Not that her looks aren't fully appreciated in Creek's fictional Massachusetts town of Capeside, where the high school students are hormonally charged as well as intensely talky and pop-culturally savvy -- the sort of kids you would expect from Kevin Williamson, the brain behind the Scream movies and this series, a hit since its January debut. Hopeless romantic Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek, 21) spent the first season resolving whether he preferred the seductive Jen, newly arrived from Manhattan with a lot of emotional baggage (a history of promiscuity) or nice local girl Joey Potter (Katie Holmes, 19). Viewers (and Dawson) seem to lean toward Joey -- there's even a Web site devoted to dissing Jen. "It's cool," says Williams. "I don't need to be the 'it' girl."

Besides, she's getting plenty of attention, most of it life-threatening, in Halloween: H20. In the 20th-anniversary sequel to the teen thriller about a tireless psycho killer, Williams plays a student taught by stalker-prone Jamie Lee Curtis. "I was worried about being a good screamer," says Williams. A groundless concern: In one scene, she recalls, "The guy is slashing his knife inches from our faces. I completely lost it."

But Williams, who recently finished shooting a comedy, Dick, with fellow teen starlet Kirsten Dunst, is usually very much in control. "She's a very deep well of a human being," says Curtis. "There's a lot that's not on the surface." When Josh Jackson, 20, who plays oddball Pacey Witter, tried to fashion himself as Williams's big brother off the Creek set, she told him to knock it off. "He was ridiculously paternal," says Williams, who now regards Jackson as a good friend. "If he ever pats me on the head again I'll kick his butt." Says a deadpan Jackson: "When she wants to be, she can be quite engaging."

Especially when she is engaged in her favourite pastime, acting. "There's never really been anything else," says the Kalispell, Mont., native, who was 10 when she moved to San Diego with her father, Larry, 54, a commodities trader; mother, Carla, 42, a homemaker; and sister Paige, 14. She made her screen debut in the '94 remake of Lassie when she was a 14-year-old freshman at Santa Fe Christian High School, and a self-described "social klutz." The following year she landed the role of an alien in Species.

At 15, feeling that her career would accelerate if she were legally independent and not restricted by California child-labor laws, Williams moved to Burbank and has since lived a peripatetic life in Los Angeles, shifting from one little apartment to the next. "My mom was hurt," says Williams, although their relationship has since recovered. (Her parents decline to talk to the press.) "But she would send me underwear and socks. Still does."

Since Williams signed a five-year contract for Dawson's Creek, the care packages have farther to go. She now spends 10 months out of 12 in Wilmington, N.C., where the series shoots. "It's really hard to have an outside life there. Everyone knows Dawson's Creek," says Williams, who will be renting a waterfront house alone. "The people are nice, but I refuse to accept it as home."

That would be the simply furnished one-bedroom house she rents back in Sherman Oaks, with her friend, actress Amy Danles, 27 (Sweet Valley High), and a 190-pound English mastiff, Gracie. "I like the stupid colors on the wall and the ugly chair in the corner," says Williams. Her love life is currently nonexistent (although, she says, "I get a lot more offers now than I did in high school"), and most of the time, says housemate Danles, "we sit on the bed and get into weird conversations about life and where we want to go."

This month, at least, it's back to work, shooting the new Dawson's Creek season in Wilmington, where Josh Jackson, despite the earlier talking-to, will probably keep up his campaign to get Williams to quit smoking. "He's constantly flicking cigarettes out of my hand, stomping on them and hitting me," she says. "It drives me crazy."