Slashers and Subversion

The slasher genre — Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street — established rules so rigid they became a language. The "final girl" who survives is always resourceful, sober, and sexually restrained. Scream later dissected these conventions on screen, proving that audiences had internalized the rules deeply enough to enjoy having them broken.

Scream in 1996 deconstructed these rules by making characters aware of them. This meta-horror approach proved that genre conventions had become cultural knowledge, shared between filmmakers and audiences like an inside joke.