10 Exact Moments That Changed The Horror Movie Genre Forever
9. Scream - The Rules
“There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie.”
That statement from Jamie Kennedy’s Randy in 1996’s Scream rang so true with so many horror hounds. Horror fans had become tired and fed up of seeing the same beats in the majority of films as studios and filmmakers jumped on any successful concept or twist and oversaturated the industry with formulaic, generic trash.
Randy’s rules on surviving a horror offering called for no sex, no drink, no drugs, and never, ever say that you’ll be right back. Of course, Scream followed this formula itself, yet in a meta way that poked fun at what horror had become.
By poking fun at the overplayed tropes and bad habits that the horror genre had so often continued to lazily fall back on, Wes Craven and Scream turned a mirror on the genre and forced it to re-evaluate itself.