During the 1990s, genre film production saw a multiplicity of remakes, sequels and adaptations. The Horror genre is no exception to the ‘rule of the remake and sequel’ during the 1990s and beyond. In his article ‘Same as It Ever Was: Innovation and Exhaustion in the Horror and Science-Fiction Films of the 1990s’, David Sanjek states that, although there seems to be an abundance of cinema screens, these offer nothing new or intellectually exciting or stimulating to the audiences.
Indeed, in the early 1990s the film industry seemed to return to classic novel adaptations and the Fantasy/Horror cycle of the 1930s, with films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994). By the mid-90s, we saw the release of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which revives the Teen Slasher Horror cycle of the 1970s and 1980s. This, at first, would seem to corroborate Sanjek’s assertion. However, the film actually refers directly, consciously and unashamedly to many classical Horror movies, such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and invites its fans to engage actively in deconstructing key generic conventions along with the characters, who are themselves Horror film buffs. Based on an analysis of visual and narrative elements in the Scream trilogy, this article will argue that, rather than ‘intellectual understimulation’ , practices of self-referentiality, pastiche and parody have contributed to a redefinition of the Horror genre by offering its audiences alternative forms and levels of engagement.