Just as Wes Craven was part of the horror movement he was responding to when he made his “Scream,” Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett came into their own as two-thirds of the Radio Silence filmmaking collective in the same period that 2022’s “Scream” reacts to. After working on the “10/31/98” segment of the first “V/H/S” movie and the found-footage horror-thriller “Devil’s Due,” the directors scored their first proper hit with the 2019 horror action-comedy “Ready or Not.” By that point, though, horror was no longer a niche market as it once had been. Gillett observed:
“I think one of the things we can say is that when [writer] Kevin [Williamson] and Wes created the first ‘Scream,’ horror movies were kind of a fringe genre in a lot of ways. It wasn’t a wildly mainstream style of storytelling. And now, in 2020, and for the better part of the last decade, horror films have really been on the rise.”
Peele certainly did his part to propagate that change when he made his directing debut on “Get Out.” The 2017 film was like a bolt of lightning to the horror genre, precisely fusing acerbic humor with bloody violence to satirize racism amongst modern white liberals while drawing a crowd well beyond devoted horror fans. In the five years since then, Peele’s star has only continued to rise at a rapid trajectory, between producing critical and financial hits like “BlacKkKlansman” and “Candyman,” hosting a reboot of “The Twilight Zone,” and directing two more original, ambitious horror movies (“Us” and “Nope”).