10 Horror Movies That Eerily Came True
7. The Rise Of Influencer Culture - Scream 4
The Scream movies have always had their fingers firmly on the pulse of the horror genre itself, though Scream 4 also took ambitious aim at something altogether different - the cult of celebrity in the Internet age.
While social media was still in its comparative infancy in 2010 when Scream 4 was being filmed, Kevin Williamson's script ingeniously foresaw a future where young people would shirk traditional channels of fame in favour of online "influencer" culture.
In the film, the two Ghostface killers - eventually revealed to be Jill (Emma Roberts) and Charlie (Rory Culkin) - record their killings to be later posted online, as part of their constructed narrative that they're the only survivors of the killer's rampage, which would in turn make them famous overnight.
Except, Jill ends up turning on Charlie and framing him as an accomplice, positioning herself as the headline-grabbing sole survivor.
While in 2011 Jill's motive seemed faintly ridiculous, nowadays, in a world where people eat Tide Pods, risk the lives of themselves and others, and do all manner of stupid s**t for social media likes, it seems downright prescient. Jill's closing villainous monologue is especially bone-chilling now:
"I don't need friends. I need fans... You had your 15 minutes, now I want mine! I mean, what am I supposed to do? Go to college? Grad school? Work? Look around. We all live in public now, we're all on the Internet. How do you think people become famous anymore? You don't have to achieve anything. You just gotta have f**ked up s**t happen to you."
While the desperation to become famous is nothing new, social media removes a lot of the traditional barriers to fame - cost, location - and Williamson's script so brilliantly saw the coming storm, of a generation obsessed with becoming "Twitter-famous" at any cost.