9 Classic Horror Films That Spawned Countless Imitators

When Wes Craven came out with Scream in 1996, part of the joke was that he was poking fun at a dying genre. The '90s wasn't the best decade for horror, and slasher films had become stale to the point that everyone was making fun of them. Ironically, though, Craven's attempt to mock the genre only revitalized it.

A bunch of new slasher movies began hitting theaters following Scream's success, and while prior to this most slashers were based on an iconic killer like Freddy or Jason, Scream helped usher in an era of slashers with a whodunnit element.

I Know What You Did Last Summer definitely wouldn't exist without Scream, for example. After the opening phone call sequence, the scare involving a killer on the phone also became extremely common, even though Scream's use of it was inspired by Black Christmas.

Many films that followed tried to emulate Scream's use of meta humor as well. Before this, characters in these movies never seemed aware that horror films existed, but now, they almost always reference them and mock genre cliches. Unfortunately, nobody was ever as good at it as Craven was.

In the same way slasher films of the '80s drew on Black Christmas and Halloween, the slasher films of the late '90s and early 2000s all show at least some Scream influence.