Horror in the 1990s

The decade in context

The 1990s ended with two very different shocks: a wave of Japanese ghost stories that traveled the world, and a micro-budget American film that made handheld footage a genre in its own right.

Prestige and fear had overlapped before, but rarely so visibly. Demme's film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1991, where he won the Silver Bear for Best Director, and in 2011 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. The film's success changed what studios were willing to finance. It showed that a story about a killer could be a serious, adult drama with major stars, and it gave later thrillers a template that borrowed freely from the horror toolbox: confinement, intimacy with a predator and a protagonist who has to prove herself in a world that underestimates her.

Both succeeded by showing less. Suggestion, atmosphere and audience imagination did the work that gore had done in the previous decade.

The 1990s started with the genre earning the industry's highest honor. The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme from Ted Tally's adaptation of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel, was released by Orion Pictures on February 14, 1991, on a budget of about $19 million, and earned roughly $272 million worldwide. At the 64th Academy Awards it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, and it is often counted as the only horror film to win Best Picture. It is usually described as a psychological thriller, which shows how fluid the boundaries are. For a library built around horror, it is a reminder that the genre's techniques reached far beyond the label.

For the rest of the decade, horror seemed to split into two directions. One was toward self-awareness. Wes Craven's Scream, written by Kevin Williamson and released by Dimension Films on December 20, 1996, was produced for about $14 to 15 million and earned around $173 million worldwide. Its characters knew the rules of horror movies, talked about them and tried to survive anyway. Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott was praised for avoiding the damsel in distress type. The film is credited with reviving the slasher, and its style of knowing humor shaped a wave of imitators that included I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997. The nod to Halloween and the idea of the final girl, introduced by Carol J. Clover in 1987 and popularized in her 1992 book, were part of the film's vocabulary.

The other direction was toward quiet. In Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on November 6, 1997, and opened in theaters in December. It is a film in which a detective investigates murders in which the perpetrators seem to have been influenced by a stranger, and it is remembered for its calm, unnerving tone. It received a US theatrical release in 2001. Its restraint is part of the same shift that produced Ringu, and both films rely on atmosphere more than spectacle.

Ringu, directed by Hideo Nakata from a script by Hiroshi Takahashi and based on Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel, was released in Japan in 1998. A journalist investigates a rumor that a videotape kills those who watch it a week later. It built on the ghost-story tradition and on the figure of the vengeful spirit, the onryō, but its object of fear was a piece of everyday technology. It became a hit in Japan and abroad, helped popularize the label J-horror, and led to sequels and to Hollywood's 2002 remake The Ring. Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge followed in 2002 as the first of the series to reach theaters, and it was remade in the US in 2004. The wave is covered in the Japan guide.

Back in the United States, the decade's most striking commercial story was an experiment. The Blair Witch Project, written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999 and was acquired by Artisan Entertainment for $1.1 million. The directors developed a script of about 35 pages and let the actors improvise dialogue. Principal photography took eight days in Maryland, and about 20 hours of footage was edited down to 81 minutes. The original budget was reportedly between $35,000 and $60,000, and the final cost after post-production and marketing is estimated at between $200,000 and $750,000. It grossed about $248.6 million worldwide.

Part of its success came from marketing. The film's website presented police reports and interviews as if the story were true, and flyers described the actors as missing, so that many viewers argued over whether the events were real. It was among the first films to be marketed so heavily on the internet. It was not the first found footage film, but it made the style a recognizable mode of horror, and the found footage boom of the following decade grew from it. Like Ringu, it relied on what is not shown, and like Ringu it uses a recording device as a source of dread.

Canada added a smaller but notable entry. Vincenzo Natali's Cube (1997) came from the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project and was shot in Toronto in 21 days on a single reused set, with a cash budget of around C$350,000. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and earned about $9 million worldwide. It shows that the decade's interest in confined spaces and quiet, systematic dread reached across several national cinemas. See also the Canada guide.

The industry background mattered. Home video, which had transformed horror in the 1980s, was now established, and independent distributors had become powerful. Miramax, through its Dimension label, helped Scream reach a mass audience. The internet began to play a role in how audiences found films, as the Blair Witch campaign showed. At the same time, audiences' familiarity with slasher conventions made it difficult to offer a plain version of the genre, which is part of why irony and suggestion became so common.

Taken as a whole, the decade shows horror adjusting to its own history. After the excess of the 1980s, filmmakers looked either backward, with references and jokes, or inward, with minimalism and mood. Neither direction was entirely new. Suggestion had been central to the 1920s and the 1960s, and self-reference is as old as the genre. But the combination, and the global reach of the Japanese wave, produced a distinct period.

To follow the thread, read about the supernatural and found footage pages, and then use the Movie Explorer to filter to the 1990s. The connection between films that use recorded images as a source of fear is especially worth following from Ringu to The Blair Witch Project. If you want to see how the story began, return to the 1920s.

A practical way to watch the decade is to pair films by contrast. Watch Scream and then Ringu, and notice how one treats the audience as a fellow expert and the other as a person to be left alone with a feeling. Watch The Blair Witch Project and then Cube, and compare how each builds fear from limits, one with a camera that cannot see enough and the other with a space that cannot be left. Then think about what each film does with its sound. Almost all of them rely on what you hear as much as on what you see, a point developed further in How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear.

Films from the 1990s