1990s: Was the genre dead, or just sleeping?

In the first half of the 1990s, the genre continued with themes from the 1980s. The genre managed mild commercial success with films such as continuing sequels to the Child's Play and Leprechaun series. The Canadian film Cube (1997) was perhaps one of the few interesting horror films of the 1990s, in that it was based around a relatively novel concept, was able to evoke a wide range of different fears, and touched upon a variety of social themes (such as fear of bureaucracy) that had previously been difficult to capture.

The fact was, the adolescent audience which had feasted on the blood and morbidity of the previous two decades had grown up, and the replacement audience for films of an imaginative nature were being captured by the explosion of science-fiction and heroic fantasy films laden with computer-generated imagery and nonstop violent action.

"By the '90s, nobody thought that anything could be scary anymore ..." said Director Rob Zombie. "It seemed there was that moment where everyone was just too cool for everything," Zombie said. "I think the over-sequelizing, franchising, merchandising world of horror sort of took the bite out of everything.

By the '90s, nobody thought that anything could be scary anymore, so they thought like, 'Why even bother? We won't even make it scary. We'll make it so that these young teen characters are smarter than all the killers and they're not really scared because they're so smart and they know everything.' People dug it because there's nothing kids love more than to think they're smarter than everybody else."

To re-connect with the economic prosperity and contentment of the Clinton era, the genre began to transform into more self-mocking irony and outright parody, especially in the later half of the 1990s, as the horror film became more attuned with its own history.

Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (known as Dead-Alive in the USA) took the splatter film as far as it could go, to ridiculous excesses for comic effect. The '90s were not without turmoil (the L.A. riots and the government's violent raid on the Branch Davidians' compound in Waco,Texas, were especially haunting), but standard horror wasn't enough for moviegoers who were generally feeling safe and secure at home. Call it the "Scream" factor.

Francis Ford Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), featured an ensemble cast and the style of a different era, harking back to the sumptuous look of 1960s Hammer Horror. Wes Craven's Scream movies, starting in 1996, featured teenagers who were fully aware of, and often made reference to, the history of horror movies, and mixed ironic humour with the shocks. It re-ignited the dormant slasher film genre.

Of popular English-language horror films in the late 1990s, only 1999's surprise independent hit The Blair Witch Project attempted straight-ahead scares. But even then, the horror was accomplished in the ironic context of a mockumentary, or mock-documentary. Together with the international success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu in 1997, it launched a trend in horror films to go "low-key", concentrating on unnerving and unsettling themes. M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) was a spectacularly successful example.