Designing an Online Entertainment Site
By Mary Jo Fahey
The Scream 3 Web site breaks new ground by being an entertainment site, not simply as a promotional tool for the movie, but as a follow-on entertainment site with an original storyline separate from the movie, designed to augment the film with its own corporate mythology.
Rather than building a site that promoted a movie, D'Arcy Young, head of Miramax's New Media, wanted to build a site that provided entertainment of its own, supplementing the movie. As he explains, "The Web site exists as a reward for seeing the movie. With enough entertaining content online, we estimated that we could get fans who had seen the movie to visit the site to get more out of what they saw. It was a grand experiment that worked."
Creating the Back Story
The Scream movies include hip references to horror films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. Each movie is both a horror film and a parody of the horror film genre. Scream 3 employs both parody and Hollywood humor, including movie producers trying to keep their secret scripts off the Internet, an unethical journalist hoping to snag a Pulitzer, cell-phone-addicted adolescents, and Los Angeles drivers. Similarly, the Web site's back story is a movie within a movie, full of suspects, clues, gags, and self-effacing wit.
In September 1999, with the Scream 3 premiere only three months away, Young contacted Amyn Kaderali, who had just written a thriller with a colleague named Brin Hill, and asked the two to conjure a 30-year history of the fictitious Sunrise Studios without benefit of the movie script.
