WHEN IT COMES to October movie-viewing habits, people have strong opinions. As the temperatures start to drop, the leaves turn a warm shade of orange, and we start seeing pumpkin spice-flavored everything, we also start to think about Halloween—and with Halloween, we start to think about Michael Myers standing behind a bush, Jason Voorhees wielding a machete, and Freddy Krueger curling his knife fingers inward. We start thinking about horror movies.
The nice thing about horror movies is that they’re never going away. Unlike say, superhero movies (which tend to be very expensive), horror is very cheap, and almost always draws an outsized audience, especially when compared to how much it costs to make. The range of quality might vary wildly—just flip through a couple of your favorite streaming service catalogues for a couple minutes and you’ll see all sorts of junky, pure nonsense movies you’ve never heard off next to movies that you could be convinced don’t even actually exist.
But there’s also a whole lot of great stuff. There are great new horror movies—the best of this year being Weapons and Sinners, both available to stream—and great old horror movies. There’s stuff to be discovered, but, more importantly, stuff to be loved, treasured, and rewatched. And while there are some obvious picks for this time of year (1978’s Halloween chief among them), there’s one movie I just can’t stop rewatching over and over and over again: Scream.
To be clear, that’s referring to the original 1996 film Scream, not the 2022 legacy sequel film also titled Scream (confusing, yes). I’m a big fan of the whole Scream franchise, which to this point includes six feature films and a little-seen MTV series. But it’s that original film tha simply demands a rewatch every single year.
Why? Personally, Scream has always called to me. As a child of the ’90s, I used to see the signature Ghostface masks around everywhere every Halloween season (and the blood-pumping version too). It’s a striking visual, one that brings to mind both classic pieces of art and some good old fashioned visual horror. It’s just a scary face, even outside the context of the movies! Even the goofy Scary Movie spoof mask is kind of spooky, if we’re being real. Before I ever knew what Scream was, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of.
Well, lucky me. By the time I got old enough to actually watch the very first Scream movie, it turned out to not only be fun, funny, well-made, and scary, but most importantly, it was good. Legendary horror Wes Craven had already created an iconic franchise in Nightmare on Elm Street, so he clearly knew what he was doing. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson was newer to this, but considering he would go on to create one of the decade’s most beloved teen dramas (Dawson’s Creek) and several more horror classics (including The Faculty and I Know What You Did Last Summer), he had something going for him too. Together, the duo was able to create a movie with characters who would resonate with viewers for decades to come, while also building in gut-punches of horror drama that even shocked the horror die-hards with truly thick skin.
What makes Scream eternally relevant in Octobers, though, is its proximity to the rest of the world of horror. The genre has certainly evolved in the 30 years since the movie came out, and recent entries in the series (like Scream IV and Scream (2022)) do good work to address that. But in a month filled with people watching their favorite horror movies of all time, from Halloween to Nightmare on Elm Street to Friday the 13th, it makes something like Scream, which is directly in conversation with those staples, all the more relevant. The context is always built in, but it’s never more relevant than in the month many refer to as “spooky szn.”
I’m not alone. A recent post from Letterboxd ranked Scream as the #1 most rewatched movie on Hulu/Disney+, and that makes sense—the latest two films in the Scream series have helped to keep the franchise popular, and the reputation of the original only grows with each passing year.
There’s also the fact that it’s filled to the brim with iconic performances, characters, and imagery. Drew Barrymore isn’t in Scream for a very long time, but there are few images in movies that you can feel in your stomach more than her on that telephone. Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott has put her in clear contention for the title of all-time Scream Queen (an honor Jamie Kennedy’s movie nerd Randy bestows upon Jamie Lee Curtis in the film itself). And Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard give some of the most animated, exciting, and chaotic performances you’ll ever see. These are features that people who haven’t even seen the movie have probably heard about one way or another, and that draw them in to watch. And then once you find out what you’ve been missing out on, well, you’ve got to make up for lost time, and that’s when the rewatching comes in.
The Scream franchise doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. For my money, it’s the most consistent horror franchise ever made—the original is the best, but ranking the series beyond that is often a point of contention among fans. The seventh film in the franchise, out next February, will bring Campbell back after she missed the sixth film due to a pay dispute (and after the controversial decision for the franchise to move forward without stars Melissa Barera and Jenna Ortega). Will it be good? Who knows. But even if it’s not, none of this diminishes the raw power of the original film, and everything that comes along with it.
As horror movies keep evolving, it’s a joy to return every year to Scream as an inflection point within the genre. Not only was the movie a massive hit, but it also changed the trajectory of the horror movies that would come after. Movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend didn’t have the self-aware wit and intelligence that Scream did, but they did manage to take a bunch of teens in a precarious situation and kill them off one by one. And the horror world continued to change from there, as those movies evolved into the torture porn of Saw, which eventually gave way to the more artful horror of movies like Hereditary and Get Out.
Scream is one of the few movies that managed to have it all: great characters, strong filmmaking, exciting kills, and a truly invigorating moment in a vital movie genre. And if you’re wondering why you keep having fun just watching Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker just answer that accursed phone call over and over and over again, just know you’re far from alone.
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Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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