Films are a form of art, and that means they're all about inspiration and influence. It's entirely rare for someone to make a movie that isn't inspired by another. Really, few movies get the honor of being one that changed their genre or influenced film as a whole. Looking at horror specifically, a few films come to mind as infamous ones.
61 years ago, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was said to change modern horror forever because of how shocking it was. Almost 20 years later, John Carpenter made Halloween which popularized the slasher genre. With the 1980s and early 1990s being filled with franchise sequels and unoriginal campy films, albeit with some wonderful gems, the horror genre needed some revitalization. And to fix that, along came Wes Craven with his 1996 film Scream.
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The story outline of Scream very much sounds like a typical slasher, a Halloween ripoff. It follows a teenaged girl named Sidney (Neve Campbell) and her group of friends in their typical American town of Woodsboro. Unfortunately, one of their classmates is found brutally murdered, and soon, the killer is after them as well. It's a simple story with simple characters, but it was made in a near-perfect way. The film spawned three sequels with another to be released in January of 2022, as well as an MTV series. The characters were more than one typically expected from a teen scream slasher and horror fans liked that, despite the simple and perhaps unoriginal plot, it was witty and smart, and different.
Though it may not seem it on the surface, Scream really acts as satire. It's a comedy, and it's making fun of the very genre that it went onto influence. This is mostly seen through a couple of the main characters and a few key scenes. The main character of Sidney, the final girl, is a virgin. This is very much a trope seen throughout slasher films, that only the pure female character will survive. One of her friends, Randy, also adds a meta element to the franchise. He's a major film fan, especially horror movies, and teaches the teens of Woodsboro what and what not to do to better their chances of surviving. Funnily enough, Scream got the parody treatment itself in the first Scary Movie.
All of Sidney's friend group consists mainly of tropes, but the villain as well seems to be poking a bit of fun. Ultimately it's not some super spooky monster or intimidating person, but just someone in a cheap-looking costume easily found at any party store. And the perpetrators were just some silly, relatively stupid, teenagers, who got a lot of inspiration from horror movies. Really, this is a very funny movie. It walks the line of being satirical and also completely fulfilling the roles of a typical slasher very well. Instead of being a funny movie with horror elements, such as something like Zombieland, it's a scary movie with a script that happens to have laugh-out-loud moments. This style of comedy has been seen throughout slasher films to come after Scream like You're Next and Ready or Not.
Scream also set trends in the way it paid homage to slashers that came before it. Now, most slashers have huge glimpses of 1990s aesthetics and give nods to the past. This was massively seen in the recent Fear Street trilogy, which received a lot of success. The way to do this properly was set by Scream. It was its own thing entirely, but it had subtle yet specific references to familiar things. The fake-out final girl, which was also seen in Fear Street, was first seen in Psycho. The girl audiences think will be the main character, ends up being the first to die. Another big thing is seen in Scream as well as movies from the 1970s, the classic trope of "the killer is calling from inside of the house." Scream takes the idea made popular in films like When A Stranger Calls and Black Christmas, but uses it in a way that feels really earnest and genuine to the story. And that's the right way to pay homage to something.
Many would say that the post-Scream era was just as bad as the pre-Scream era. The 2000s were full of basically terrible horror movies, many cheap teen scream slashers included. So was this film really that important, did it actually change anything? Well, it didn't change the world of cinema forever. However, it made people excited about horror again. Even if it swung too far and there was an influx of bad horror movies to come, it breathed some real life into the genre. As a singular film franchise, there are a lot of great things about it. Not one of the Scream films is bad, and hopefully, it stays that way following the new one. But its real success is the way it influenced films to follow for the better, especially horror films with satire. And most of all, it's important because it made people excited about this genre again. Without it, some of the best recent horror films might not have ever been made.
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