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.