Helen’s chase scene starts off with her trapped inside a police cruiser as the killer stalks toward her. Although it sure seems like she’s trapped, she manages to kick her way through one of the windows and crawl out just in time. In the original version of the script, however, things got a lot more complicated.
“In the back of the car, in the very beginning of the sequence when the car stops, Kevin had written a scene in which the fisherman gets into the car and he drives off and they have a fight in the car and a car crash,” revealed director Jim Gillespie in a 2022 interview. “But you never see the fisherman’s face throughout the whole sequence. I just said, ‘Dude, this is impossible to do.’ Because the confines of the police car, for us to stage the action with the fisherman’s hat and not see him, I said, ‘It’s just gonna restrict the sequence so much.’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna do that. We’ll do something else.'”
But Williamson wasn’t content to cut the scene forever. Instead, almost this exact sequence of events happens with Sidney (Neve Campbell) and Hallie (Elise Neal) in “Scream 2.” Because Ghostface always wears a mask, there was no difficulty this time around with avoiding showing the killer’s face. The real highlight of the scene is what happens after the car crashes; Sidney and Hallie are forced to climb over an unconscious Ghostface and escape out the driver’s side door, knowing full well he could wake up at moment, or that he could be pretending to be asleep.
“It was a really good scene,” said Gillespie. “It just wasn’t right for our circumstances.”