10 Horror Movies That Changed The Industry Forever

6. Scream (1996)

Horror was in a bad state around the early 1990's. The popularity of established franchises from the decades before had begun to wane as the quality took a downward turn, resulting in decreasing financial and critical success. What had once been scary had now become overly familiar and even cliched for audiences who had become numb to horror icons such as Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Horror maverick Wes Craven, the man responsible for creating the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise in the first place, revitalized the genre in the form of Scream. With an innovative script written by Kevin Williamson, Craven mocked the conventions of horror, exploiting the audience's familiarity with previous films to simultaneously amuse and scare viewers who had grown tired of the same old formula. The impact of Scream's success led to a new wave of slasher movies that tried to capitalize on this new found interest, but films like Urban Legend and I Know What You Did Last Summer failed to capture the same irreverent humor that Scream brought to the genre. Outside of horror though, the influence of Scream continues to be felt even today in deliberately self aware films such as Stranger Than Fiction, Funny Games and Scott Pilgrim VS. The World. Scream may not have been the first meta film to explore this conceit, but its success certainly had an impact on the movies that followed since.