While films like Psycho and Black Christmas may have been early slasher hits, the genre began to really take shape in the late ’70s and into the ’80s; when films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th jumpstarted the slasher genre, horror became inescapable from the public eye. Between merchandise and the largest influx of new films the genre had seen to date, horror icons were the new pop culture craze. However, the genre began a steady decline as the ’90s began and progressed. The once box-office juggernauts were barely making their budgets back, and fans just didn’t seem to care as much.
The biggest issue were the cookie cutter sequels. The ’80s housed some frightening horror movies, but it had gotten to a point where fans felt they were essientially watching the same films but with slighty different settings. By 1991, there were six Nightmare on Elm Street films, five Halloween movies, and a whopping eight Friday the 13th installments.There were only so many times the same killer could stalk teenage girls before fans grew bored.
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Great mainstream horror had all but died out by the mid-’90s until a Wes Craven-directed film from December of 1996 breathed new life in the seemigly dead genre. While it may be iconic now, Scream was a real gamble in 1996, and no one could have guessed the impact it would go on to have.
By Fans For Fans
Those who worked on the crews of horror films throughout the ’80s grew up with a different type of scary movie. Most of them came of age with the tamer monster films from Universal or the twists found in magazines like Tales From The Crypt. While these are iconic in their own right, they are a far cry from the gore-heavy slashers that were being pumped out, and there was a kind of cognitive dissonance between what the creators actually liked and what the producers told them to make. What made Scream special was that the team behind it grew up on the slasher films of the past, and they were part of the same fandom their film was marketed toward.
Scream was written by Kevin Willamson, and his love of the genre shined in every page of the script. This is among the first times that horror fans actually saw themselves on the screen, no longer having to shout at the void to tell characters not to go into a dark room; the film did it for them, with a bloody wink.
Over the years, slasher fans have realzed a pattern of horror rules and tropes from their favorite movies, and in Scream, the character Randy Meeks laid them all out word for word. This postmodern cultural self-awareness (wherein cinematic characters actually know about existing films) in the movies is still a trope today, and makes smarter characters in many cases.
This wasn’t limited to the first film; subsequent Scream movies lampooned the aforementioned sequels that had been coming out in droves, with the later films cleverly laying out the rules for slasher sequels, and eventually slasher reboots.
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A New Face In Terror
What made films such as Nightmare on Elm Street so popular was that they had a main antagonist who would terrorize characters in each movie; the iconic villains would seem to be stopped, but endless sequels meant that they only survived to scare the box office another day. Scream brought a new now-classic killer to the forefront, and what made it so scary was that it could be anybody. Ghostface wasn’t a supernatural killer with terrifying powers and the inability to die; Ghostface was always just a normal person. So normal, in fact, that the character would often trip and make mistakes any normal person would make. Humanizing (in a strictly literal sense) the villain was extremely different for horror.
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This killer wore a common Halloween costume that has since become synonymous with the holiday. Ghostface remains interesting because it is a different person behind the mask in each movie, lending a sort of whodunit mystery to each installment as audiences speculate about just who may be the killer each time. This keeps viewers on their toes, and allows for more complicated and enjoyable plot mechanics.
Highest Form Of Flattery
As with the slasher giants of the ’80s, Scream spawned imitators almost immediately. The horror genre received a second wind and was back in full force. Suddenly, nearly every horror movie had a tongue-in-cheek feel to it, one which seemed to knowingly wink at the audience without flat-out breaking the fourth wall. Bringing in young and sarcastic newcomers was the new norm, and many actors such as Jennifer Love Hewitt got their breaks from these imitators.
Postmodern irony and meta-humor were all the rage (for better or worse), and nerd culture seemd to rise in popularity. If Scream wasn’t enough proof of this, then the following year’s release of Buffy the Vampire Slayer should be; it could be argued that the popular series owes much of its success to Scream. Even series star Sarah Michelle Gellar appeared in the sequel, released the same year as her ironic horror show in 1997.
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Perhaps the best known imitator is I Know What You Did Last Summer, which went on to spawn its own lineage of sequels and a recently cancelled television series. Even other franchises enjoyed renewed success thanks to Scream, such as Halloween which had a similar feel in its seventh installment, released in 1998. Other playful genre exercises in ironic horror abound– The Faculty, Idle Hands, Ginger Snaps, Happy Death Day, Final Destination, and, of course, the Scary Movie franchise.
With the fifth film already generating positive buzz less than a week before release, the franchise shows it still has plenty of steam. Scream has one of the largest fanbases in all of horror, showing that it has become just as iconic as the films that inspired it.
