Picture a group of teenagers in a suburban town, their hormones on overdrive, fueling their penchant for acting reckless. Then, on an inexplicit anniversary, their lives are turned upside down when a masked serial killer appears, hell-bent on ruining their mundane high school experience. One by one, they get knocked off, leaving behind the “final girl,” a survivor who reveals the identity of the murderer and opens the door for a string of straight-to-video sequels. This is the basic plotline that defines many scary movies of the 1990s.
This trope existed before the era of CD players, AIM, and Aqua Net. In the ’70s and ’80s, pioneering auteurs like Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Sean S. Cunningham, and Paul Lynch were at the forefront of this cinematic formula, known as the slasher film, producing low-budget gory spectacles outside the Hollywood studio system. Movies of this sort were small, scrappy, and sometimes moderately successful. With time, they would become cult classics. And by the ’90s, the genre writ large garnered mainstream appeal, cultivating a horror revival that really blossomed in the early ’00s.
But as popular as slasher flicks became in the run-up to Y2K, particularly among a younger crowd, they weren’t the only kinds of scary movies to spring forth then. Early on, directors like Scorsese, Coppola, Demme, del Toro, Jordan—names revered by critics—created psychological thrillers, sweeping period dramas, and even sci-fi fantasies that defied categories. They were able to elicit feelings of intense fear, the stuff that nightmares are made of, without the conventional masked serial killer wielding a sharp blade.
Consequently, the ’90s certainly had no shortage of scary movies. If you need a rundown of the best, check out the list below.
Audition (1999)
Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a widower in Japan who is encouraged by his 17-year-old son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) to start dating again. To help with Aoyama’s grief, Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a film producer and friend of the family, holds fake auditions to find him a new wife. But the women are under the impression they are going up for a film. Ultimately, Aoyama becomes fascinated by Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), who isn’t as quiet and reserved as she first appears.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
In the mid-1400s, Vlad Dracula (Gary Oldman), prince of Wallachia, Romania, is battling insurgents when his wife Elizabeta dies. Furious at God for allowing this to happen, he ceremoniously renounces the church and his faith, and swears he will be reborn with all the powers of darkness. Centuries later, Dracula is now a vampire and Transylvanian count, who, after a successful real estate deal, ventures to London to wreak havoc.
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Candyman (1992)
Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) are students at the University of Illinois, conducting research for their thesis on urban legends. Lyle particularly becomes obsessed with the story of Candyman (Tony Todd), a myth from Chicago’s Cabrini–Green housing projects about a one-armed man who appears when his name is spoken in front of a mirror five times.
Cape Fear (1991)
Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is in prison for the rape and battery of a minor. His lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), horrified by his client’s actions, hides evidence so as to ensure a guilty verdict. Fourteen years later, Cady is released after serving his sentence—now fully aware of the law and what Bowden did. Seeking revenge, Cady makes his way to New Essex, North Carolina, where Bowden, his wife, and his 15-year-old daughter reside.
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Cronos (1992)
Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), an antique dealer, comes across a 400-year-old scarab, called Cronos, which gives him youth and eternal life. The downside: He develops an unquenchable thirst for human blood.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
At the end of Halloween II (1981), babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) evades murder at the hands of her long-lost brother, Michael Myers, who is presumably killed in an explosion at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. Twenty years later, Strode has faked her death and lives with her son (Josh Hartnett) on the grounds of Hillcrest Academy, a private school where she is headmistress. Then, one Halloween night, mother, son, and a small group of students (most of the staff and faculty are away on a trip) come face to face with their masked worst nightmare.
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I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
One night in the coastal town of Southport, North Carolina, four high school students (played by a who’s who of teen stars: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr.) are driving from a beach party when they suddenly hit a man with their car. Assuming he’s dead, they dump the body in the ocean and swear to never speak about the incident again. A year later, after going their separate ways, they receive a note with a cryptic message: “I know what you did last summer.” They are then stealthily stalked by a hook-wielding man in an ominous raincoat and fisherman’s hat.
Interview With the Vampire (1994)
One night, Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), a San Francisco–based reporter, finds himself in an anonymous room with an ominous stranger. He discovers that the man in front of him is Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), a vampire over 200 years old, who wants Molloy to document his supernatural story: Du Lac was a 18th-century plantation owner in New Orleans who was transformed into a bloodthirsty creature with long nails and fangs by the seductive and sinister aristocrat Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise).
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Mimic (1997)
Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) is an entomologist who has figured out a way to stop the spread of cockroaches killing children in New York City. Along with her research associates, she has created a mutant breed of insects, called the Judas bugs, to mimic the roaches, attack them, and then die after one generation. But several years later, Tyler discovers the species has survived—and that they are mimicking humans.
Misery (1990)
Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a romance novelist driving back from the lodge where he finished his latest book, about the death of his trademark character, Misery Chastain. On the road, he is caught in a blizzard and crashes. Sheldon is saved by nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who reveals that she is a huge fan. But things take a turn for the worse when she discovers he is killing off her favorite heroine.
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Scream (1996)
Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is a high school student in Woodsboro, California, traumatized by the murder of her mother a year prior. Around the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Ghostface—a serial killer concealing their identity behind a stylized mask referencing Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream—begins terrorizing her classmates, calling them on the phone to taunt them, before brutally stabbing them to death. The media descends on the small town, as the local police try desperately to avoid further deaths by issuing a curfew—to no avail.
Scream 2 (1997)
A few years after surviving the well-publicized murders in her small town, Sidney Prescott (Campbell) is now a student at Windsor College. As she tries to regain some sense of normalcy, a copycat killer outfitted in the same Ghostface garb begins a reign of terror on campus. Prescott—along with two other survivors from the previous film, news reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Officer Dewey Riley (David Arquette)—tries to figure out the true identity of the culprit (or culprits) before she and her allies become the next victims.
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Se7en (1995)
William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt) are homicide detectives investigating a series of murders. After seeing the second crime scene, Somerset concludes they are the work of a single man: a sociopath who chooses his victims based on the seven deadly sins. The killer, called John Doe, has a warped sense of absolution; he believes his actions to be morally justified. It is up to the two officers to capture Doe, who is seemingly always two steps ahead of them, before he completes his checklist.
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a New York City detective in the late 18th century, a man of science and rational thought, sent to investigate a series of murders in Sleepy Hollow, a provincial town run by a council of men with menacing motives. Crane is told that the deaths were at the hands of a headless horseman resurrected from the dead. Skeptical of the story at first, the skittish police officer soon finds out the ghoulish figure is in fact real.
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The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Three film students (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams) venture into Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland. They are aspiring documentarians looking to capture footage about a local urban legend, the Blair Witch. The group starts by gathering clues from the townspeople, but as they go deeper and deeper into the wilderness, a threatening supernatural presence begins to overwhelm them.
The Exorcist III (1990)
William Kinderman (George C. Scott), a police lieutenant in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., is investigating a murder that shares similarities with the methods of the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), who was caught and executed 15 years ago. Kinderman discovers a hospitalized mental patient (Jason Miller), who looks like Father Damien Karras (who died performing the exorcism in The Exorcist)—and claims to be Gemini.
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The Faculty (1998)
Tension between students and teachers is nothing new in movies, but The Faculty takes the struggle many steps further. In a small town in Ohio, the teachers at Harrington High begin to act freakishly strange, with only a few students from different cliques (played by Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Laura Harris, and Shawn Hatosy) initially taking notice. Then they discover the adults have been infected by alien parasites intent on taking over humanity.
Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), a trainee at the FBI, is assigned by Agent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a former psychiatrist turned psychopath, infamous for eating his victims, at an asylum for the criminally insane. Crawford believes Lecter has insight about his former patient Jame Gumb—or “Buffalo Bill,” a serial killer who skins women. But first, Starling must get through Lecter’s mind games.
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The Sixth Sense (1999)
Malcom Crowe (Bruce Willis), an award-winning child psychologist, is shot by a former patient (Donnie Wahlberg) in his home. A year later, Crowe takes another case, a young boy who exhibits the same symptoms as that patient: He claims to see dead people.
Urban Legend (1998)
A string of murders, bearing similarities to popular urban legends (hence the title), strikes the campus at Pendleton University. Student Natalie (Alicia Witt) is the first to notice the pattern, her conjecture growing stronger and stronger with each death, committed at the hands of a hooded figure who, both literally and figuratively, has an ax to grind.