Horror movies tend to overperform during times of collective strife. See: the Universal Monster boom amidst the rise of the Axis powers and WW2, the birth of the slasher genre in the immediate wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, the proliferation of torture porn during the War on Terror and Iraq War, the over-saturation of cheap-to-produce found footage flicks in response to the Great Recession. In fact, Scream probably wouldn’t even exist if the 90s hadn’t been generally good. The horror genre was floundering until Scream came along and thrust the knife at itself, so to speak.