Paramount confirmed that the original 1996 “Scream” is returning to select theaters nationwide on October 30, a 30th-anniversary re-release the studio announced live at a cast reunion panel, according to Haunted Attraction Network’s coverage of the event. Wes Craven’s slasher hit theaters December 20, 1996, meaning the October date functions as an early anniversary run ahead of the actual milestone.

• The re-release was announced during Paramount Scares’ panel at Midsummer Scream, held August 7-9 at the Long Beach Convention Center, per Haunted Attraction Network.
• Matthew Lillard hosted the reunion panel, joined by Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy, and Roger L. Jackson, the voice behind Ghostface himself.
• Paramount Scares built a full-scale recreation of Woodsboro’s Blockbuster-style video store — the one Randy monologues in — on the convention floor, and produced a special Fangoria magazine edition exclusively for the event.
• Independently, regional theaters have already begun booking their own 30th-anniversary screenings; Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, New York, is holding one with David Arquette in attendance, and Sonoma is pairing a screening with a “Haunted Market,” according to The Press Democrat.

What made the panel more than a nostalgia lap were the details the cast let slip. Lillard revealed the film’s climactic party sequence at Stu Macher’s house took seventeen shooting days to complete, an enormous chunk of the schedule for a movie shot on a modest budget. Jackson, whose voice work was originally locked in only for the film’s opening kill scene, ended up voicing Ghostface across the entire franchise.

Panelists recalled, per Haunted Attraction Network’s panel recap, that Henry Winkler, who plays doomed principal Arthur Himbry, improvised on set to help steady the stunt performer during his death scene — a detail that’s floated around fan circles for years but got its clearest airing yet directly from the people who were there. Whether Billy Loomis or Stu Macher actually killed Tatum in the garage was, according to that same panel, never definitively decided even by the filmmakers, leaving one of the movie’s small mysteries permanently unresolved.

“Scream” didn’t just revive the slasher genre in the mid-90s — it rewrote its rules by having characters who’d actually seen horror movies before, and that self-awareness is a big part of why theater chains keep finding excuses to bring it back. Thirty years on, the film that taught a generation the rules of surviving a horror movie is still filling seats, still spawning sequels, and still getting its own cast to show up in costume-shop Ghostface masks for the anniversary photo op.

For fans who missed the original theatrical run entirely — the film opened modestly before word of mouth turned it into a genre-defining sleeper hit — October 30 is the first real chance in years to see Drew Barrymore’s opening sequence unfold on a big screen the way it was built to be seen.