Top 10 Horror Movies of the 90's

In sifting through my review archive I was surprised when my list of the best horror movies of the 90s past the 20 mark. Not necessarily pleasantly surprised, because it’s always hard to cut good movies out of top 10 lists, but don’t be discouraged by all the I Know What You Did Last Summer’s and the like, it turns out that the 90’s were a great time for horror movies. Time to start stocking up for the weekend!

10. Audition (1999), R, 115 mins.

I know, I know. No foreign horror films in either of my Top 10 Horror lists from the 70's or 80's, and now here I am squeezing one in at #10. But don't worry, they make an appearance in the 00's list, too, so stay tuned for that next week. For now, he's a characteristically disturbing Japanese horror film about a man who holds auditions for a non-existent film, in hopes of selecting a potential bride for his son.

Instead, he becomes enamored himself with a beautiful young woman named Aoyama who is, shall we say, not exactly as sweet as she looks.

The movie is beautifully photographed but also genuinely horrifying. Like any good horror film, there are plenty of scenes that will have you squirming in your seat (and have your date burying her face in your chest, and that's important, too), but it also explores the intricacies of an older man dating a much younger woman.

This is a taboo topic in many cultures, and Audition understands that and it uses that tense subject as a foundation for a horror construction that goes far, far beyond the discomfort stage.

It avoids, for the most part, being overtly gory, opting instead for the audience's imagination when we see something as simple as a single needle, which can be far scarier even than a chainsaw when it's presented in the right threatening way. The movie is incredibly atmospheric and adds the uncanny quality of a deadly threat coming from a beautiful young woman. This is intelligent horror at its best...

9. Cemetery Man (1994), R, 105 mins.

Tagline - "Zombies, guns, and sex, OH MY!"

How can you go wrong with a tagline like that? It's like a recipe for a classy horror movie! Who would have thought that Rupert Everett could be so good in a scary movie?

He plays a man named Francesco Dellamorte, the guardian of the cemetery of Buffalora, a small town in northern Italy. He falls for a stunningly beautiful but mysterious woman, played by Anna Falchi, and after breaking the cardinal rule of horror movies by having sex, they unleash a horde of zombies onto the cemetery (beginning with her dead husband), which Dellamorte must then destroy.

The movie is unusually stylish and atmospheric, and stands out even among the classics of Italian horror. It juxtaposes two of life's most universal realities, love and death (the Italian title is Dellamorte Dellamore - dellamore means "of love," and dellamorte means "of death"), and manages to pass as a god horror comedy while still being bloody enough to satisfy the gore hounds. Fans of the great Bruce Campbell are sure to enjoy it!

8. In The Mouth of Madness (1994), R, 95 mins.

Regardless of your opinion of the movie, In The Mouth of Madness definitely deserves credit for having one of the coolest titles in horror movie history. Sam Neill plays John Trent, a freelance insurance investigator who has been assigned to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a hugely successful horror novelist named Sutter Cane.

His investigation sends him searching for the charming little town of Hobb's End which, were he able to look it up on Google Earth on his iPhone, he might find difficult to locate on the map. It seems that Sutter Cane was particularly good at bringing his creative worlds into reality to the point where his novels regularly caused disorientation, memory loss, and paranoia in his readers. John's problems begin with the fact that Cane's disappearance took place just before the release of his latest book, "Horror in Hobb's End."

John, being a natural skeptic, smells a publicity stunt, sets off to find the supposedly fictional town of Hobb's End. Fully expecting not to find it, he's stunned when he stumbles across it so suddenly that he literally almost crashes into it, and then he has to find out how far Cane has gone in unleashing an evil force upon the town's unsuspencting population...

7. Jacob's Ladder (1990), R, 115 mins.

Tim Robbins stars as Jacob Singer, a New York postal worker whose life is beginning to fall apart. He is trying to keep his second marriage together but is being increasingly plagued by flashbacks to his first marriage, his son, who died in an accident that Jacob feels responsible for, and his tour of duty in Vietnam.

He begins to feel more and more that someone is out to get him, and as his feelings of a military conspiracy against him get stronger, the line between delusion and reality gets weaker.

The movie makes brilliant use of the visions of demons in everyday life, an intensely creepy technique that has been borrowed in everything from The Devil's Advocate to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which itself is one of the scariest movies that I've ever seen.

The curious title comes from the suggestions that Jacob seems to be standing in the midpoint of a ladder that reaches up to Heaven and down to Hell, and the story is a journey through his mind, which is infested with a kind of schizophrenic paranoia, as he moves toward the decision of climbing up or down. It's a bit abrasive at some points, but it's a hell of a ride.

6. Scream (1996), R, 111 mins.

It's hard to argue that Scream is anything but a Hollywood teen horror movie, given that it was so successful with high school kids (like me) at the time it was released, it's populated with Hollywood actors and, for a brief time, it ran the risk of becoming an endless horror franchise, but it does give us a genuine throwback to the classic slasher films of the 80's, and most importantly, there is a true love of scary movies that permeates the film that I think  makes true lovers of scary movies sit up and take note.

Neve Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, whose mother was brutally killed in her small town. One year later, two students turn up dead at her school and she suspects that their murders are related to her mother's. The story focuses on the investigations o the murders (both by the police, led by bumbling detective David Arquette, and by the press, represented by the ambitious reporter played by Courteney Cox).

It is the relationships between the characters that make the movie watchable, because David Arquette is so cute that it's hard not to get involved in his interest in Sidney, while Courteney Cox plays such a heartless and self-serving jerk that we get very involved in Sidney's fight to prevent her from making a career out of her mother's and these new students' killings.

The movie opens with a brilliant scene that shocked us with what happened right down to who it happened to and when, and Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard also give outstanding performances. As a horror film, Scream is not ambitious in covering new ground, but it's an exhilarating walk over ground that has been ignored for far too long.

5. Misery (1990), R, 107 mins.

In a huge literary stretch, Stephen King gives us a frightening story about a novelist who is so successful that when his car breaks down, the first person that shows up to help is a fan who is so obsessed with his work that she thinks it better to kidnap him and force him to write a novel just for her than to take him to the hospital. Nice!

It's interesting that King can write such a high percentage of his novels around successful novelists, because I would think that the vast majority of his readers are not successful novelists and so might find it difficult to relate. But he can do it because he focuses on the things in life that we can relate to, like, for example, being caught in the captivity of a psychotic Kathy Bates.

This is the performance that I always remember when I see Kathy Bates, who is a tremendously talented actor. When I see James Caan, on the other hand, I always think of The Way of the Gun.

I read the book when I was about 12 years old and then saw the movie, so the "hobbling" scene and the sheriff at the top of the stairs absolutely affected me for life. They are two of the small handful of horror movie scenes that I saw coming because I had read the books (along with little Gage getting killed and the Achilles tendon scenes in Pet Sematary and the car accident at the beginning of Children of the Corn).

If nothing else, if you watch this alone or with someone else, chances are you're going to have fingernail marks somewhere on your body by the time it's over. See this one!

4. Dead Alive (1992), R, 97 mins.

Okay gore-hounds, this one's for you. Before Peter Jackson became world famous for directing one of the biggest and most successful trilogies ever made, he used to make blood-soaked horror movies the likes of which you wouldn't have ever thought would lead to a career in mainstream film.

Despite being quite literally one of the single goriest splatter films that I've ever seen, the movie keeps a certain charm because it is threaded with a morbid humor and a level of extremism that made the Evil Dead films so much fun. It's hard not to have a good time with a movie like this when it keeps giving us hilarious bits of dialogue like, "Your mother ate my dog!"

You see, a young man seems to have found his soul-mate, but unfortunately his overbearing mother is not only living with them, but has also been recently bitten by a "rat-monkey" which has turned her into a powerful, blood-thirsty zombie. There is a zombie battle in the movie that, in the world of zombie movies, is truly a spectacle to behold!

Obviously, zombie movies are not for everyone, but for pure zombie fun (and yes, there is such a thing), you can hardly do better than Dead Alive.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999), PG-13, 107 mins.

It's easy to forget what a great film The Sixth Sense is when director M. Night Shyamalan keeps releasing movies that seem to be getting progressively less and less interesting. He had directed two films before this one, but it was The Sixth Sense that broke him into mainstream filmmaking and earned him a reputation for delivering a startling twist at the end of his films.

9-year-old Cole Sear has been suffering from terrible delusions where he can see dead people walking around in everyday life, a condition that is crippling him with fear on a daily basis. An insecure psychologist, Malcom Crowe, is desperate to help him to rid his head of these visions, in order to help the boy and also to make himself feel like a competent psychologist after past failures.

Haley Joel Osment steals the show with his incredible performance, but even with a powerful actor like Bruce Willis giving one of the most genuinely impressive performances of his career, it is the sheer momentum of the story that propels the movie. Even after numerous viewings, the movie is so good that once you start watching it, it's nearly impossible to turn it off.

2. The Blair Witch Project (1999), R, 86 mins.

Love it or hate it, The Blair Witch Project is one of the most successful small horror films ever made. The marketing strategy was brilliant, as the approach of the film was shrouded in mystery and headed by one of the most interesting premises that I've ever seen for a scary movie.

Three students filmmakers disappeared in the woods while making a documentary about the "Blair Witch," a local urban legend in Burkittsville, Maryland. A year later, their footage was found in the woods, giving a frigtening and bizarre answer to the mystery surrounding their disappearance.

The movie starts out as just a casual home video, with lots of goofing around and non-acting, and then as they begin their investigation they discover that there certainly is a lot of strange things about the Blair Witch legend.

The movie makes brilliant use of psychological horror, playing with our imaginations using more sound effects than video and allowing us to impose our own fears onto whatever it is lurking in the woods, terrorizing them at night and leaving strange signs for them by day.

The ending is vague enough to have disappointed many people, but like much of the rest of the film, it is left open to individual interpretation and sent people home feverisly discussing what happened and planning to watch it again to try to find out. If nothing else, the necessity for repeat viewings shows that there is much more going on here than in your typical horror film.

1. Army of Darkness (1992), R, 81 mins.

Ok, this is going to be a little bit of a personal choice. Many people will argue that the second Evil Dead sequel doesn't merit a spot at #1 on a list of the best horror movies made in the 1990's, but the movie is so well-written and so well-acted and so much fun, that for sheer entertainment, it tops the list for me.

It begins with Ash working in a small market called S-Mart, while something as simple as the curl of hair hanging over his forehead gives him a Clark-Kent-like appearance, making him seem like a giant of life crammed into a crummy job. This guy is destined to be doing something bigger than announcing special sales over the store's intercom, things like battling the forces of evil in the distant past!

Soon Ash and his car are transported back to ancient times where monstrous forces are terrorizing a medieval castle. By now, Ash is full of confidence, having done so much battle with the forces of evil before (and also because he happens to have brought with him a rifle from the Sporting Goods section), making his character all the more fun to watch.

Unfortunately, he mispronounces the critical words from the Necronomicon, unleashing an army of heavily armed skeletons with whom he does hilarious battle. Like it's predecessors, the movie is wildly over-the-top, going for every extreme imaginable, but one of the extremes that it achieves is pure horror enetertainment. It's a modern classic!

Strangely, it's in my list of the 10 best horror films that I can't resist adding on an Honorable Mention list for the movies that should be here but there just aren't enough numbers between one and ten, so here they are in no particular order -

It (1990)

Ringu (1998)

Needful Things (1993)

Cube (1997)

From Dusk 'Til Dawn (1996)

Candyman (1992)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Seven (1995)

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Event Horizon (1997)

Tremors (1990)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)