Thirty years after a masked killer with a voice like a bad phone connection turned a small California slasher movie into a franchise, one of its most beloved survivors is taking the film back on the road. On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, David Arquette comes to E.J. Thomas Hall at the University of Akron for "Behind the Scream," an evening built around a 30th-anniversary screening of Scream followed by a live, moderated conversation and audience Q&A with the actor who played Deputy Dewey Riley.
The format is simple and, for this part of Ohio, unusual: the film first, then the man. The event at the 198 Hill St. hall is listed for a 7:30 p.m. start. A limited number of VIP tickets include the best seats in the house and a post-show photo opportunity with Arquette. It is a ticketed, seated, single-performance event rather than a convention appearance or a concert, which makes it a different kind of night out than the usual touring circuit offers Akron.
Scream arrived in theaters on December 20, 1996, directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson. Craven was already a horror institution by then, the man behind The Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the project was modest: a $14 million production that went on to gross about $173 million worldwide, according to IndieWire's reporting on the franchise. Its premise, a killer who has studied the rules of horror movies and uses them against his victims, gave the genre a self-aware jolt that critics and audiences had not quite seen before, and it revived the slasher at a moment when it had been written off.
For Arquette, the film was a pivot of a different sort. He came from an acting family that reaches back generations, and his credits before Scream leaned comic and young: Airheads, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Never Been Kissed, Ready to Rumble. Dewey, the small-town deputy with the bad haircut and the worse luck, was not obviously the role that would define a career. But the character became the franchise's emotional center, the goofy, decent lawman who kept surviving when he shouldn't have. Arquette played Dewey across all five films of the original run, from the 1996 original through the 2022 relaunch, and the character's arc, from bumbling deputy to traumatized sheriff, tracked the actor's own long relationship with the series.
That 2022 film gave Dewey the ending fans had dreaded. In an interview with Variety around its release, Arquette noted with a laugh that the reaction to Dewey's death was intense: "People do seem more upset about the death of Dewey than the near-death of myself," he said, a reference to a real-life scare he had in a wrestling ring when an opponent smashed a fluorescent light tube over his head and cut his neck. The line says something about how the audience holds the character, and it is exactly the sort of story that a live Q&A is built to draw out.
The venue fits the occasion better than a generic theater would. E.J. Thomas Hall opened in October 1973 and has spent more than half a century as the University of Akron's performing arts anchor, occupying three acres on the western edge of campus next to downtown. It is named for Edwin J. Thomas, the retired chairman and chief executive of Goodyear Tire & Rubber and a long-serving university trustee. The building was designed by Caudill, Rowlett and Scott of Houston with Dalton, Van Dijk, Johnson and Partners of Cleveland, and it was celebrated at the time as one of the world's finest multipurpose halls in design, acoustics and creative engineering.
What makes the hall genuinely strange and wonderful is overhead. Its 44-ton ceiling can be moved, repositioning the room's acoustics and its sense of scale in roughly fifteen minutes, a mechanism devised with the theater consultant Dr. George Izenour of Yale and the acoustician Dr. Vern Knudsen of UCLA. The auditorium seats 2,955 in a continental layout across three tiers, and the Goodrich Lobby holds more than 40 tons of Witzman counterweights that drive the ceiling's movement. The Akron Symphony Orchestra played the hall's inaugural performance in 1973 and returned for its 50th anniversary celebration in 2023. It is a room built for symphony and Broadway, which is part of the fun of putting Ghostface in it.
For anyone who has heard Arquette tell it, the Scream story is not only about the movie. It is about a franchise that kept reinventing itself, about working with Craven across four films, and about what it is like to be the guy the audience keeps rooting for even when the script has other plans. The tour, which the actor is taking around the country for the film's 30th anniversary, pairs the movie with the memories, and the Q&A leaves room for the questions fans actually want answered.
Tickets for the Akron date are on sale through the usual channels, with the event listed on the Behind the Scream tour site and on the Downtown Akron event calendar. For a Halloween-season night in a hall that can literally reshape its own ceiling, a 1996 slasher and its most likable survivor is a fitting double feature.