Wes Craven’s films often pay homage to horror. The conventions and themes utilized in a Craven film are playfully aware of the confines of both their genre and the medium of film at large. Looking at three of his most reflective films, this metanarrative commentary can be broken down and understood as both horrifying and creatively boundary breaking. I will examine, in order of release, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Scream (1996), and Scream 3 (2000), looking at both the evolution of Craven’s metanarrative commentary and the function it serves in adding to the fright in each film, and how this narrative reflection has affected horror as a whole.