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 incomparable Ringu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, America found a revitalized love for the slasher, prompted by the release of Wes Craven’s Scream. 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, and Friday 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. In Jason 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 Dead turned 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 of John Carpenter’s unimpeachable original Halloween would care.

There were a few franchise installments that successfully riled dormant inventiveness – Hellraiser 3, The Exorcist 3, Army of Darkness, and Alien 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, from Possession and The Shining to The Fly and From Beyond. Films like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs legitimized the art form in ways that not even Kubrick could pull off, while The Vanishing and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer found 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 3 was meant to be a comment on AIDS; the French shocker Man Bites Dog lampooned 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, and Misery – 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

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Sure, it’s essentially just Scream relocated to a college campus, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Mind you, Halloween 2 is merely Halloween relocated to a hospital, even if it is lacking the unimpeachable artistry of John Carpenter. In comparison, Scream 2 still 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, from Omar Epps getting a knife through a bathroom-stall wall to Sarah Michelle Gellar taking a header off her sorority house balcony. This also might be the least annoying Jerry O’Connell has ever been in a movie, and the additions of Timothy Olyphant, Laurie Melcalf, and David 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 to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’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 seeing Baby Blood.

48. Mimic

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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 by Mira Sorvino and Jeremy 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

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A college professor and family man, played by Jeff 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 how Eric 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

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Very few films, horror or not, come within spitting distance of William Friedkin’s beguiling, breathless The 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 Miller returns as Father Karras, but The Gemini Killer, a ruthless, perverse butcher played by a thrillingly scary Brad 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.

45. Bad Moon

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It’s a sad realization that Bad Moon is 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 only Eric Red’s Bad Moon making a sincere impression. It’s worth noting that Red was the writer behind Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent Near Dark, and the familial undercurrents that delineated that near-masterpiece come into play equally in Bad Moon, which revolves around a series of wolf-like maulings that occur when Mariel 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. While Mike NicholsWolf tries and fails to lend maturity to the sub-genre, Bad Moon uses practical effects, creative writing, and an imaginative director to revitalize what we always loved about werewolf stories.

44. The Relic

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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 Sizemore is the lead detective on the case while Penelope Ann Miller is 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 by Peter Hyams, The Relic is 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 of Stan 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

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Image via Warner Bros.

Few directors have had a career as varied and estimable as Neil 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 with Interview with the Vampire and then, in 2012, with Byzantium. 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 frightening Tom Cruise. Jordan focuses the action on class struggles and the transformation from human to timeless monster, most profoundly represented by Kirsten 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

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Image via Disney

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 by Jeff 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 clearly John Goodman, who play’s the town’s cocky, ignorant exterminator with buoyant comic energy.

41. Vampires

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The second best of John 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 Woods is 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’s Thomas 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 gives Vampires its undeniable edge. The film is shot well, strewn with good use of gore and impactful action sequences, and sports a solid cast that also includes Mark Boone Jr., Sheryl Lee, and Maximilian Schell. All that’s great, but it’s near-textural feeling of Carpenter’s mind at work in every frame that makes Vampires unique in a sub-genre that so often feels plain.

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40. Candyman

Like the not-so-great Urban Legend, this creepy, grisly shocker is steeped in modern folklore, specifically that of the titular hook-handed killer (Tony Todd) who, according to recreational mythology, was once a slave who was tortured, mangled, and murdered by a gang of white men for fathering a child with a white woman. Working from a Clive Barker story, writer-director Bernard Rose makes the film a lacerating revenge tale, with white society finally feeling the retribution for years upon years of slaughtering African-Americans, often for no reason bigger than boredom and petty jealousy. Not only does Virginia Madsen’s protagonist get set up as the perpetrator of the Candyman’s ghastly butchering, she also gets roughed up for inspecting the ghettos for research, upsetting other kinds of modern mythologies for the sake of her written study. Had Rose pushed his perspective even further into the threads of the narrative, Candyman would be an essential text on hate crimes and racial injustice, but as it stands, he’s simply made one of the most outraged horror films of 1990s.

39. The Eternal

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Michael Almereyda followed up his seductive and strange vampire tale Nadja with this similarly erotic, alluring, and sensationally acted Irish witch tale. Alison Elliott, who broke out in 1990s dramas such as The Spitfire Grill and Wings of the Dove, plays Nora, a borderline-alcoholic wife and mother who returns to her home in Ireland with her husband (Jared Harris) and son to meet her grandmother (Lois Smith). Who they meet first is her crazy uncle, played by Christopher Walken, who has resurrected a druid witch from the local bog that might be Nora's mother but most definitely awakes to cause mass devastation at the family's mansion. Almereyda's camerawork is wondrous, pulling us through the long shadowy hallways of the mansion via some alluring long-takes, and the script summons a host of fascinating concepts about lineage, the seduction of the past, and familial bonds. If the trajectory does prove to be a bit predictable, The Eternal nevertheless, and you'll have to forgive me here, casts a moody spell from the first shot to the haunting last.

38. Funny Games

With this 1997 art-house white-knuckler, Michael Haneke honed his occasionally self-serving indictment of audiences who look toward violence, torture, and death for their entertainments to a fine point. Two pleasant-seeming psychotics enter the home of an affluent family and put them through a series of near-sickening games in which their lives are constantly on the line. The psychotic boys intermittently address the audience, and even rewind the film at one point, suggesting that the viewers are in on their cruel activities and are, in a way, rooting for them. It’s a stunning criticism that hits like a jackhammer at certain moments, but Haneke cops out in one regard, in that he never faces his own place in the making of films that are mainly built on suffering and death. Still, Funny Games is one of the venerable filmmaker’s most exhilarating creations, right up there with Cache, Code Unknown, and The White Ribbon, and though his moral arguments are muddled, the power of his film’s clinical visuals and menacing plot turns cannot be denied.

37. Whispering Corridors

J-Horror and K-Horror were built up as globally recognized sub-genres in the 1990s, and although few can match the likes of Ringu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s heart-stopping Cure, there were more than a few minor curiosities that reinforced their longevity. Case in point: Whispering Corridors, a remarkably odd and direful ghost tale that pivots on a series of severed friendships and alliances at a small high school. Those expecting a run-of-the-mill fright-fest are in for a surprise, as the film only has a handful of kills and the bulk of the dialogue centers on high school politics – popularity, teachers, rifts, and counseling are the most memorable topics. As such, Whispering Corridors works most potently as a reflection of Japanese society and the insistence on authoritative control to keep citizens in line, but when the film does invoke the power of the specters, the hairs on the back of your neck shoot up and the enduring power of regret can be felt fully.

36. Bram Stoker's Dracula

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Image via Colombia Pictures

It’s really too bad that Francis Ford Coppola directed the Godfather trilogy. The first two Godfather films, to say nothing of The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, set an impossible standard to live up to in the annals of popular cinema, and when Coppola wanted to get weird, the reaction was either indifferent or straight-up rancorous, despite the director’s tremendous skill and evocative artistry still being evident in nearly every frame. His take on the Dracula lore, specifically, was dismissed as nothing more than a camp item at best, with lead actors Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, and Keanu Reeves receiving their own critical bruises along the way. Revisiting the film, however, what remains so palpable is Coppola’s visual expression of immortality and insatiable lust that goes beyond mere sex, entering into a surreal realm of physical hunger. There’s a cutting sense of menace to the entire production and rather than play the classic tale as soberly frightening, the director goes for the psychological madness, disbelief, and uncertainty of becoming a creature that is sustained on blood alone. Tom Waits makes for a great Renfield, but the film belongs to Oldman, who plays each version of the Dracula character with a lurid uninhibitedness, making his very presence summon feelings of liberation and damnation in equal measures.

35. Stir of Echoes

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Image via Artisan Entertinment

Richard Matheson’s still-chilling story of ghosts and murder got a potent, buoyantly directed telling by longtime screenwriter David Koepp, but, unfortunately, it came out the same year as The Sixth Sense. Koepp, who has yet to direct another film that’s worth anyone’s attention, indulges in a handful of bump scares but otherwise, this tale of a Chicago telephone lineman (Kevin Bacon) who begins seeing the same specter that his young son is constantly speaking with is all mood and expert technical ability. The editing is remarkable, especially in a scene where Bacon’s everyman rushes home from a local sports game to check on his son, and Koepp neither lets up the tension too much nor makes the film pivot exclusively on plot turns. He has an easy, ingratiating sense of the Chicago area, and gets the tone of the friendships and relationships that Bacon’s character’s family increasingly count on convincing and naturally rhythmic, thanks largely to a great supporting cast that includes Veep’s Kevin Dunn and Kathryn Erb. Like Rosemary’s Baby and, yes, The Sixth Sense, the feel for the city is at once breezily familiar and surprisingly shuddersome, suggesting the piles of neighbors and strangers who have unjustly died in the place that you call home.

34. Event Horizon

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Image via Paramount Pictures

“Hellraiser in Space” is how a close friend of mine always described this sole masterwork from “bad auterism” golden child Paul W.S. Anderson but that doesn’t give the film half the credit it deserves. First of all, Hellraiser isn’t nearly as menacing as what’s going on in Event Horizon, which revolves around a spaceship crew who find themselves being murdered off following contact with a experimental gravity drive on the titular, lost spaceship that they answer the distress beacon for. Very few films have summoned the claustrophobia of space travel so well, and that anxiety seems to be at the root of the horror that is visited upon ship’s team, including Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Joely Richardson, and Kathleen Quinlan, which occasionally borders on the sadistic, which is likely where the Hellraiser comparisons come from. The final moments between Fishburne’s head-strong captain and a seemingly possessed Neill are the kind of magnetic and operatic scenes that would seem silly and unearned under a different director, but Anderson’s undeniable grasp of tone and pacing here make them moments that will make you never want to watch a movie with the lights off again.

33. Alien 3

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Image via 20th Century Fox

The film that cemented David Fincher’s reputation as Hollywood’s greatest misanthrope. 20th Century Fox, which has a long reputation of fucking up good things in the name of narrative familiarity, cut Fincher’s third installment of the Alien franchise into ribbons. What remains of the film, which finds Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) on a prisoner-run work colony where the xenomorphs hatch and do their business, is not the transcendent comment on the AIDS virus that the director intended it to be, but it’s still a stylish, tense blast of supernatural horror, even if the production lacks thematic or political depth. The sleek imagery, which seems burned to an dark orange in so many shots, is a precursor to the directors excellent work with shadows and dim lighting that would follow, and the film itself features some of the franchise’s most memorable set-pieces, including the gripping final sequence. The promise of the film remains unfulfilled on the whole but what remains is as entertaining and haunting as its predecessor, if not quite as fine-tuned in its terror as the original.

32. Dust Devil

Richard Stanley’s second, and far more accomplished work, following his intriguing Hardware, is a Namibia-set folklore tale, which tells of an immortal creature that takes the body of a man and keeps him all-powerful as long as he continues to kill. As played by Law & Order: SVU staple Robert John Burke, the titular being is at once alluring and furious, using the blood of a lover early on to paint ritualistic messages all over her home, before he burns it and her to a cinder. Stanley complicates the story with the inclusion of a detective (Zakes Morkae) and a woman, Wendy (Chelsea Field), that Burke’s devil is reluctant to butcher, but the story still comes off as the kind of story you would tell around a campfire or, if you’re particularly twisted, at bedtime. Stanley also wrote the screenplay and he goes the length to give the film a sly feminist undertone, as Wendy is escaping a miserable, abusive marriage when she runs into Burke’s devil, and finds neither peace nor joy in either coupledom or picking up with random men. The film ends with her essentially killing two men and walking out to find a new life beyond the desert, suggesting a breaking with tradition and folkloric fear.

31. The Frighteners

Image via Universal Pictures

Peter Jackson’s first big Hollywood production via Universal Pictures is a clever twist on the ghost story, and a personal comment on a life in the horror racket. In one of his very best big-screen performances, Michael J. Fox plays Frank Bannister, a medium-huckster who works with a tribe of friendly ghosts, played by the likes of Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe, and Gomez Addams himself John Astin, to scam homeowners into having him clear their homes of ghosts. Business is somewhat good until a grim reaper-type figure begins killing the living and the dead alike and swallowing them up into nothingness, a figure that ends up being the ghost of an infamous serial killer.

Jackson, rightly, is more playful in his direction and writing, alongside wife Fran Walsh, than morbidly serious, and The Frighteners is nothing if not knowingly old-school in its production and narrative trajectory. Credit a reliably excellent Danny Elfman score and Alun Bollinger & John Blick’s cinematography for adding visual and auditory pep to the proceedings, but The Frighteners also has a clear intimate reflective surface for Jackson, a filmmaker who, at the time, had built much of his own career on ghastly trickery as a way of staying in his comfort zone, whether in the madness of Meet the Feebles or Dead Alive. Some four or five years later, he would follow this moody delight up with the first of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the crowning achievements of modern Hollywood filmmaking, and the seeds of the ambition and emotional openness of those films are clearly visible in The Frighteners.

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