My relationship with horror films and games has always been relatively non-committal. Reason being that jump scares irrationally bug me while gore makes me squirm. For all my misgivings though, I find myself engrossed in any entry into the genre that plays on the logic we’ve inherited, be it the mysterious nature surrounding strangers or the fact that clowns are a bit creepy.
A classic example is Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher film Scream, which used horror clichés to make narrative progression harder to predict and as a way of having fun with the tropes that fatigued the genre in the first place. In one scene a character famously expresses bemusement at victims in other horrors who run upstairs when chased by killers, due to it leading to a dead-end. Moments later she is pursued by a killer and runs up a set of stairs. Darius Guerrero’s Dere Evil .Exe offers up a similar sense of meta-horror and fun.
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