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Williamson kids may talk like therapists, but they act like guarded and wounded 15-year-olds whose cell phones and videotapes stand in for a sadly absent adult institutional authority. Scream worked not just because teens reacting to murders in their midst by ironically citing old horror movies was a fresh take on a way-stale tale, but also because their jaded nonchalance felt almost frighteningly cynical.
"These characters have all grown up with the media, and I don't think any of them had a safe upbringing," says Party of Five ingenue and Scream centerpiece Neve Campbell. Her Sidney, a dewy innocent in the original, has morphed in the new film into a quintessentially '90s victim/survivor, achieving a kind of tear-streaked operatic grandeur that, frankly, lends Scream 2 more emotional punch than a slasher sequel really deserves. "Young people have been numbed," she says. "Kevin has a way of capturing that cynicism without being naive."
Call it Clearasil Realism. "His characters are incredibly honest," says 20-year-old James Van Der Beek, who plays Williamson alter ego Dawson in the new TV show. "They say things teenagers are thinking but don't necessarily say, especially about sexuality." Dawson is a high school sophomore, aspiring filmmaker and overall sweetheart. He's the rosy lens through which we observe Williamson's latest assemblage of troubled, fumbling teens, notably the two competitors for Dawson's heart: Jen (Michelle Williams), the new girl in town whose dark past will emerge in time for the February sweeps, and his childhood pal Joey (the impossibly lovely Katie Holmes), product of a very broken home, who helps make the show a likely TV-14 by climbing in Dawson's window in the pilot episode, flopping onto his bed and then...
But let's not give away the story ahead of time. Suffice it to say that the pilot's hormonal preoccupations, though largely limited to words rather than deeds, have already drawn a consternated flurry from cultural watchdogs. "You gotta look past the 'size queen' references and masturbation talk," says Williamson. "The show at its core is about sweaty palms, hand holding and 'Will she kiss me?'"
Williamson grew up along the rural Carolina coastline a few miles from the real Dawson's Creek, a die-hard reader and weekend-matinee freak whose own life has served as a rough cut of the screen dreams that Scream is now enabling. His fisherman father was the visual model for the killer in Last Summer. Mrs. Tingle will be his directorial debut. His struggling L.A. young-adulthood informs his in-development twentynothing TV drama Wasteland. The kid who once sat through six straight showings of Halloween recently met Jamie Lee Curtis for drinks at the Polo Lounge to swap ideas for Halloween 7, for which he wrote "a quick treatment as a favor to Harvey and Bob."