The Best Horror Movies of the ’90s

A breakout for child star Haley Joel Osment, the young actor plays Cole here. Only 10-years-old, Cole, indeed, sees dead people, and often dead people who have suffered horrible deaths. Still, the child winds up trying to help them. It’s a terrible “gift” for this thoughtful boy who didn’t ask for his power and doesn’t want it. Bruce Willis’ child psychologist tries to help in more ways than one. The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Oscars (which is very good going since Oscar tends to ignore horror), including Best Supporting Actor and Actress for Osment and Toni Collette, who plays his mother. It’s a wonderful film, and if you don’t tear up at the “Do I make her proud?” moment, do you even have a heart? – RF

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Despite holding the record for the most decapitations in a single movie, one could argue Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is not fully a horror movie. From a certain vantage, which we imagine includes Burton’s, it even looks like an exceedingly dry comedy. This just happens to be one dripping in foreboding Halloween atmosphere. Loosely based on Washington Irving’s genesis of American horror and fairy tales, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this movie follows Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane—now a fancy pants New York City constable instead of a school teacher.

In this reimagining, Ichabod is sent to uncover the culprit of a series of grisly beheadings that have occurred in the quiet hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. Alas, when he gets there on All Hallow’s Eve, all anyone can say is it was the Headless Horseman who’s risen from his grave to claim random heads before his nightly sojourns back to Hell! It’s wicked, depraved stuff that allows Burton to draw upon his childhood of watching Hammer horror movies and then paint that aesthetic in his own preferred shade of black.

In lesser hands, this might be grotesque, but back when Burton was at the height of his powers, it’s charming, especially thanks to an all-star cast that includes Christina Ricci, Michael Gambon, Hammer’s own Michael Gough, Miranda Richardson, the Sir Christopher Lee, and best of all, Christopher Walken as a delightfully camp Headless Horseman in the scenes before he earned his nickname. – DC

Ravenous (1999)

Westerns had a bit of a renaissance in the 1990s. In terms of staying power, we now collectively think of that because of Clint Eastwood’s last classic in the genre, Unforgiven (1992). But really it began with the far more dated Dances with Wolves (1990), a Kevin Costner Oscar winner about a Civil War veteran who goes out into the West “to live”—ultimately alongside idealized Native American tribes. It was the Avatar of its day.

Yeah, so Ravenous flips that on its head when Guy Pearce’s Civil War coward, who’s a hair’s breadth away from being court-martialed and hanged, winds up in a U.S. Cavalry outpost where instead of romantic ideas of noble savages… he finds cannibals. Specifically one cannibal who used to be in the Cavalry himself (Robert Carlyle) but now views his old compatriots as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is an amusingly mean-spirited dark comedy that never bites off more than it can chew. And it chews up a lot. – DC