Every generation has movies that leave serious impressions. Take just a few moments to sort of scroll around social media and you’ll inevitably run into a post or a discussion about the movies from one’s youth that have in some lasting way embedded themselves into life, culture, and fandom. This is especially true for genre films in the 1990s. Maybe it’s because they’re the movies that often ended up broadcast (edited and trimmed of course) on one of the three television channels most folks reliably got in that decade. Maybe it’s because genre films have something of an indelible quality that make them stick with us longer. It could be anything, but if there is one thing that we know for sure, when it comes to the horror genre and the 1990s, there are some movies that scared the crap out of us not just in the moment but just might still give us nightmares to this day.
1996 in particular was an interesting year for horror. There were releases that year that helped to fully redefine the genre in ways that we’re continuing to see the impact of decades later. It’s also a year with some genuinely messed up movies that ‘90s kids still can’t shake. Here are four such films that make that list of cinematic sleep paralysis demons that completely warped ‘90s kids and while they might not all hold up now or even seem all that terrifying in retrospect, trust me: the fear was real.
At this point, Scream is almost less of a horror movie and more of a pop culture moment. The franchise has gone on for so long that we’ve seen fluctuations in levels of actual horror, the quality of its scares, and we’ve even seen controversy overshadow some of the movies themselves. You’d be forgiven for wondering why the OG Scream is on this list. After all, Ghostface is a Halloween costume every year. How scary can this really be? But back in 1996, the answer was “very scary”. The Wes Craven film completely revitalized slasher movies and truly, audiences hadn’t seen quite like Scream before. After that intense 13-minute opening sequence in which anything Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker got murked by Ghostface, a whole bunch of ‘90s kids weren’t exactly sleeping particularly well for quite some time. If I’m being honest, that’s the Scream film I go back to the most now as an adult. The tension, the terror, the overarching mystery, and the twists all still hit—and you best believe I turn the nightlight on after.
Real talk: I didn’t see Thinner in theaters. I saw it a little bit later when it was broadcast on television late one night and while I’m pretty sure that, for me, that contributed to it being nightmare fuel I also know that it’s not an original experience and, for a lot of us this movie was terrifying even if it’s not necessarily a great movie or Stephen King adaptation. The movie has an odd premise: an obese lawyer accidentally kills a Romani woman thanks to some distracted driving and after he is acquitted of manslaughter (due to some extra-legal shenanigans) he ends up cursed by the deceased’s father and starts getting thinner and thinner no matter what he does. Watching Billy (the lawyer) waste away is just so creepily unsettling that it’s sort of burned into one’s mind. Some of the other afflicted characters undergo grotesque transformations as well and it’s ultimately just really twisted body horror that sticks deep in the recesses of memory. Oh, and Michael Constantine’s Tadzu cursing Billy by saying “thinner” is creepy as all get out, too.
I can personally trace my irrational fear of the dentist to this 1996 horror film. As horror films go, it might be a little on the obscure side and in retrospect a horror movie about a dentist feels a little like low hanging fruit because a lot of people are already afraid of the dentist on their own long before seeing a movie about an unstable dentist on a murder spree but the movie sucks you in and keeps you from being able to get a decent night’s sleep. There is one particular scene in which the evil dentist pulls out a woman’s teeth and cuts off her tongue that is particularly unsettling. There’s a twist with that woman at the end that almost makes the scene worth it somehow, but yeah, watching this one was nightmares for a long time… and you better believe you’ll want to brush your teeth very, very well after watching The Dentist.
As ‘90s horror movies go, few are as iconic as The Craft so you might be puzzled about why this particular movie would be on a list that gave us nightmares. But here’s the thing: while The Craft is undoubtedly cool and completely iconic, for a younger audiences it also had some downright chilling moments. In particular, when Sarah uses her magic to deal with Bonnie, Rochelle, and Nancy, those scenes are particularly terrifying. As is the scene where the coven turns against her before that. It’s the visuals in The Craft that make for some scary dreams, especially if you happened to be a teen girl in the 1990s. This one is a lot less scary and much more empowering now decades later, but as complex scares go, The Craft really did things right and none of us got any rest for a while after it was first released.
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