Scream was the first of its kind that redefined horror with new rules, a meta plot, and rebellious unexpected twists. Scream followed all the rules and simultaneously broke them in a brilliant self-aware genre reinvention that leveraged every horror movie trope to set up and subvert every expectation. Scream is a love ballad to horror movie fans that intimately knows and zealously honors the legacy of terror-filled films that came before while creating something new, innovative, bold, and surprising. Scream’s dark humor and admiration of overused horror plot points resulted in one of the first meta films in history. Characters know they are living a real-life horror film and yet make dumb and predictable horror movie decisions tricking the viewers into a sort of safety before breaking all the rules and surprising with unexpected twists and turns. Scream was the first of its kind and welcomed a whole new horror sub-genre and a movie franchise that still has no end in sight over 25 years later.