Scream 7 may not be the film franchise fans were hoping for — or even one that needed to be made — but it marked a major leap for director . He’s been tied to the franchise for years, having written all but two installments. His move to directing was a notable shift, but now that the film is out in the world, Williamson is returning to his forte: television.
Williamson is a towering figure in the Scream universe, but that’s not his only key work. He also created shows like Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries, cementing his status as a formative voice in teen drama. His next project sees him revisiting that space, but instead of building a new world, Williamson will be playing in one of the most iconic fictional realms ever crafted.
In an interview with , Williamson described as a bit of a detour from other planned stories. “Netflix and Universal were very kind to let me direct Scream VII and put some projects on hold,” he said. “Now I’m focused on those.” The first, Williamson notes, is a TV series “set in the Universal monster land.”
Like , the series will bring familiar characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster into a shared world. It also won’t skimp on Williamson’s flair for melodrama: he compared the project to “an adult Vampire Diaries,” something we haven’t really gotten from him before. The Vampire Diaries did spawn The Originals — a more mature spin-off set in New Orleans — but Williamson wasn’t involved with it. This Universal project could strike a balance between his teen-focused stories and the tales he wants to tell in his second act.
“Right now I feel like I’m getting old,” Williamson told Esquire. “My time is ticking, and I have so many stories to tell.” Despite returning to the Scream universe after 15 years, the filmmaker doesn’t want to make a habit of revisiting the same well repeatedly: “With Scream 7, I felt like I found a way to go backwards so that I could go forward.”
Revisiting the characters he created, now all grown up, might have given Williamson the inspiration he needed to embrace a new chapter. The fact that it’s the latest addition to Universal’s monster world is just the icing on the creepy cake.