Matthew Lillard has a rare horror résumé: a cult VHS creature feature, one of the most quoted slasher villains of the 1990s, and a starring role in the biggest opening in Blumhouse history. This guide covers his horror films and creepiest TV work in release order, with honest scare ratings and what’s coming next. Twists stay boxed off until you choose to read them.
Matthew Lillard at a glance
Matthew Lyn Lillard was born on January 24, 1970, in Lansing, Michigan, and grew up in Southern California. His first screen credit was a horror sequel in 1991, and he has drifted back to the genre ever since.
Here are the key numbers:
- 1991: Film debut in Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College.
- 1996: Scream made him a horror icon. It earned about $173 million worldwide on a budget of roughly $15 million.
- 2010 onward: Official voice of Shaggy Rogers in Warner Bros. animation, taking over from Casey Kasem.
- 2023: Five Nights at Freddy’s opened to about $80 million in the US, Blumhouse’s best opening to date, and went on to gross close to $300 million worldwide.
- 2025 and 2026: He returned for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (December 5, 2025), and he was announced in the returning cast of Scream 7, dated for February 27, 2026.
His range outside horror matters too. He played the punk Stevo in SLC Punk! (1998), the hacker Cereal Killer in Hackers (1995), and Brian Speer, the man having an affair with the wife of George Clooney’s character, in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011). That comic and dramatic range is exactly why his horror villains land.
Every Matthew Lillard horror role compared
| Title | Year | Subgenre | Scare level | Where to watch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College | 1991 | Creature comedy | 1/5 | Physical media, digital rental |
| Serial Mom | 1994 | Black comedy, satire | 1/5 | Digital rental |
| Scream | 1996 | Meta slasher | 3/5 | Rotates on streamers; digital rental |
| Thir13en Ghosts | 2001 | Supernatural, haunted house | 3/5 | Warner Bros. catalog; digital rental |
| Scooby-Doo | 2002 | Family monster comedy | 1/5 | Warner Bros. catalog; digital rental |
| Twin Peaks: The Return | 2017 | Surreal TV horror | 4/5 | Showtime (Paramount+ with Showtime in the US) |
| Five Nights at Freddy’s | 2023 | Animatronic horror | 2/5 | Peacock (US); digital rental |
Streaming rights for the older films shift often, so check your region before movie night. All of them are easy to rent digitally.
Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991)
Directed by effects artist John Carl Buechler, this direct-to-video sequel drops the toilet-dwelling Ghoulies onto a college campus during prank week. Lillard plays Stork, one of the frat guys. The part is small and the movie is pure VHS-era nonsense, but you can already see the rubber-faced energy he’d bring to Stu Macher five years later.
Who it suits: cult collectors and anyone who loves bad-movie nights. If you need an actual scare, skip it.
Serial Mom (1994)
John Waters cast Lillard as Chip Sutphin, the horror-obsessed son of Kathleen Turner’s perfect suburban mother, who happens to murder people over minor slights. Chip loves gory movies, so this is basically Lillard playing a horror fan two years before Scream made him the most famous one.
It’s more satire than horror. Pick it if you like your bodies counted with a wink, and if you’ve already seen everything in our rundown of Jamie Lee Curtis horror movies and want something just as knowing but much nastier in tone.
Scream (1996)
Wes Craven directed it, Kevin Williamson wrote it, and Dimension Films released it. Lillard plays Stu Macher, the loud, goofy boyfriend in Sidney Prescott’s friend group, and his scenes alongside Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis are the beating heart of the film’s chaos. He improvised some of Stu’s best moments, and the party sequence, where the teens watch Halloween (1978) while the actual killer stalks the house, is still the template for every meta horror film since.
This is the one to start with. It’s scary enough for a proper jump on first viewing but funny enough for viewers who usually avoid slashers. If you came to the franchise through Jenna Ortega’s horror movies and roles in the 2022 sequel and Scream VI, this is where all those rules and callbacks were born.
Thir13en Ghosts (2001)
Dark Castle Entertainment, the Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis horror label, remade William Castle’s 1960 gimmick film as a glass-walled haunted house loaded with brutal, beautifully designed ghosts. Steve Beck directed. Lillard plays Dennis Rafkin, a sweaty, wisecracking psychic who knows exactly how bad the house is, alongside Tony Shalhoub, Shannon Elizabeth and F. Murray Abraham.
Critics hated it in 2001. Fans have been far kinder since, mostly because the ghost designs (the Jackal and the Juggernaut especially) are fantastic. Lillard is the audience’s nervous guide, which makes it a great pick for a loud, rowdy Halloween night horror double bill.
Scooby-Doo (2002) and Shaggy Rogers
Raja Gosnell’s live-action Scooby-Doo and its 2004 sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, gave Lillard the role that most people now associate with his voice. His Norville “Shaggy” Rogers is uncanny, close enough to Casey Kasem’s original that he later inherited the voice. He has voiced Shaggy in animation since 2010, including the darker, serialized Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (Cartoon Network, 2010 to 2013), which leans harder into spooky lore than most Scooby shows.
Who it suits: families and anyone easing a young viewer toward horror. The monsters are rubber masks and the scares are giggles. That’s the point.
If you liked this
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010): Lillard’s voice work in the most horror-flavoured Scooby series.
Monster House (2006): a properly spooky haunted-house film for kids.
Coraline (2009): Henry Selick’s stop-motion nightmare, a real step up in scares.
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Showtime revival is not marketed as horror, but it contains some of the most disturbing TV ever made. Lillard plays William Hastings, a South Dakota high school principal tangled up in a grisly murder. His interrogation scene in the first episode is a raw, unravelling piece of acting that many critics singled out as an early highlight.
Who it suits: viewers who want dread instead of jump scares. It’s strange, slow and nightmarish. Watch the original series first if you can, or at least know that Lynch never explains everything.
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)
Blumhouse and Universal adapted Scott Cawthon’s game series with Emma Tammi directing and Josh Hutcherson starring as Mike Schmidt, a struggling security guard on the night shift at an abandoned pizzeria. Lillard plays Steve Raglan, the career counsellor who gets Mike the job. The animatronics come from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which gives the film a tactile creepiness that CGI could not match.
The PG-13 rating keeps gore off-screen, which made it a gateway horror film for a whole generation of younger fans. It opened in theaters and on Peacock the same day and still broke records. If the film hooked you, the games are the next step, and you can play FNAF 2 on PC without a modern rig.
The two twists that define his horror career
Spoiler warning
This section spoils the killer reveal in Scream (1996) and the villain reveal in Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023).
In Scream, Stu Macher is one of the two Ghostface killers, working with Billy Loomis. The reveal works because Lillard spent the whole film playing Stu as harmless comic relief. His meltdown in the finale (“My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”) is one of the funniest and most unhinged moments in slasher history. Stu appears to die when Sidney drops a TV on his head, though fans have argued for years that he survived. Scream 7 will finally address that.
In Five Nights at Freddy’s, Steve Raglan is revealed to be William Afton, the series’ child-murdering villain and the man inside the Springtrap suit. Lillard gets very little screen time, but fans who knew the games had been campaigning for that casting, and his reveal at the end drew the biggest reaction in theaters. Afton’s fate at the end of the first film set up the sequel.
Matthew Lillard TV shows worth knowing
His television career is broader than his horror filmography, and it’s where you’ll see his range most clearly:
- The Bridge (FX, 2013 to 2014): Daniel Frye, a burnt-out reporter dragged into a serial killer case on the US and Mexico border. The darkest non-Lynch TV he has done.
- Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime, 2017): covered above.
- Good Girls (NBC, 2018 to 2021): Dean Boland, the cheating, scheming husband of Christina Hendricks’s character, played for both laughs and pathos.
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and many later Scooby projects: the voice of Shaggy.
Off-screen he co-founded Beadle & Grimm’s, a company that makes deluxe collector’s editions for Dungeons & Dragons. He’s also a regular on the tabletop and convention circuit, which explains why fans treat him like one of their own.
What it means for horror fans
Lillard’s career is a useful reminder of how horror treats character actors. He was never the final girl or the square-jawed hero. He was the funny friend, the nervous psychic, the guy you underestimate. Horror rewards that kind of actor, and the same pattern shows up in our look at Tim Curry’s horror roles, from Rocky Horror to Pennywise: a performer whose comedy makes the menace hit harder.
It also shows how fan campaigns now shape casting. The FNAF community pushed for him, and Blumhouse listened. In 2024, when Quentin Tarantino publicly named Lillard among actors he didn’t rate, fans rallied around him loudly, and his response at a convention was gracious instead of bitter.
What happens next
Two franchise returns sit at the top of his slate:
- Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (Universal and Blumhouse, December 5, 2025): Emma Tammi returned to direct, and Lillard came back to the franchise. Expect a scare level close to the first film’s.
- Scream 7 (Paramount, dated for February 27, 2026): Kevin Williamson, who wrote the original, directs. Lillard’s return was officially announced alongside Neve Campbell’s. How Stu fits in has not been explained, which is half the fun.
If you’re catching up before either release, watch Scream and Five Nights at Freddy’s back to back. They make a surprisingly great pairing: one a gory slasher for adults, one a gentler creature feature for younger viewers, both built around the same gleeful, unsettling performer.
FAQ
What is Matthew Lillard’s full name?
His full name is Matthew Lyn Lillard. He was born on January 24, 1970, in Lansing, Michigan.
Who did Matthew Lillard play in Scream?
He played Stu Macher in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996). He’s announced to return in Scream 7, dated for February 27, 2026.
Who does Matthew Lillard play in Five Nights at Freddy’s?
He plays Steve Raglan in the 2023 film. The character’s real identity is a major twist, covered in the spoiler section above.
Is Matthew Lillard still the voice of Shaggy?
Yes. He has voiced Shaggy Rogers in Warner Bros. animation since 2010, after playing the character in the live-action Scooby-Doo films of 2002 and 2004.
What is the scariest Matthew Lillard project?
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is the most disturbing, rated 4/5 here for dread and a few truly shocking moments. For a classic slasher scare, Scream is the pick.