10 Horror Movie Franchises That Forgot How To Be Scary

Kevin Williamson claims he locked himself up for a few days and knocked out the first draft of Scream in a matter of days, re-invigorating the slasher subgenre by calling it out on its many cliches and flaws, turning them on their head.

At a loss for how to continue, the sequel struggled a little, with Williamson doing rewrites while filming, but it still managed to deliver a deliciously funny and occasionally clever whodunnit with some great suspense set-pieces.

By the third, however, Williamson was committed to other projects and screenwriter Ehren Kruger was brought in to give some sort of finality to what felt like a trilogy. Kruger had recently been awarded the Nicholl Fellowship for his script Arlington Road, and felt like hot property. Had they the foresight, producers of Scream 3 would have known they hired the guy who made robot-cars talk for several of the Transformers sequels.

Slashers are mysteries, and the unpredictability of just who the killer or killers is/are can be just as invigorating and frightening as a random, masked lunatic. Kruger's installment just never felt genuine, with convoluted twists never even broached in the previous works.

He also did some uncredited rewrites on Scream 4, the second sequel no one asked for, but at least Williamson was brought back to his brainchild. Ultimately, the franchise became less about scaring audiences and more about subverting tradition at all costs - trading a scare for a laugh at the drop of a hat.