Rolling turned to art and music for solace – his Christmas gift of a guitar at age 15 proved to be one of his happiest memories from adolescence. Temperamental, controlling and violent, James fought with Claudia and heaped verbal abuse on Danny and his younger brother, Kevin, resorting to physical attacks on the boys as they got older. He was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, to a 19-year-old mother named Claudia and a police officer named James, a decorated Korean War veteran who may have suffered some combination of post-traumatic stress disorder and inherent mental illness. READ MORE: Scream Cast: Where Are They Now? Rolling suffered abuse at the hands of his fatherĪs he later recalled in The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders, Rolling endured the sort of horrendous childhood that made him ripe to emerge as a menace to society. Spooked, he hammered out the screenplay for what became Scream, the successful 1996 fright flick that was celebrated for its knowing winks at horror film tropes and breathing new life into the genre.īut while Scream provides plenty of slashing scares, in the end, its story of Sydney and the masked killer bears only a passing resemblance to that of Danny Rolling, the 'Gainesville Ripper,' whose life of violence and despair would present a difficult task for any screenwriter to depict. In March 1994, a struggling actor and screenwriter named Kevin Williamson became engrossed in a news program about a drifter who terrorized the town of Gainesville, Florida, with the murders of five college students over three days in August 1990.

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