Kevin Williamson's art has always imitated his life. Fifteen years after his high school English teacher told him he'd never make it as a writer, he took revenge in his first screenplay, a dark comedy called Killing Mrs. Tingle. The script got optioned, and the failing Los Angeles actor spent his windfall to repay college loans and lease an Infiniti. But Tingle languished, and by 1995 Williamson was facing the cruel truth: he was not a rising star but a 30-year-old dog walker and word-processing temp, with escalating debt and an old teacher who might have been right.
Then one night when he was house sitting in Westwood, he heard a noise in the kitchen and noticed an open window he could have sworn had been closed. Next thing you know, he's creeping around with a butcher knife in one hand and a cell phone in the other, his friend across town posing Freddy and Jason trivia questions and gleefully whispering "Kill, kill, kill."
Every so often, a writer catches lightning in a bottle. Williamson's magic moment came last December, when millions of shrieking teens watched Drew Barrymore try to guess the original killer in Friday the 13th and, ahem, choose incorrectly. Cannily crammed with the likes of Neve, Courteney and Skeet (if these names seem meaningless, you're just in an obsolete demographic) and directed with twisted bravura by the incomparable Wes Craven, Scream became the highest grossing horror movie ever, reviving the moribund slasher genre and lifting its author into Hollywood's screenwriting elite. When the Williamson-scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer (starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar) ruled the box office for three weeks running, his coronation was inevitable; just last week Williamson signed a $20 million contract to write, produce and direct movies and TV shows for Miramax into the next millennium.
But this weekend, as the multiplex masses pour into Scream 2 to learn who's trying to carve up poor Neve this time, Williamson will be poring over the decidedly calmer dailies for Dawson's Creek, a coming-of-age TV series whose adolescent anxieties are resolved not by gleaming cutlery but by awkward, angsty dialogue (though the dead-on post-grunge sound track remains the same). Debuting next month on the WB network, the quiet, thoughtful Dawson is about as far removed from slasherdom as you can get and still have L.A.'s BMW brigade return your calls.
In person, Williamson is sweet of nature, mild of manner and decidedly nonviolent. "I'm too squeamish for horror," he says. "I can't handle all the blood." In fact, he really wants to be the next John Hughes, albeit for a far edgier generation than the one that peopled The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Williamson's calling card may have been an eye for artful carnage, but his staying power derives from his ear for the voice of the '90s teen, whom he describes as "a very self- aware, pop-culture-referenced individual who grew up next to Blockbuster in the self-help, psychobabble '80s."