Padraic Maroney - It All Began With A Scream

By the mid-1990s, horror movies had fallen out of favor. The genre that had flourished for decades was going through an identity crisis as it struggled to find what the audience yearned to see. Historically, the horror genres popularity has been cyclical. It ebbs and flows every so often, as the types of horror that people are thirsty for changes.

In the 1930s, Universal Movie Monsters were the rage. Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy all terrorized cinemas throughout the decade. In the 1950s and 1960s creature features like Tarantula! (1955) and The Blob (1958) took over, mixing horror with science-fiction as a reflection of the political themes of the time and fears of nuclear weapons.

In 1978, a movie came along that helped popularize a relatively new subgenre the slasher film. Slasher films are generally defined by a killer (usually hidden by a mask) who murders a group of people (usually with sharp, pointy objects). Many of the films revolve more around the villains than the protagonists, with the villains gaining as many fans as the movies themselves. The first slasher films, Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960), came out the decade prior, but it was Halloween (1978) that created the craze that would carry through the next decade. It launched Jamie Lee Curtis reign as the scream queen, a title she seemed destined to obtain as the daughter of Psycho star Janet Leigh, and was the beginning of a successful franchise that includes almost a dozen sequels and a pair of rebooted films centered on serial killer Michael Myers. Curtis earned the crown by starring in a string of classic horror movies between 1978-1981.

Despite a dedicated and ravenous fan base, horror movies are rarely respected. Instead, they are often viewed as disposable entertainment that doesnt always involve quality in front of or behind the camera. However, Hollywood loves that horror films can be produced for a relatively small budget without casting well-known actors, and therefore have much better odds of generating a tidy little profit for their producers regardless of quality. In fact, Halloween held the distinction of being one of the most profitable independent films for decades.

After the success of Halloween, another horror icon in-the-making arrived with Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th (1980). The 1980s also gave birth to Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with Krueger, Voorhees, and Michael Myers reigning throughout the decade and becoming the modern-day version of the Universal Movie Monsters. They were joined by second-tier horror icons Pinhead, from the Hellraiser (1987) movies, and Chucky, from Childs Play (1988).

Eventually, audiences grew tired of the seemingly unkillable villains in 1980s slasher films. Seeing the same boogeymen get killed and then easily resurrected in the sequel became redundant. Instead, audiences turned to thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and Basic Instinct (1992) to get their scares, albeit with much less gore. In an effort to squeeze any last possible money from the franchises, the movie studios plotted Jason and Freddys cinematic demise as the 1990s began.

A Palm Springs Horror Story

In 1994, A Nightmare on Elm Street director Wes Craven returned to the franchise he created to offer a meta take on the slasher film with Wes Cravens New Nightmare (1994). Many of the actors from the original film returned to play fictional versions of themselves, albeit still battling Freddy Krueger. Ironically, it was well received by critics, but audiences did not turn up. The film grossed only $18 million at the box office which was almost half of the domestic gross made by its predecessor Freddys Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) just three years earlier.

While that transpired, a young unknown writer, Kevin Williamson, was working on a screenplay that would ultimately help revitalize the genre and bring it to new heights. The origins of Scream (1996) began when Williamson wrote a one-act play in college about a girl being taunted on the phone by unknown caller.