10 Great Horror Movies With Terrible Concepts

This one is almost sacrilege, given how much love the film series in question (deservedly) receives from genre fans.

But before Dawson’s Creek writer Kevin Williamson’s sleeper hit revived the slasher sub-genre, the idea of a self-aware slasher wherein the young victims were familiar with horror tropes and openly discussed their implausibility sounded laughably un-scary.

Legendary critic Roger Ebert’s term “dead teenager movie” made clear the central issue with Scream’s conceit: Kids in slasher movies need to be dumb in order to be unable to escape a lumbering, slow-moving slasher villain.

If the kids are smart enough to know not to have sex, do drugs, or even utter the fatal words "I'll be right back", then there's no satisfaction in seeing them offed one-by-one and the film becomes a grim Wolf Creek-esque ordeal. Who would want to see relatable people die for making the same decisions that the audience would?

So Williamson’s ingenious move, alongside horror helmer Wes Craven, was to make the killer a smart ass too, abandoning the stoic stock murderer of earlier slashers in favour of a sarcastic, sharp, and lethally quick-witted villain. This way outsmarting the killer was a legitimate feat, whilst the whodunit structure gave the film's story more body than most Friday the 13th clones.