As you may already have figured out from the ads for this year’s upcoming film releases, 2011 is the year of the sequel. A record-breaking 27 franchises will be getting new installments this year, from the highly-anticipated (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2) to the baffling (Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son) and everything in between. Hell, we’ve already seen a surprisingly strong box-office performance from Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules, of all things.

The next couple of months will bring Scream 4, Fast Five and Kung Fu Panda 2. As these are all high-profile blockbuster offerings, I may be called upon to watch and review some or all of these. The only problem being that I’m not familiar with any of these franchises and I don’t have the time or inclination to go through eight movies in three film series, all in such a short time. Instead, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks watching one film — the first film — from each of these three franchises. I figure it’s a nice middle ground between going into the more recent entries with a fresh mind and going in completely ignorant. It beats reading the plot synopses on Wikipedia, anyway.

So, Scream. The story of a high school girl on the run from a masked serial killer a year after her mother was viciously slain. But of course, no one remembers the film for its premise. No, this film was made famous for being Wes Craven’s magpie movie. A film cobbled together out of references to slasher films crafted by the man who made so many of them.

Now, I regret to say that I’m not a horror film buff. I’ve seen Psycho, The Exorcist, the original Nightmare on Elm Street and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, but my firsthand knowledge of true horror classics pretty much ends there (and also the original I Spit on your Grave, if you care to call that a “classic”). I’ve only seen Jason Voorhees in the recent Marcus Nispel remake and my familiarities with Leatherface, Michael Myers and The Tall Man were obtained entirely through osmosis. To that end, I wouldn’t claim to have caught half of the references and inside jokes in this film.

Having said that, I don’t know if there’s a person alive who isn’t familiar with the rules and cliches of classic slasher films. They’re practically in our DNA by this point. As such, it doesn’t take a film historian to appreciate the way this movie uses classic slasher rules. I think my favorite example is when we see some teens watching some characters screwing in a horror movie, talking about how they’re going to die, as our film cuts to characters screwing. The death by TV is another great one.

The film is truly remarkable in how it mocks the established norms of a genre while paying heartfelt homage to them at the same time. It’s pulled together from pieces of other films, yet the movie is clearly its own creation. It’s a very amusing parody of horror films while being a genuinely scary horror film in its own right. This approach — plus the overt and intelligent references to horror classics — puts the approach somewhere between Pegg/Frost/Wright and Quentin Tarantino. And damned if that doesn’t sound like a sweet place for a film to be.

Everything about this film is self-referential. Take the casting for example: The film opens by killing off Drew Barrymore, arguably the most prominent child star of the ’80s. That should be a signal that this is going to be a nostalgia trip right off the bat. I suspect that they would have cast Jamie Lee Curtis or Heather Langenkamp in that role, if only they were still young enough to play teenagers. Then again, pretty much all of the actors are twenty-somethings pretending to be high-schoolers, as per usual in the horror genre.

Then there’s the score. The music in this film is very over-the-top and extremely predictable in what it’s going to do and when, but it works here. Even without the score, anyone with a working brain cell would know which of the threatened scares are going to actually happen and when. Yet the musical stings and string crescendos still happen on cue, just to go through the motions as any other horror film would. It wouldn’t work in any other film, but it adds another level of comical self-awareness that helps make the movie click.

I don’t really know what else to say about Scream, except that it’s well-crafted, comical, scary and self-referential in all the right ways. It’s easy to see why this film was so popular back in the day and it’s still a barrel of fun over a decade later. Furthermore, I applaud the film and those who made it for so perfectly illustrating why the standard horror formula of the time had grown stale. If it wasn’t for this film, The Blair Witch Project and Platinum Dunes (*grumblegrumble*), the horror genre wouldn’t be what it is today. A lot of changes have been made over the past fifteen years and I look forward to seeing how this franchise will address those changes in the coming sequel.