Our Daily Trailer: SCREAM

We're counting down to The Cabin in the Woods this weekend, and any trailer series with that theme must include the original Scream. In a lot of ways this film killed the slasher genre for a decade, first by making everybody hyper-aware of its silly conventions and then by spawning a whole shitload of post-modern slasher movies. I like Scream as a film, but I hate it as a moment in horror history.

The trailer really sells the meta aspect hard. And it does it perfectly; the genius of Scream was always that it was generic enough to be open to anyone. This wasn't a movie that required a huge amount of genre knowledge, just familiarity with the broadest, most basic tropes. The trailer makes you feel really smart for knowing those tropes, which makes you want to see this movie that has you feeling so very, very smart. Essentially it's a trailer that's appealing to our inner heckler. "Yes, you ARE smarter than the horror films!" the trailer cries.

Which is sort of what bugs me about the movie.