Let’s be honest: The 1990s were, at best, a transitional time period for the horror genre, in America as much as anywhere else. Whereas K-Horror and J-Horror just began to find a regular fanbase internationally towards the end of the 90s, thanks in part to the incomparableRinguandKiyoshi Kurosawa’sCure, America found a revitalized love for the slasher, prompted by the release ofWes Craven’sScream. There were plenty of good and great horror films, mind you, but this was the era after the initial boom, when the genre was coming down off the high of its three defining franchises:Halloween,A Nightmare on Elm Street, andFriday the 13th.
It’s interesting, then, to note that the installments of those franchises that came out in the 1990s, looked to broaden their templates into often absurd realms. InJason Goes to Hell, the man behind the hockey mask became not just an unstoppable killing machine but a being possessed by a demonic-worm who can only inhabit those in the Voorhees clan. Or something.Freddy’s Deadturned Mr. Krueger into a deadbeat dad attempting to connect with his daughter, jumping through time and dimensions, it would seem, to ensure the death of teenagers worldwide. And as for our brutish friend Mike Myers, he was turned into a kind of super-soldier project, and the series attempted to find more interest in the Illinois community where he lives, wrongly assuming that fans ofJohn Carpenter’s unimpeachable originalHalloweenwould care.
There were a few franchise installments that successfully riled dormant inventiveness –Hellraiser 3,The Exorcist 3,Army of Darkness, andAlien 3, to name just a few - but the very best of the decade build on the idiosyncrasies and perverse obsessions of key works of the 1980s, fromPossessionandThe ShiningtoThe FlyandFrom Beyond. Films likeSe7enandThe Silence of the Lambslegitimized the art form in ways that not even Kubrick could pull off, whileThe VanishingandHenry: Portrait of a Serial Killerfound resonant chills in depicting, detailing, and gazing without hesitation at the work of sadistic psychopaths. Serial killers, and the forensic sciences and psychology that ensnared them, were the bread and butter of the 90s, but the greatest works offered distinct visuals and thematic considerations embedded under the blood and gore.Alien 3was meant to be a comment on AIDS; the French shockerMan Bites Doglampooned the moral flexibility and opportunism of artists looking to make a big break.
A lot of these films could arguably be categorized as thrillers – specifically,Cape Fear,The Silence of the Lambs, andMisery– but horror has always shared DNA with the thriller genre. Looking back at the crucial works of Hitchcock or Tournier, the feelings are primarily terror and horror in the psychological realm, rather than in gushing wounds and severed limbs. This isn’t to say that blood and guts are any reason to take a film less seriously or to accuse it of being immoral simply on the basis of its subject matter. The 1990s were a time where horror solidified itself as an art form, not just capable of a few random works of genius but of dozens that wrestled with politics and societal attitudes in ways that mainstream Hollywood could not deal with without softening its edges and going for saccharine over skepticism, making way for the wildly imaginative genre landscape of the aughts and the 2010s.
In this spirit, we decided to gather up the 50 best, scariest horror films of the decade, to survey how horror regained its strength and bloomed into narrative vistas that the 1980s barely hinted at. Take a look:
50. Scream 2
Sure, it’s essentially justScreamrelocated to a college campus, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Mind you,Halloween 2is merelyHalloweenrelocated to a hospital, even if it is lacking the unimpeachable artistry ofJohn Carpenter. In comparison,Scream 2still has the late master,Wes Craven, in the director’s chair and the film carries his trademark tone of increasing dread and terror, denoted by a series of solid kills, fromOmar Eppsgetting a knife through a bathroom-stall wall toSarah Michelle Gellartaking a header off her sorority house balcony. This also might be the least annoyingJerry O’Connellhas ever been in a movie, and the additions ofTimothy Olyphant,Laurie Melcalf, andDavid Warner, in a brief scene, lend extra oomph to the movie’s endearing theatrical timbre.
49. Baby Blood
A minor cult sensation in France,Alain Roback’s variation on the birth of the anti-christ tale hinges on the communication between a young woman (Emmanuelle Escourrou) and the gestating devil that she’s been impregnated with by some unknowable creature…at the circus where she works. Like any child, the anti-christ needs to be fed, leading to a series of brutal slayings that end with the mother drinking the blood of her victims. Essentially the trailer-park cousin toRoman Polanski’sRosemary’s Baby, Roback’s film offers a wild-eyed, charmingly cheap satirical take on the holy image that mothers are asked to labor under and epitomize. The film is not short on gore, but it’s the raspy voice of the devil that will soon be birthed into existence that echoes in your mind after seeingBaby Blood.
Guillermo del Toro’s first American film was famously cut to ribbons by the not at all shallow and idiotic suits at Dimension and Miramax, but what remains still shows several flashes of the director’s inventive genius. The clever and intricate story, centered on a group of scientists – fronted byMira SorvinoandJeremy Northam– hunting a man-made evolved killer insect originally created to fight off a plague that killed children, clearly touches on del Toro’s favored narrative concepts – children in danger, horrors born of grief, etc. – and sports his stylish, eloquently designed aesthetics. There was clearly a wiser, more audacious film here, and a stronger, more ponderous script was obviously corrupted in the name of audience-friendly familiarity, but there’s still a solid creature feature at work here, one that is gripping, philosophically attuned, and intermittently quite compelling.
47. Body Parts
A college professor and family man, played byJeff Fahey, loses his arm in a car accident but, miraculously, is the beneficiary of an experimental surgery that gives him a working transplanted arm, harvested from a recently deceased man. That’s how this engrossing little gem begins, and the story only gets more preposterous and eerie as the film goes on, leading to a wild, bloody climax. The professor soon bonds with two other recipients of the donor, but his fuse becomes shorter as well, leading him to yell at his children and even abuse his wife. No fair ruining howEric Red’s film unfurls from there, but it’s fair to say that the director gives the Frankenstein tale an inventive twist here, and though the film lacks for expressive imagery, the shocks come increasingly bigger and quicker.
46. The Exorcist III
Very few films, horror or not, come within spitting distance ofWilliam Friedkin’s beguiling, breathlessThe Exorcist. Like most great or even good movies, it didn’t warrant a sequel and its first one,The Heretic, realized everyone’s worst fears as to what such an unneeded production would do with the mythology. The third one, however, takes a far more chilling and strangely playful route in extending the narrative.Jason Millerreturns as Father Karras, but The Gemini Killer, a ruthless, perverse butcher played by a thrillingly scaryBrad Dourif, has possessed him. The thrust of the narrative involves an aging detective (George C. Scott) investigating a series of extravagantly violent murders, with the case leading him to a mental institution. It’s here that he finds Karras, whom he was friends with, and the center of the film is a series of exchanges between Scott’s policeman and Karras, with the editing switching between Miller’s outer character of the priest and Dourif’s bracing expression of the inner fury of the killer. The rest of the film is marked by fleet-footed editing and mixture of surprisingly ponderous dialogue, focused on grief, loss, and mortality, and haunting imagery, but what goes on between Scott and Dourif is the stuff that could keep you up at night, wondering if the devil’s really out there, waiting.
It’s a sad realization thatBad Moonis the only werewolf film to rank on this list. It’s a sub-genre that has struggled consistently, with its major works being relegated to the 1930s, 40s, and 80s, with a few minor successes in the aughts (Dog Soldiers,Ginger Snaps), the 1960s (The Curse of the Werewolf), and the 2010s (Late Phases). The 1990s is a wasteland in this regard, with onlyEric Red’sBad Moonmaking a sincere impression. It’s worth noting that Red was the writer behindKathryn Bigelow’s excellentNear Dark, and the familial undercurrents that delineated that near-masterpiece come into play equally inBad Moon, which revolves around a series of wolf-like maulings that occur whenMariel Hemingway’s Janet welcomes her black-sheep brother, Ted (Michael Pare), back into her life and home. It’s actually Janet’s german-shepard, Thor, that takes most clear note of Ted’s strange behavior and easy temper, and Red does well by putting focus on the connection between beasts. Ultimately, the film suggests that a loyal animal like the dog is as much family as the wolf in human’s clothing who, though sincerely hoping to reconnect with his family, cannot help but sacrifice him to his inner demons. WhileMike Nichols’Wolftries and fails to lend maturity to the sub-genre,Bad Moonuses practical effects, creative writing, and an imaginative director to revitalize what we always loved about werewolf stories.
44. The Relic
We begin far away, around a small fire where a white man indulges in local custom by drinking some strange elixir. The filmmaker cuts to a tribesman in headdress crawling up to the white man, but what we see is clearly not what the white man sees. We never find out, but it’s safe to say that its not dissimilar to the horrifying creature that follows him back to his home turf of Chicago’s Field Museum, where a series of savage murders occur only days leading up to an important gala.Tom Sizemoreis the lead detective on the case whilePenelope Ann Milleris the scientist who begins putting together the clues, and much of this film wouldn’t work if they weren’t both so quietly charming and convincing in their roles. Paced and directed smartly byPeter Hyams,The Relicis a conventional monster movie in many ways, but it’s done with moody finesse, a sense of atmosphere that doesn’t make the film about the atmosphere. And when the big thing shows up, it proves to be yet another testament to the brilliant, nightmarish imagination ofStan Winston, who barely gives you a full look at his creation, but gives enough to ruin a night of sleep or two.
43. Interview with the Vampire
Few directors have had a career as varied and estimable asNeil Jordan, who has swung from grim revenge tales (The Brave One) to emotional melodramas (The End of the Affair) to surreal thrillers (In Dreams). Among the hash, he’s approached the vampire lore twice, first withInterview with the Vampireand then, in 2012, withByzantium. The latter film is undervalued, but the former is the far more seductive feature, tracing the decades-long path of Louis (Brad Pitt), one of the chief minions of Lestat, played by a surprisingly frighteningTom Cruise. Jordan focuses the action on class struggles and the transformation from human to timeless monster, most profoundly represented byKirsten Dunst’s Claudia, and the result is an elegant tale of a seemingly endless life of loss and grief, with plenty of petrifying set-pieces to evoke the desperation and terror of being tired of life yet unable to slay one’s hunger for immortality.
42. Arachnophobia
There’s not much blood in this smartly paced creature feature, but one might prefer the sight of gushing wounds to the close-up shots of our eight-legged friends as they take over a small California town. Usually a competent purveyor of low-grad schmaltz,Frank Marshall’s light touch actually works to his advantage here, creating a potent sense of idyll, quasi-rural suburbia that is thrown into tumult by a plague of South American killer spiders and their enormous mother-spider. The main character, a doctor played byJeff Daniels, has arachnophobia, but the series of venomous deaths equally reflect his fear of leaving the city for a quiet life where there’s a sizable plot of land separating you from your neighbor. The climactic sequence, when spiders overrun his house, plays like any spider-haters waking nightmare, leading to the squirm-inducing unveiling of the Momma, but the film’s MVP is clearlyJohn Goodman, who play’s the town’s cocky, ignorant exterminator with buoyant comic energy.
41. Vampires
The second best ofJohn Carpenter’s interesting but largely dramatically lacking 1990s output, Vampires expresses a kind of hard-nosed brand of bad-assery that other directors have attempted to pull off but few have ever even brushed up against.James Woodsis Jack Crow, the leader of a gang of vampire slayers who are all but wiped out completely when they come up against Jan Valek (The Karake Kid Part 3’sThomas Ian Griffith), a powerful bloodsucker looking for a talisman that will allow him to walk freely in sunlight. There’s no attempt to make Crow into a role model. There’s not even a minute trace of sentimentality in the production on the whole really, and it’s that simplistic, skeptical perspective that givesVampiresits undeniable edge. The film is shot well, strewn with good use of gore and impactful action sequences, and sports a solid cast that also includesMark Boone Jr.,Sheryl Lee, andMaximilian Schell. All that’s great, but it’s near-textural feeling of Carpenter’s mind at work in every frame that makesVampiresunique in a sub-genre that so often feels plain.
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