The Scariest Movie From Each Year In The ’90s, Ranked – Screen Rant

From terrifying Stephen King adaptations to Wes Craven's meta-slasher hit Scream, the '90s were a groundbreaking decade for horror cinema.

Horror cinema enjoyed one of its best decades in the 1990s. All kinds of scary movies were getting made. David Fincher bowled audiences over with Se7en, a movie that proved horror can be grisly andsmart, and that buddy cop pairings dont have to be confined to the action genre.

RELATED: The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) '90s Horror Movies

And on top of that, the genre got a self-aware makeover in the age of postmodernism. Wes Craven, one of the forerunners of the slasher subgenre with movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street, took a satirical jab at his own legacy with Scream, one of the most meta horror movies ever made.

1993 didnt have a lot for audiences in terms of horror movies, with offerings like Leprechaun, Needful Things, and Amityville: A New Generation squanderingtheir exciting premises. However, George A. Romero did release a pretty good Stephen King adaptation, the psychological thriller The Dark Half.

The movie doesnt rank among Romeros best work, but his script has some fascinating ideas and Timothy Hutton plays delightfully against type.

Two years before he would grace the horror genre with arguably its greatest work of metafiction, Scream, Wes Craven brought a self-aware angle to the sixth sequel to his slasher classic,A Nightmare on Elm Street.

New Nightmare takes places outside the franchise canon, depicting Freddy as a fictional character from a movie series who makes his way into the real world.

Paul W.S. Andersons reputation as a filmmaker has been tarnished by an endless slog of interminable, incomprehensible Resident Evil movies, but in 1997, he directed an underrated sci-fi horror gem called Event Horizon.

A rescue crew is sent to a ship and discovers that it accidentally ripped open the spacetime continuum, allowing an ominous entity from outside the known universe to possess it.

In a year that brought some truly awful movies like Leprechaun 3, Village of the Damned, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, 1995 wasnt a great time to be a horror fan. But David Fincher delivered a neo-noir crime thriller that was more terrifying than any horror movie hitting multiplexes that year.

RELATED:15 Serial Killer Movies To Watch If You Love Se7en

Se7en stars Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as a classically mismatched buddy cop duo on the trail of a serial killer whos been basing his gruesome murders on the seven deadly sins.

Wes Craven took a satirical jab at the slasher, the horror subgenre hes perhaps most associated with, with Scream, a movie in which high schoolers are getting killed off by a masked murderer and for the first time in slasher history, theyre actually familiar with horror movies that follow that structure.

On top of being a pitch-perfect lampoon of slashers, Scream also delivers the goods. Its what Adam McKay calls that weird kind of satire where youre making fun of it, but youre also doing it.

The great William Goldman wrote the screenplay adaptation of Stephen Kings Misery as one of the tensest two-handers in film history. James Caan and Kathy Bates are perfectly matched as afamous author and the superfan who saves him from a car wreck and subsequently holds him hostage.

Bates, in particular, steals the show as the iconic villain Annie Wilkes, more than earningher Academy Award by making the word cockadoodie and the horrifying hobbling scene organic to the same character.

When a widowers son recommends that he find a new wife in Takashi Miikes Audition, he holds interviews with various women and becomes drawn to one of them.

However, as they turn out to have a very dark past, the relationship suffers. Theres no horror movie out there thats quite like this one aside from all the movies its since had an impact on.

Featuring one of the horror genres most memorable villains, Candyman follows the terrifying revelations that come to light when a Chicago graduate student investigates the validity of a local urban legend.

RELATED:Candyman: Everything We Know (So Far) About Jordan Peele's Reboot

On top of the supernatural thrills, Candyman is an important movie about race. Clive Barkers source material was about the British class system, but Bernard Rose recontextualized it as a story about inner-city U.S. life.

Everyone knows this movies premise from its Hollywood remake a cursed videotape that kills its viewers within a week but as usual, the Japanese original is far superior.

Thematically, its about the fears of modern technology, while the set pieces are terrifying enough to stop the story from getting bogged down in its big ideas.

While Martin Scorseses Cape Fear remake is a masterfully crafted suspense thriller, the horror movie that stole the spotlight in 1991 was Jonathan Demmes The Silence of the Lambs. Jodie Foster is the perfect protagonist as Clarice Starling, an FBI rookie hunting a serial killer targeting women, while Anthony Hopkins is the perfect antagonist as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal whom she consults with on the case.

Foster and Hopkins both won Oscars for starring in this masterpiece, as did Demme, screenwriter Ted Tally, and the movie itself, making The Silence of the Lambs the only horror movie and one of the only movies, period to win the big five Academy Awards.

NEXT:The Funniest Movie From Each Year In The '90s, Ranked

Next After: 5 Differences From The Popular Book (& 5 Things The Movie Kept The Same)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, filmmaker, and comedian. In addition to writing for Screen Rant and CBR, covering a wide range of topics from Spider-Man to Scorsese, Ben directs independent films and takes to the stage with his standup material. He's currently in pre-production on his feature directorial debut (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema and BabbleTop.

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The Scariest Movie From Each Year In The '90s, Ranked - Screen Rant