Credit: Far Out / Artisan Entertainment / Dimension Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

The five best horror movies of the 1990s that you’ve never heard of

Mon 13 October 2025 21:45, UK

These days, when anyone thinks of the horror movie landscape of the 1990s, Wes Craven’s Scream looms large, which gave the genre a meta shot in the arm in ’96, and transformed how the industry looked at horror almost overnight.

After Scream terrified audiences, but also made them laugh and think about the tropes of the genre as a whole, a raft of imitators quickly followed. Suddenly, the back half of the decade was stuffed to breaking point with teen horror, while other strains of the genre, such as ghost stories, sci-fi horror, and found-footage chillers, all surged in popularity again.

While it is true that Scream was the rising tide that carried all horror boats, setting the genre up for a cultural dominance that is still going strong today, the ’90s also boasted a huge number of great horror flicks before and after it. The genre wasn’t quite as dead as many film historians would have you believe, and the second half of the decade wasn’t entirely defined by Ghostface either.

In truth, the ’90s featured just as many worthwhile horror films as many other decades, and as always, there were several that slipped under the radar for a variety of reasons. These days, I’d wager that even the most rabid gorehound mightn’t be aware of a couple of these buried gems, so test your knowledge of dot-com decade horror movies with this list of the underrated.

Five best 1990s horror movies that slipped through:

‘Stir of Echoes’ (David Koepp, 1999)

M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was the second biggest movie of 1999, but not the only one with a protagonist experiencing terrifying visions of the dead, with Stir of Echoes boasting Kevin Bacon as the vision sufferer. Released in the wake of Shyamalan’s sleeper hit, struggled at the box office and, even though it received some very positive write-ups, there were definitely a lot of people who questioned whether it was a Sixth Sense ripoff.

Viewed on its own merits decades later, Stir of Echoes was vindicated as one of the best horror films of the entire goddamn decade. Writer/director David Koepp’s feature offering is often spine-chilling and legitimately fucking disturbing, but it’s also emotionally resonant and features a great central performance from Bacon as a man losing his marbles. In fact, had it seen a 2025 release from left-field studios like A24 or Neon, it would stand a much better chance of embedding itself in the culture, or at least raise a shitstorm to gain popularity.

‘Nightwatch’ (Ole Bornedal, 1997)

Barely into my teens at 12 or 13, I begged my parents to let me rent Nightwatch from the local video rental shop. Was I a precocious teen who knew the movie was a remake of an eerie 1994 Danish horror flick directed by the same man who made the original? Nope. Was I a fan enamoured by Ewan McGregor, Josh Brolin, or Patricia Arquette? I’m going to guess not, because I was too young to have seen Trainspotting or True Romance at the time, and probably didn’t connect Brolin with The Goonies. I have no idea why I wanted to rent this tale of a morgue nightwatchman dragged into a gruesome goddamn battle of wits with a serial killer, but it sure as hell freaked me the fuck out.

Nightwatch is a genuinely tense, sweaty, nasty piece of work which builds to a frenzied finale filled with blood, depravity, and hacked off body parts. It still surprises me that the movie tanked at the box office and was quickly forgotten about, which might be why it took director Ole Bornedal another 15 years to even work in America again. I reckon the film is primed for a resurgence, though, if only so people can wildly exclaim, ‘Wait, Nick Nolte and John C Reilly are in this thing, too?!’

‘The Prophecy’ (Gregory Widen, 1995)

It might sound strange to include a movie on this list that spawned four sequels. However, considering these were all direct-to-video/DVD schlockfests, and the original movie wasn’t exactly a resounding hit to begin with, it’s a fairly safe bet to say that many cinephiles haven’t heard of The Prophecy.

The first instalment was quite ahead of its time with its depiction of an ancient war between Heaven and Hell fought by angels and demons, a concept that’s since powered comics, movies, and TV shows like Constantine, Supernatural, Legion, and Preacher, proving that Highlander‘s creator Gregory Widen had hit on a rich vein of storytelling potential.

The Prophecy follows Christopher Walken’s Archangel Gabriel as he searches for an evil human soul on earth, which soon leads to a religiously terrified cop, played by Elias Koteas, becoming stuck in the middle of an Angelic civil war. The film is a canny mix of horror, mystery, and fantasy, all wrapped up in the kind of black trenchcoat-wearing visual aesthetic that would soon become all the rage with The Matrix, Blade, and Angel, the vampire-with-a-soul from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By the time Viggo Mortensen shows up to chew some scenery as Lucifer himself, the movie becomes a battle between him and Walken to see who can out-weird the other, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.

‘Idle Hands’ (Rodman Flender, 1999)

I’ve always been a man who enjoys a bit of silliness in his horror, so when a good horror comedy comes along, I’ll be there with bells on, and despite it being widely discredited by critics and disappearing at the box office, I absolutely loved Idle Hands. The movie is about a teenage slacker whose hand becomes possessed, killing his parents and best friends, which he then cuts off, but it continues on its murderous killing spree like a vengeful Thing from The Addams Family. This forces him to team up with his pals, now undead stoner zombies, to stop the path of destruction being laid by his lone appendage run amok; tell me that’s not funny.

Idle Hands is genuinely amusing and has a ghoulishly goddamn zany tone that fans of Sam Raimi or Edgar Wright will definitely dig. The cast is great, with Seth Green and Elden Henson being particularly hilarious standouts as the recently deceased chums Mick and Pnub. Best of all, the movie features a cameo by pop-punk supremos The Offspring, inexplicably playing a Halloween dance in a high school, which ends with spikey-haired singer Dexter Holland being fucking scalped by the severed hand on stage. Slap that Martin Scorsese meme here because to me, that’s cinema, baby.

‘Deep Rising’ (Stephen Sommers, 1998)

In 1999, Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy became a fun sensation and launched a beloved franchise helmed by goddamn ridiculously gorgeous archaeologists.

However, the year before Brendan Fraser embraced his inner Indiana Jones, Sommers made a deep-sea monster movie that, in hindsight, seems like a trial run for the action-packed, scary, and fucking fun experience he perfected with The Mummy.

Unfortunately, Deep Rising did terribly shitty business upon release, perhaps because it was obviously trying to replicate the tone of an old-school ’50s B-movie.

The story involved a crew of mercenaries who plan to loot the passengers of a luxury cruise liner that is languishing dead in the waters of the South China Sea, but once on board, they find that everyone is fucking gone, with only blood stains left behind. They are soon attacked by all manner of tentacled beasties until it is revealed that all suction cup arms belong to one goddamn enormous cephalopod monster known as the Octalus.

A gory, exciting, slightly cheesy adventure with the late Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, and Djimon Hounsou selling the gravity of the ludicrous situation, it’s a scary and bombastic blast.