Starring: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore

Many consider Wes Craven’s Scream to be the end of an era for the American horror film as it folds in all of the genre’s tropes of the previous twenty years into one meta experience. With one of the more shocking first scenes in horror history (akin to Hitchcock killing off his main character in Psycho), it establishes everything you need to know about the ride you’re about to go on. More than anything, and without being hokey, Scream is a whole lot of fun as a group of high school students ponder the “rules” of horror movies while a masked killer cleverly guts their peers.