10 Best Slasher Films Of All Time

10. Scream

By 1996, the slasher movie had nowhere new to go, so it turned in on itself and began referencing its former glories. If John Carpenter’s Halloween was Psycho for the movie literate generation raised on TV, then Wes Craven’s movie plays to the audience who grew up with the 80s slasher craze.

Kevin Williamson’s script knows we’ve seen those films a hundred times so in the very first scene an assailant taunts his victim (Drew Barrymore) with horror movie trivia, slaughtering her boyfriend when she incorrectly names Jason as the killer in Friday The 13th. (Note to Millennials and other strange beings – this was long before the 2009 remake).

With Craven at the helm and a handful of good actors, Scream stands out from the dregs of 90s horror (Prom Night 4: Deliver Us From Evil, anyone?) and deserved all of its massive success, even though its legacy amounted to little more than three forgettable sequels and an endless succession of tawdry knock-offs (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer). The genre’s due for another reinvention, so if you’re an aspiring horror filmmaker, you know what to do.