If You Love Urban Legends, You Need To Check Out This Forgotten Post-'Scream' Anthology Horror Movie (2025)

Urban legends have always creeped me out. You know the ones. A couple is making out in a car and gets home to find the hook hand of an escaped killer on their door handle. Or the couple makes out in the car, only for the guy to disappear and be found the next day hanging from a tree, his shoes scraping against the roof. In 1998, fresh off the post-Scream slasher boom, the film Urban Legend looked at these popular stories we've passed down, and although it was a hit, it wasn't the first film of its era to take this approach.

Just a few months after Wes Craven's introduction of Ghostface changed everything came the quickly forgotten Campfire Tales. It looked at popular urban legends through an anthology format and did it all with a cast of young stars on the verge of breaking out, like James Marsden, Amy Smart, Christine Taylor, and Ron Livingston. Urban Legend might get all the glory, but Campfire Tales scared viewers first.

'Campfire Tales' Was the First of the 'Scream' Imitators

After the '80s slasher boom died off towards the decade's end, horror didn't know what to do next in the '90s. The genre found its answer in reinventing the past with Wes Craven's meta slasher, Scream. It might have had the similar beats of those '80s movies, with masked killers, high body counts, and final girls, but it was more sleek, and with cool young stars of the era like Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox. It was released in December 1996, and after making $103 million at the box office, the imitators came fast. The most famous came less than a year later in October 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer, with young breakout stars such as Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr.. However, Campfire Tales beat it to the punch by a few months.

Being an anthology film, it was nothing like Scream. Instead, it's a story centered around a group of teens who get into a car accident in the middle of nowhere late at night. As they wait for help to arrive, they tell scary stories to each other. There's no killer in a mask terrorizing them, just their imaginations. Campfire Tales was released direct-to-video in Europe in May 1997, and later in Australia and New Zealand. After the success of Scream, Paramount was going to release Campfire Tales on 2,000 U.S. screens in 1997, but when that fell through, it went straight to video a full year later. Released on September 22, 1998, it beat Urban Legend, which came out in theaters on September 25, to the punch by three days.

Many of 'Campfire Tale's Actors Would Become Major Hollywood Stars

Still, it's hard to watch Campfire Tales and not feel that nostalgia for the late '90s Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. This is because of its young cast of breakout stars. James Marsden is here, a year before Disturbing Behavior. He's paired with Amy Smart, who had just started her career a year earlier. We also get other future stars, such as Christine Taylor straight off of The Brady Bunch Movie, Christopher Masterson three years before Malcolm in the Middle, and Ron Livingston just two years before Office Space would change his life.

What's different here is that none of these names is the main star. Being an anthology film, their talent is spread out, and they all get time to shine instead of being in a huge ensemble that limits their screen time. It's fun to watch Campfire Tales now and see them right on the cusp, with none of them knowing the collective luck they were about to have.

'Campfire Tales' Is Scarier Than 'Urban Legend'

Okay, Campfire Tales came out before I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, but is it any good? Campfire Tales is honestly a mixed bag. It has some strange editing choices along with over-the-top acting, and the lack of a budget shows. Still, this was the first film for co-directors Martin Kunert and Eric Manes, so it's understandable. Those flaws actually kind of help, because often the best horror isn't the big-budget shine of Hollywood, but the rawness of something smaller.

Urban Legend had that bigger budget shine, and while it is a fun movie, it's also hindered by putting urban legends into a full-length single story. The whodunit mystery is what matters most, and urban legends are the killer's method of mayhem. In Campfire Tales, it's the urban legends that come first, with no subplots. Made up of five short films, the focus is only on the immediate horror. If you know a lot about urban legends, you can guess where some of the stories are headed ("The Hook" and "People Can Lick Too" give it away in the titles), but it's still creepy how they get there. You might think that, since the main story is about friends telling urban legends to each other, there is no real threat. After all, no one can be hurt or killed because it's just a story. When it's over, we're still left with friends by the side of the road who might be scared but who have never been in any real danger. But then comes the twist ending, where Campfire Tales proves you wrong.

Campfire Tales is available to watch on Tubi.

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Campfire Tales

R

Horror

Release Date

May 16, 1997

Director

David Semel, Martin Kunert

Runtime

88 minutes