If you ask me, Scream was pretty much responsible for the decline of the horror film. Horror was actually doing pretty well for itself in the early to mid 90s, but then Scream came around and everyone big shot Hollywood dingwopper went "Oh man, we gotta follow that formula Craven set out in Scream and made every horror film from this point on very slick and full of WB TV Monday night soap teen stars". That's why horror went down the gutter.
There's been some pretty good horror films since such as this film, The Babadook, Oculus, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, Excision, the Maniac remake, No One Lives, You're Next, Antichrist, Rob Zombie's Halloween, High Tension, Daybreakers and Curse of Chucky, but nothing truly revolutionary and genre ascending (The Babadook comes very, very, very close though and should be regarded as a future mid-level horror classic). You could even go as far to consider the first Human Centipede and A Serbian Film to be as good as those but they're a little too extreme for some and tend to veer off into oneupsmanship gross-outs too much for their own good.
Some may violently disagree with me but as someone who passionately cares for the horror movie genre, I do know why exactly horror isn't doing too hot and in order to bring legitimacy back into it, you gotta at least think beyond making "just another date movie for teens to clutch each other after they both saw another cheap jump scare" kind of junk that has dominated the genre for quite some time now.
"What's the ugliest part of your body? I think its your mind."
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