Among all the traditions horror broke and reinvented during the 1990s, perhaps none proved more impactful than a surge in self-referential “meta” horror. Films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend gleefully dismantled genre tropes, commenting knowingly on clichés even as they deployed them for …
Among all the slick, sarcastic teen screamfests of late 90s horror, Wes Craven’s smash-hit Scream stands apart as the most incisively influential. Released in 1996, Scream playfully skewered and celebrated the slasher genre’s derivative clichés and tired tropes even as it expertly weaponized them in classic Craven fashion. The script’s …
As a lifelong horror devotee, the 1990s hold a special place for me as a transitional decade that radically reshaped genre conventions on the brink of a new millennium. Following the lucrative slasher boom of the 1980s, the 90s saw seismic shifts in studio priorities, cultural tastes, and what mainstream …
Among Wes Craven’s filmography, 1994’s New Nightmare remains criminally underappreciated for its ahead-of-its-time meta-horror storytelling. After fatigue set in across six ponderous Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, Craven returned to restore creative passion by deconstructing Freddy Krueger’s cinematic realm through a story set in “the real world.” New Nightmare shattered …
