Self-aware romp through the genre is redolent of the 90s but its ghost-masked killer is as alarming as ever

The 30th anniversary re-release of the original Scream, from screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, brings us to a locus classicus of the 90s: a self-aware romp through the horror genre. It features Skeet Ulrich’s high schooler Billy Loomis announcing that reality is “all one big movie – but you can’t pick your genre”, which is the meta-slasher equivalent of Jacques Derrida’s belief that there is nothing outside the text.

A ghost-masked killer is murdering and terrorising the bland Californian town of Woodsboro, and we begin with his gruesome assault on Casey (Drew Barrymore); he makes chilling calls to people’s landline phones, in an era where that meant you more or less had them pinned them down to a certain location. (The existence of “cellular” phones was still an exotic novelty.) The mother of teen Sidney (Neve Campbell) had been brutally killed previously, a crime pinned on local man Cotton Weary (a cameo for Liev Schreiber) who is now in jail. But was he really guilty? Now Sidney is at risk like everyone else.

The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their most rewatched comfort films is an unusual journey back to the 1980s through the lens of the early 2000s

If the stereotypical feelgood movie is a cashmere comfort blanket – the kind of film that leaves viewers blissed out on the sofa as the credits roll and Bridget Jones finally gets to snog Mark Darcy – I should probably notify a qualified team of specialists that my own is a tale of teenage alienation, suburban hypocrisy, apocalyptic dread and a man in a monstrous rabbit suit issuing stern instructions about death. Then again, it does have a considerably better soundtrack.

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko explored alternate realities decades before the Marvel films and Everything Everywhere All at Once made the multiverse a pop-cultural touchstone. Its tree-lined streets, Halloween skies and teenagers pedalling through suburbia were like a weirder, sadder blueprint for Stranger Things long before Hawkins existed. It’s a suburban fever dream about fate, madness and collapsing timelines, a nightmarish physics puzzle steeped in existential dread. But beneath all the cult-film weirdness, it is also the oddly uplifting story of a lonely, damaged kid who finally understands his place in the world – and sacrifices himself to save it against the backdrop of some of the most luminous 80s alt-pop atmospherics ever recorded.