There’s a well-known idea that horror movies don’t exist in horror movies - that the characters often act as though they’ve never seen one. This might sound like a bland observation from the vantage point of 2021, but in 1996, Scream’s use of other horror movies to navigate its own plot was unique. The horror century Scream’s knowing use of horror movie tropes was iconic, terrifying, and game-changing We wouldn’t have films like Get Out, The Cabin in the Woods (2011), or even 2020’s Promising Young Woman without Wes Craven’s hit meta franchise - and we can’t talk about modern horror without talking about Scream. The horror genre has since become so saturated with films following Scream’s self-aware horror-comedy model that it’s worth recognizing that all this metatextuality basically has a single point of origin. With so many of these cerebral horror films shaping cultural discourse, it’s important to recognize the role Scream played in the genre’s evolution.įor while it embodies the quirks of ’90s horror - including overaged teenagers, trope-filled plots, and enjoyably over-the-top deaths - Scream also completely up-ended trope-filled scary movies, arguably forever.
In one single, terrifying opening scene, and with one now-immortal line - “Do you like scary movies?” - Scream transformed ’90s horror and paved the way for generations of smart, genre-savvy filmmaking to come.Īs this self-referential icon turns 25, horror is currently enjoying a renewed “golden age,” with modern horror films like Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018) being hailed as genre-elevating masterpieces. That all changed when Scream debuted five days before Christmas in 1996. The cultural ascendence of 1991’s Silence of the Lambs kicked off an era in which stylish cat-and-mouse thrillers with horror elements had dominated mainstream cinema, while more traditional teen slasher fare languished. The fun, philosophical innovations that characterized the genre in the ’80s had been reduced to derivative, repetitive slasher flicks: stab, wipe, repeat. When Wes Craven’s Scream appeared on the scene in 1996, horror was stuck in a rut.
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