Scream Collection

Kevin Williamson was watching a TV special about a real serial killer when the idea for this franchise actually started. In 1994, alone at home, he put on a program about Danny Rolling, the so-called "Gainesville Ripper," who had murdered five University of Florida students over four days in August 1990 and staged their bodies for whoever found them. Partway through, Williamson noticed a window in his own house was open, and the wave of real fear that followed is what he's credited as the direct seed for Scream's opening: a woman home alone, answering a stranger's call, being asked if she likes scary movies. The film was originally titled Scary Movie.

Wes Craven directing it wasn't the obvious outcome it looks like in hindsight. He'd just come off A New Nightmare (1994), a genuinely clever meta-slasher that flopped at the box office, and by most accounts was ready to leave horror behind entirely by the time Williamson's script landed on his desk. The genre itself was in roughly the same position: slasher sequels had spent the early '90s getting progressively cheaper and worse, and by December 1996 the format looked essentially dead. Scream didn't just succeed, it single-handedly revived the genre and set off a new wave of imitators almost immediately — meaning the thing that's now remembered as horror's smartest reinvention came from a director who'd just watched his own first attempt at the same trick fail, one franchise entry earlier.

What makes this collection genuinely unusual is how far the self-awareness goes, and how long it's been sustained. Starting with Scream 2, the films invented an in-universe slasher franchise called Stab, explicitly based on the real Woodsboro murders from the first film — meaning the characters inside this story can watch dramatized, increasingly disappointing sequels about their own trauma, which lets the real films comment on their own sequels without ever breaking the fourth wall to do it directly.

The 2022 film pushes that same trick onto the franchise's own revival. It's a requel — a legacy sequel that brings back original cast alongside new characters — and rather than pretend otherwise, one character explains the term out loud on screen, and the plot is literally about a killer trying to "fix" a disappointing new Stab sequel by recreating the original murders exactly. It's the same meta-move the 1996 film made about slasher conventions generally, aimed this time at the specific commercial trend — Halloween's 2018 legacy sequel chief among them — that the new Scream was itself cashing in on. Twenty-six years apart, it's the same joke, told about a genre the films themselves had already changed once.