phone rings, but that small jolt before we check the screen is the same one Scream played on in 1996.

So the card's question passes to you. When an unknown number lights up your screen, what's the first thing you imagine?

About the Author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn't designing games or dreaming up new products, he's here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Sources and Further Reading

• Snopes, "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs." Link
• Slashfilm, "Black Christmas (1974) Ending Explained." Link
• Box Office Mojo, "Scream (1996)," release and box office data. Link
• Slashfilm, "One of the Scariest Scenes in Scream Is Its Iconic Cold-Blooded Open." Link
• Fangoria, "Loren's Ghost: The Haunted History of the Scream Mask." Link
• Bonhams, "An original Scream 'Ghostface' mask," auction lot notes, December 8, 2021. Link
• East Carolina University News, "Be very afraid: ECU alum Kevin Williamson directs 'Scream 7'," February 27, 2026. Link
• Smithsonian Magazine, "How Scream Explored the Exploitative Nature of the Nightly News." Link
• Encyclopedia.com, "Telephone Caller Identification (Caller ID)." Link
• California Public Utilities Commission, "Caller ID Delay" press release, May 22, 1996. Link
• California Public Utilities Commission, "FCC Delays Caller ID Implementation for Some California Phone Companies Until July 1," June 3, 1996. Link
• Den of Geek, "How Scream Scared Americans into Buying Caller ID." Link
• Pew Research Center, "Most Americans don't answer cellphone calls from unknown numbers," December 14, 2020. Link
• City News Service, "Critic-Proof 'Scream 7' Opens with Franchise-Best $64 Million," March 2, 2026. Link