Halloween is now less than a week away, but Hollywood has mostly failed to deliver on the scary movie front this year. “Ouija: Origin Of Evil” is better than you might imagine, and “Boo! A Madea Halloween” is… a movie with Halloween in the title. But otherwise, from arthouses to multiplexes, there are slim pickings, unfortunately (Tom Hanks has a movie out, but sadly he plays boring old professor Robert Langdon, rather than David S. Pumpkins…)
READ MORE: The 15 Best Found Footage Horror Movies Ever
With that in mind, we’ve spent the month picking out the highlights from the haunted archive, and have brought you the Best Foreign Language Horrors, the Best Horror Films Of The 1970s, and the Best Horror Films of the 1980s. So we’d be remiss in not carrying on with our zombie-shuffle through time, and so today we’re looking at the highlights from the 1990s.
READ MORE: The 50 Best Horror Movies Of The 21st Century So Far
Coming after the VHS boom of the 1980s, the 1990s are in some respect less iconic when it comes to horror. But that’s not to say that the decade was short on masterpieces: from the revival of the slasher film and the creation of the serial killer genre, to the pre-millennial anxieties and mainstreaming of found footage, to the explosion of new filmmakers, the 1990s are just as high in quality as the preceding decades. As ever, it was hard to pare down to just 25, but we’ve landed on a strong list. Take a look at below, and let us know what you’d pick in the comments.
For more, don’t forget our lists of the Best Horror Movies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
25. “In The Mouth Of Madness” (1994)
After a near-unbeatable run in the 1980s, the popular narrative suggests that “Halloween” and “The Thing” mastermind John Carpenter was on a downturn in the 1990s. And it’s certainly true that films like “Memoirs Of An Invisible Man,” “Village Of The Damned” and “Escape From L.A.” shouldn’t be considered among the horror legend’s finest works. But there was one major gem from the decade, namely “In The Mouth Of Madness.” Completing an unofficial trilogy begun with “The Thing” and “Prince Of Darkness,” the film stars a post-“Jurassic Park” Sam Neill as an insurance investigator charged with looking into the disappearance of Stephen King-ish horror author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) — he finds that the author’s creations may be coming to life and driving his readers crazy mad. Deeply divisive at the time and a box office flop, the film now stands as one of the few truly successful attempts at making Lovecraftian horror work on the big screen, with a truly weird, jarring tone throughout that swiftly moves from being unsettling to truly insane. It’s not perfect —Carpenter’s rock-tinged score is one of his weakest— but it’s one that’s well worth reinvestigation.
24. ”Event Horizon” (1997)
If “Event Horizon” was famously a bomb on release and was savaged by critics like any other Paul W.S. Anderson film, it took a few years for us all to realize how good it is. And by “good,” we mean “absolutely bloody terrifying,” in the way that only films that play cleverly in the arena of insanity, guilt, self-deception and hallucination —preferably in space— can ever really be. Detailing a doomed expedition to investigate a distress signal sent out by the titular ship, which had been believed lost, the film finds Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew, including Joely Richardson, Sean Pertwee and Jason Isaacs, along with the Event Horizon’s original engineer Dr. Weir, played by Sam Neill, pulled into a dimension of “pure chaos.” Confronted with evidence of a massacre, one by one the crew starts to see phantasms from the past as they slowly turn psychotic, especially Dr. Weir, whose attachment to the ship he designed seems to devour him. But the film, so remarkably tense and deeply creepy for so long, loses steam in its final stages when, instead of embracing a “2001” or “Solaris” or “Sunshine“-style and its black-hole weirdness, it attempts an unsatisfying genre resolution that feels lifted from a much less inventively frightening film.
23. “Dellamorte Dellamore”/“Cemetery Man” (1994)
Compared to our current undead-saturated times, the 1990s were relatively light on zombie movies, but one of the best of the bunch was “Dellamorte Dellamore” (released in the U.S. as “Cemetery Man”), and it’s almost the dictionary definition of a midnight movis-style cult classic. Based on a book by “Dylan Dog” author Tiziano Sclavi and directed by Dario Argento protegé Michele Soavi, the film stars Rupert Everett as a lonely Italian caretaker in a cemetery who tries to stop the dead from rising, even as he’s haunted by echoes of a young widow (Anna Falchi) he loved before she was killed by her dead husband. It’s perhaps understandable that the film didn’t find a wider audience outside of Italy —it melds influences from classic giallo and the European comic-book world with Sam Raimi-indebted gruesome horror comedy, Italian political satire, and a smattering of “Vertigo.” There’s even some “American Psycho” in there —it’s never entirely clear how much of what we’re seeing is real, as Everett’s hero (he’s at his Byronic best here) starts to gun down the living as well as the dead. The film’s attitude to women is decidedly less than enlightened, yet this is a rich and enormously enjoyable horror-comedy classic.
22. “The Exorcist III” (1990)
Whether through countless imitations or various sequels (famously including two attempts to film a prequel with the same cast by two directors), almost all attempts to live up to “The Exorcist,” one of the most acclaimed and popular horror flicks in the history of the genre, have failed miserably. But the major exception is “The Exorcist III,” which survived a tumultuous production and poor reviews to now be regarded as a fitting follow-up to the original, in part because it departs so far from it. Written and directed by original “Exorcist” author William Peter Blatty and based on his book “Legion” (the title was changed and a late, extraneous exorcism scene was added at the insistence of studio executives), the film tracks a string of murders following the pattern of The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif). What’s baffling Lieutenant Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb’s role in the original, played by George C. Scott here) is that the Gemini was executed fifteen years earlier. It’s a familiar set-up, but Blatty’s execution is smart, sensitive and restrained, adding an unusual degree of texture to a movie like this while still keeping the scares —Dourif is terrifying, and there’s one jump gag in particular that’s among the best ever. It doesn’t match the original, but what does?
21. “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (1994)
Kevin Williamson gets the lion’s share of the credit for popularizing the meta-horror with “Scream,” but his director on that movie, the late, great Wes Craven, deserves at least as much: not only did he helm that movie, but he did something just as interesting (and with his name in the title, no less) two years earlier with “New Nightmare.” A sparklingly clever soft reboot of the “Nightmare On Elm Street” series that put Craven on the horror A-list, the picture sees original star Heather Langenkamp playing herself on the verge of returning to the franchise for a new movie. But she finds her young son Dylan behaving strangely, and soon realizes that Freddie Krueger is breaking out from the movies and tormenting his creators. It has its flaws —some of the acting isn’t great, particularly when Craven himself cameos in an exposition dump— but after a succession of increasingly silly sequels, the film restores Freddy to his original darker, terrifying state, rather than a wisecracking anti-hero, and he is all the scarier for it. Furthermore, it has some truly interesting things to say about the way that both horror and fame can impact on the lives of those who create and live through it. Arguably the best of the franchise, including the original.
