Rose McGowan can’t scream. Which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem, except the 22-year-old actress plays one of the teen-age targets of a horror-movie-inspired serial killer in director Wes Craven’s latest thriller, Scream. And screaming is in the script.

So after a series of post-production looping, McGowan reaches back and lets loose a scream-queen-worthy shriek.

Which McGowan says once again proves to herself that she can deliver the goods.

“I hate it when people talk about their ‘craft,’ and actors actually say that sort of stuff because it’s goofy,” says McGowan, talking recently at a New York City hotel. “But I do think I’m really good and I think I have a strong feeling that I have something amazing inside. This sounds so lame. But I just hope to hang in there until it’s tapped, you know, and slog through.”

McGowan never intended to jump into movie-making. On a visit to Los Angeles, McGowan caught the eye of a friend of independent filmmaker Gregg Araki. Araki was desperate for the right woman to play the lead in his new teen road movie, The Doom Generation. And McGowan’s funky look fit the bill.

For a woman who studied art history in college, McGowan’s acting debut was a crash-course in movie-making.

“It was like boot camp for movies,” says McGowan, who found herself working a 14-hour schedule six days a week. “So I definitely learned quite a bit about films, and it promptly sent me back home to Seattle for six months.”

McGowan discovered that there’s more to making movies than just making the movie. There’s also promoting them. So after The Doom Generation became a counterculture hit, McGowan found herself jetting to Europe as part of a publicity tour. Which taught her that perhaps she’s got more to learn when it comes to talking to the press.

“I’m probably much too open,” she says. “I’m probably not following whatever you’re supposed to do when you do these things. I just sort of bumble along. I do damage and I apologize. I wish there was a manual for this, because I can tell you honestly I don’t know.”

She can always let her work speak for itself. Araki cast McGowan in his latest teen-angst movie, Nowhere, and she plays a 1950s pin-up girl in the independent film Going All the Way. Currently, she’s on location in Colorado shooting the big-budget suspense thriller Phantoms with Peter O’Toole.

McGowan still plans on returning to college, but for now she plans on acting. At least as long as the work still interests her.

“I don’t want to be like some nightmare actress who’s totally self-obsessed,” says McGowan. “There’s a million of them, and I don’t want to be like them. I want to cultivate myself as a person. I want to travel all over the place. I want to have an amazing life with a bunch of different, crazy experiences.”