Evan Peters names the greatest year in cinema history: “You’ll be shocked”
The year you consider to be the greatest in cinema history probably depends on when you were born, perhaps the nostalgia of witnessing an incredible year of cinema unfold in front of your very eyes plays a part in your decision, or maybe you long to have experienced such a phenomenon, but just imagine how good the cinema trips would’ve been.
For Evan Peters, the star of American Horror Story and, more recently, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, he believes it was the 1990s that gave us one of the best years in cinematic history. After a period of blockbuster domination throughout the 1980s, American cinema needed revitalising, desperately needing a dose of what made the ’60s and ’70s so great.
The New Hollywood era had seen many incredible and often rather subversive or experimental titles emerge, changing what mainstream cinema could be, and now that felt like a thing of the past.
Everything from Bonnie and Clyde to The Godfather and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Dog Day Afternoon carved out a new landscape for film, but this inevitably gave way to a dip in quality; this era of filmmaking proved to be unsustainable once Star Wars came and blew everything out of the water.
Now, franchises emerged as the popular new trend in Hollywood, and it looked like it was going to be a while before shocking indie pictures would come to have any real impression on audiences (and the box office) again, yet the ‘90s proved to be a turning point, with many great low-budget movies emerging to acclaim, from Reservoir Dogs to Fight Club.
The ‘90s was a goldmine of incredible films that seemed to take influence from both the innovation of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the commercialism of the ‘80s. Endless box-office big-hitters emerged and endured, and for Peters, it’s 1993 that stands out as the defining year of the decade.
“The ’90s, who doesn’t love the ’90s? I was looking at the movies of ‘93, and they are some of my all-time favourites, the comedies and the dramas,” he said in an interview with Hero. “Demolition Man came out. It’s a pretty incredible movie for a lot of reasons. But yeah, just Google 93 and you’ll be shocked.”
The actor continued to list off some of his favourites from 1993, “OK, Jurassic Park is ’93, Groundhog Day… Sleepless in Seattle, Mrs Doubtfire, Dazed and Confused, The Nightmare Before Christmas and one of my all-time favourites, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”
That’s a pretty stacked list of films, all of which remain classics over 30 years later. From rom-coms to hangout movies and unforgettable dramas, 1993 seemingly had it all, even if Peters was only six at the time.
“The Sandlot, True Romance, Philadelphia, Hocus Pocus,” he added, even including Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, since, 1993 also gave us Schindler’s List, The Piano, Carlito’s Way, The Age of Innocence, Naked, Three Colours: Blue, and, unforgettably, Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers.
1993 was certainly a good year for cinema, but you might argue that 1999 was better, because I mean, the final year of the decade saw the release of classics ranging from Eyes Wide Shut to Fight Club.
I guess everyone will have a different opinion on the year that stands out as the greatest, but we can’t help but feel like Peters is a little off the mark here, considering that 1999 came just a few years later with such a tremendous display of filmmaking.
