Scream

Craven's second restart of the slasher, and the one that worked. The characters have seen the films, know the rules, and are murdered anyway.

The opening twelve minutes are the achievement. Drew Barrymore was the biggest name in the cast and the marketing put her front and centre, so an audience in 1996 watched that sequence assuming she was the lead. Craven built the whole film to spend her in the first reel, which is a Hitchcock move and it works exactly once.

Kevin Williamson's script is smarter about structure than it gets credit for: the rules speech is not a joke, it is the film telling you what it is about to do, and it does it.

What followed was a decade of horror that mistook referencing for wit. That is not this film's fault, though it is its legacy.