The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) ’90s Horror Movies | ScreenRant – Screen Rant

With hits like Scream and The Silence of the Lambs, the nineties were a great time for horror cinema. But the decade had a few genre duds too.

Throughout the 1990s, the nihilism of Generation X had an interesting effect on horror movies. As audiences were becoming more and more familiar with the tropes and conventions of horror cinema, filmmakers could get meta and toy around with moviegoers expectations of scary movies, leading to self-aware gems like Scream.

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For better or worse, the found footage subgenre was also pioneered in the late 90s with the release of The Blair Witch Project. As with any decade of horror cinema, there were both great and terriblegenre offerings. So, here are the five best and five worst horror movies from the 90s.

After helming one of the definitive slashers with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven deconstructed the genre with Scream. Its a slasher in which a masked serial killer targets the students of a high school, and the high school students are all familiar with the tropes and structure of the kind of movie theyre in.

There are a ton of brilliant meta moments, like Jamie Kennedy outlining the rulesone mustfollow to survive a horror movie, that effectively killed the slasher genre by lampooning the absurdity of its conventions.

A year after some teenagers cover up a hit-and-run incident, the guy they thought they killed begins stalking them and picking them off one by one. I Know What You Did Last Summer is one of the most formulaic and predictable slashers ever made, following all the familiar beats with a cast of idiotic characters.

Adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, Misery stars James Caan as Paul Sheldon, an author whose car slides off the road and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, the superfan who saves him from the wreck and nurses him back to health.

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As the story develops into a terrifying two-hander, Paul begins to realize that Annie isnt as innocent as she seems, and he could be in grave danger as she forces him to write her favorite character back to life.

This is the movie that lost Peter Jackson the job of directing The World is Not Enough. The 007 producers had been fans of Jacksons earlier work, Heavenly Creatures, and wanted to offer him the gig. However, they changed their minds after seeing The Frighteners.

The premise of Michael J. Fox playing a fraudulent supernatural investigator running scams with ghosts sounds like a great movie.But while Jackson does his best to emulate the creepy suburban satire of Tim Burtons Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands,he falls incredibly short with a movie that cant decide if it wants to be spooky or ridiculous, and ends up being a banal tightrope walk between the two.

Martin Scorsese doesnt typically make horror films, but in his 1991 remake of the 1962 Robert Mitchum thriller Cape Fear, the simplicity of the story paves the way for Hitchcockian terror.

Robert De Niro plays Max Cady, a murderer who stalks the family of the public defender (Nick Nolte) who failed to keep him out of prison after his release.

The first Predator movie is all-out fun. Arnold Schwarzenegger goes out into the jungle and fights a bloodthirsty alien that can turn itself invisible and sees in heat vision.

In thesequel however, Arnie was nowhere to be seen. The alien came to Los Angeles to prey on a cop played by Danny Glover and there was nothing scary, exciting, or otherwise entertaining in the whole dull movie.

David Finchers Se7en is one of the grisliest, most disturbing serial killer thrillers ever made. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt star as a classically mismatched buddy cop duo, with Freeman playing a by-the-book veteran and Pittas a hotshot rookie.

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The killer theyre chasing uses the seven deadly sins to inspire his murders, which gives the audience the sense that they know where the story is going,leading to some shocking plot twists.

After the first Childs Play movie established itself as a fresh, unique, devilishly entertaining horror flick, its 1990 sequel simply ticked off all the items on the slasher movie checklist with a painfully by-the-numbers approach.

It almost works to the detriment of the original as it takes concepts that were new and exciting in the original film and beats them to death until they seem derivative and well-worn.

The first (and, as of yet, only) horror movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs blends grisly terror with earnest character development to deliver one of the most effective crime thrillers in film history.

Director Jonathan Demme deftly balances the disturbing tone of the film, while the riveting performances by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins (particularly in their tense scenes together) keep the story anchored in real humanity.

Famous for pioneering the laziest subgenre in horror cinema, The Blair Witch Project is simply not a very scary movie. Some film students take a camera out into the woods to find a fabled witch.

We never get to see the witch which doesnt work in a Jaws-style less-is-more way, but rather fails in a disappointingly anticlimactic way and the characters make decisions that dont make sense.

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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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