Scream
A personal favorite of mine, Wes Craven’s Scream not only brought the horror king back into relevancy, but also paved way for a new kind of scary movie: the one that can laugh at itself.
The teens in this film aren’t exactly the ditsy ones that Jason Voorhees comes across in Friday the 13th – they’re smarter, and one of them named Randy (Jamie Kennedy) is a horror expert whose come up with the rules of how to survive a scary movie. Of course, the entertainment peaks as he tells these rules somewhere downstairs, while someone else upstairs breaks them.
After an iconic opening featuring Drew Barrymore, Scream follows Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her group of friends as the serial killer Ghostface terrorizes their hometown. Eventually, their paranoia breaks down their trust in one another, and they must scramble to regroup so they can beat their stalker, who uses the clichés of classic horror flicks to kill. Do you like scary movies?
Scream features a whole cast of mid- ‘90s stars, including Courtney Cox, Rose McGowan and Skeet Ulrich. Together, they make Craven’s film an intense, and surprisingly humorous adventure, with most of the jokes being at the genre’s expense.