Scream (1996)

Country: USA
Director: Wes Craven
Screenwriter: Kevin Williamson
Stars: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore, Jamie Kennedy

Last year's The Cabin In The Woods owes a lot to Wes Craven's Scream, which was, up until now and Cabin's debut, the only mainstream meta-horror film that mattered. For his genre targets of choice, the screenwriter opted for the then-dead slasher flick template, unleashing a masked killer onto a band of unsuspecting youngsters, all of whom are pin-up-level attractive.

Except, in Scream, the potential victims all knew a great deal about how slasher movies work, and Williamson's script deftly uses their consciousness to routinely subvert the audience's expectations. Eventually, the Scream franchise would devolve into passable flicks that focus too much on the comedy and hardly at all on the scares (see: last year's sadly uneventful Scream 4). But we'll always have Craven's original to cherish. -MB