The 10 Best Horror Films of the 1990s

Typewriters! Bad dates! Terrifying art!

Index to Best of Horror by Decade.

The best horror movie of the 90s is generally agreed to be Silence of the Lambs. Unfortunately, I hate Silence of the Lambs because it is grotesquely transphobic and because I dislike movies about how serial killers are smarter than everyone else.

Luckily, there were lots of other good horror movies in the 1990s, especially if you take a broad view of what horror can mean. So here is a list of awesome 90s horror films that are not Silence of the Lambs, darn it.

10. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The viral marketing campaign was a bit numbing for those of us who experienced it, but if you can put that aside, The Blair Witch Project gets onto the list through sheer audacity.

The found footage genre is an old rusted ax by this point. But two decades ago horror had seen nothing quite like this 81 minutes of shaky cam footage  pulling terror out of nothing but some trees and a bleak prayer to dark gods. Heather Donohue playing a character named Heather Donohue set the genre’s standard for non-acting acting as she vacillates between irritating nagging and escalating terror. The bizarre, elliptical ending remains one of the best jump scares, and one of the oddest images, in horror.