Out of minor respect for the victims, Sunrise Studios took a couple of years off before greenlighting a new take on “Stab 3.” Naturally, this version was based on Gale Weathers’ most recent book, “Hollywood Horror,” turning the real-life bloodbath surrounding the failed “Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro” production into the next chapter of the franchise. After initially sitting out the third film, franchise veteran Robert Rodriguez ultimately returned to direct once more.
Released in 2001, “Stab 3: Hollywood Horror” was based on “actual” events and followed Sidney Prescott after she had been traumatized by the brutal murders of nearly all her closest friends. Having left Woodsboro behind, Sidney was now working as a crisis intervention counselor, speaking to callers by phone from the safe seclusion of her home in an unknown area of Northern California.
Meanwhile, the Stab franchise, born from Gale Weathers’ book “The Woodsboro Murders,” had become a successful series of horror films. During production on “Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro” in Los Angeles, a killer obtained a copy of the script and began murdering the actors in the same order their characters were supposed to die in the movie. Predicting the next victim, however, was not as simple as it seemed, since the producers had circulated three different screenplays, each with a different ending.
The third installment also brought back fan-favorite Dewey Riley, who was working for Sunrise Studios’ production of “Stab 3.” It also featured a special cameo from long-lost friend Randy and introduced Jennifer Jolie, the actress who gave Gale Weathers a run for her money.
Official Stab posters seen at the Scream VI Experience event in Los Angeles, which were created for Scream VI, reveal another interesting detail about the franchise’s fictional production history. According to those posters, fictional musician Dante Paltrow wrote the scores for “Stab” and “Stab 2” before real-world composer Marco Beltrami stepped in to contribute music to “Stab 3.” That would make Beltrami the only known person to have worked on both the real Scream franchise and its fictional movie-within-a-movie counterpart.
We never actually get a proper look at this version of “Stab 3,” but a poster visible during Scream 4 suggests that it had a massive supporting cast. In addition to the returning and central characters, the cast also included Rutger Hauer, Elizabeth Banks, Balthazar Getty, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, and Will Smith.
Of course, the existence of this completed version raises one especially morbid question: what happened to the footage Roman Bridger shot for the original version of “Stab 3” before he murdered his producer, his cast, and was then killed himself? There would almost certainly be intense public interest in seeing any surviving material from that doomed production. Whether Sunrise ever considered a “tasteful” release of that footage in some form remains one of the stranger, darker mysteries surrounding the Stab franchise.
In the end, “Stab 3: Hollywood Horror” transformed the chaos of the abandoned “Return to Woodsboro” production into another chapter of Sunrise Studios’ most infamous horror series. What began as a movie about murder became a movie about the murders that happened while making that movie.
