As a horror-obsessed teen coming of age in the 1990s, I felt as though I was experiencing a profound religious reawakening vicariously through the decade’s startling resurgence of provocative occult cinema. I sought primal metaphors to make sense of my own spiritual unrest, and found them manifested larger-than-life on the …
Among all the traditions horror broke and reinvented during the 1990s, perhaps none proved more impactful than a surge in self-referential “meta” horror. Films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend gleefully dismantled genre tropes, commenting knowingly on clichés even as they deployed them for …
Like a drop of blood re-animating lifeless flesh, a startling resurgence of creative vampire films in the 1990s revitalized the subgenre after a decade of diminishing returns. Forward-thinking directors infused new blood into timeless mythology, reimagining bloodsuckers through fresh lenses tinted by metaphors relevant to modern audiences. From tragic romances …
Among all the slick, sarcastic teen screamfests of late 90s horror, Wes Craven’s smash-hit Scream stands apart as the most incisively influential. Released in 1996, Scream playfully skewered and celebrated the slasher genre’s derivative clichés and tired tropes even as it expertly weaponized them in classic Craven fashion. The script’s …
Among Wes Craven’s filmography, 1994’s New Nightmare remains criminally underappreciated for its ahead-of-its-time meta-horror storytelling. After fatigue set in across six ponderous Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, Craven returned to restore creative passion by deconstructing Freddy Krueger’s cinematic realm through a story set in “the real world.” New Nightmare shattered …
The creative team behind the hugely popular retrospective horror documentary series In Search of Darkness is returning to the genre’s past, this time setting their sights on the crucial but overlooked 1990s epoch. In an unconventional move, the producers are inviting horror buffs to help shape the upcoming In Search …
