Scream star Melissa Barrera reveals how close she was to being stabbed in earnest when she filmed her fight scene at the hospital with Ghostface.
Scream star Melissa Barrera has revealed that she was almost stabbed down right on the set when she recorded her encounter with Ghostface. The fifth entry in the meta-horror series has so far enjoyed a strong economic and critical reception, with Scream be the first film to knock Spider-Man: No Way Home of its pedestal as number 1 at the ticket office. Following a group of horror-fanatic teenagers pursued by a new killer wearing the iconic spectral mask, the film introduces new characters to the series in addition to bringing former protagonists back from the past. Scream film to meet the hooded slasher again.
Participating with Barrera, Scream‘s impressive cast also features Jenna Ortega, Mason Gooding and Jack Quaid, with Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Marley Shelton and Neve Campbell repeating their roles from previous films. However, the road to Scream has been anything but easy. After Wes Craven’s death in 2015, development on a fifth Scream remained in limbo for some time when Craven was seen as an integral part of the franchise and its success. Uncertainty about the future of the film was further exacerbated by the closure of The Weinstein Company in 2018, which had supported Scream 4 and was to finance two additional installments. But it was Spyglass Media Group that finally came to the film’s rescue when they acquired the rights to the franchise in November 2019, allowing production on Scream to finally move on.
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Speaks in an interview with THR, Barrera talks about her experience working on the hit slasher film, from her reaction to reading the script for the first time to her relationship with costar Jenna Ortega. When asked about her hospital showdown with Ghostface at the start of the film, Barrera tells an unexpectedly worrying anecdote that reveals how close the scene got to becoming so much more real. Prior to the story, by explaining how a mixture of rubber and real knives was used during the filming, the star goes on to describe his shocking encounter:
So we made part of the sequence where I was on one side of a round table and he was on the other and made plugs across the table to try to reach me. Well, under one of those stabs, the knife flew out of his hand and hit the window right behind me. And it was a real knife! And everyone was so freaked out. Luckily, it went a little out to the side, away from me. But from then on, they had to glue the knife to the glove so that it did not happen again. But poor Keith [Ward], our stunt guy, was horrified. I felt so sorry for him. I thought, “I’m fine!” And they said, “Yes, but it could have gone really, really wrong. Imagine if you had been stabbed with a flying knife!” So that was my first experience with Ghostface.
Barrera, and devoted fan off Scream, also reveals how she performed almost all of her battle choreography for the film herself, despite the production team’s initial hesitation. This devotion to the role rewarded the actress with an injured wrist after falling on it about 50 times while recording her fight with Ghostface. Despite her close shave and injuries, Barrera continues to praise directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett for creating “such an incredible environment to record this movie“, as well as claiming that”there is nothing I would rather “ than to return to the role of Sam in the future Scream rater.
It’s certainly not the first time the franchise has had an almost-miss when recording its brutal fight scenes, and many devoted fans of the series will no doubt notice that Barrera’s encounter bears a strange resemblance to Skeet Ulrich’s injury in the original. Scream. But it’s clear that Barrera has in no way been deterred by her narrow escape, and her eager enthusiasm to return to the role of Sam testifies to how enjoyable an experience filming was obviously for the cast. And while the success of Scream has certainly made the franchise’s future prospects much more promising, one can safely trust that the producers of any further installments will ensure that there are no more flying knife failures in the future.
Source: THR
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