In a 1997 interview, Wes Craven was asked to explain the difference between his latest movie, Scream, and his preceding film, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. It was a fair question. After spending more than two decades churning out reliably gruesome horror flicks, the director had suddenly taken a sharp pivot into metatextual filmmaking, with two strikingly different films both designed to explore the concept of horror itself.

“[Scream] was much bolder, and more comprehensive,” Craven said, “declaring that it was a movie looking at movies, and yet, at the same time, it’s not […] It had very interesting philosophical permu­tations that New Nightmare didn’t have.”

In a sense, Craven was right. Scream’s clever subversion of the slasher genre turns the usual group of teenage victims into a squad of horror-obsessed film buffs capable of predicting the killer’s next move. That idea immediately resonated with fans. Three decades after its release, Scream is still one of the best scary movies ever made, and even its worst sequels typically make a killing at the box office.

But in another sense, maybe Craven was wrong. While New Nightmare doesn’t have the cultural........

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