What Horror Looked Like 20 Years Ago

Each year, we celebrate the anniversaries of some of our favorite horror movies. As a matter of fact, I recently posted a tribute to George Romero’s Land of the Dead as it’s about to turn 10. That got me thinking about what movies turn 20 this year, which ultimately led me to thinking about just how much has changed in horror over two decades.

I thought it would be fun to take a little trip back to 1995 and take a look at what was going in our beloved genre, including what films were coming out, what some of our favorite directors were doing, and what some of horror’s icons were up to.

Freddy was dead, and had already come out of the movies and met some kind of Hansel and Gretel witch fate or some nonsense. We wouldn’t see him again for years and in 1995, he was nowhere to be found beyond aging VHS tapes. Jason was in Hell with Freddy waiting for a battle that would take another eight years to arrive, though he was still six years from going into space. Michael was finally killing Loomis and meeting Paul Rudd in The Curse of Michael Myers. Chucky was about midway through a seven-year hiatus. Pinhead had yet to travel to space, though he was much closer than Jason.

Leatherface was crossdressing and hanging out with future star Matthew McConaughey, though it would still be a while before most people got to actually see it. Leprechaun was doing whatever the hell Leprechaun did in Leprechaun 3 (sorry, it’s been a hell of a long time since I watched that one, and frankly, I don’t remember a goddamn thing about it). Candyman had relocated from Chicago to New Orleans, and the Wishmaster franchise didn’t even exist yet. The Howling got its seventh film with the mostly forgettable New Moon Rising.

1995 did see the debut of other legendary villains such as the Ice Cream Man and Rumpelstiltskin (at least the incarnation of him that counts), not to mention Sil.

What were the masters of horror putting out during that time? Well, pre-Scream, Wes Craven put out Vampire in Brooklyn. John Carpenter released both In the Mouth of Madness and Village of the Damned. From Clive Barker, we got Lord of Illusions. Tobe Hooper gave us The Mangler. Stuart Gordon gave us Castle Freak. Argento gave us The Stendhal Syndrome. We weren’t getting anything from Romero. It was a couple of years after The Dark Half and ten years from when we would finally see him return to his legendary Dead films with Land of the Dead. Cronenberg was between M. Butterfly and Crash. Mick Garris gave us…an episode of New York Undercover. Tommy Lee Wallace was working on a Flipper TV show.

Don Coscarelli was between Phantasms III and IV. Tom Holland gave us The Langoliers. Fulci was still alive, but only until the following year, and he hadn’t directed a film for several. Takashi Miike released three direct-to-video films in Japan because of course he did. While perhaps not seen as a “master” of horror, generally creepy Jeepers Creepers director Victor Salva released Powder for Disney, his first film following Clownhouse and sexual abuse/child porn charges.

Ernest Dickerson, who was hardly seen as a “master of horror” at that point (though he would go on to appear as one of them on Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror series), was known for films like Surviving the Game with Ice-T and one of my all-time favorite movies, Juice. He made a big mark on the horror genre in 1995 though with one of the year’s best horror films, Demon Knight. Dickerson has since given us 9 episodes of Dexter and 11 of The Walking Dead.

As much as I still love Demon Knight, the real standout of the year was Seven, which showed the world David Fincher, who at that point only had Alien 3 under his belt (at least in terms of feature films). Seven was wonderfully bleak, nasty, and even scary. I remember seeing it in the dollar theater and immediately considering at instant classic.

Another Instant classic was In the Mouth of Madness. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see this one until it hit VHS, but I fell in love with it as soon as I was afforded that opportunity, and it’s still one of my favorite movies, let alone one of my favorite Carpenter movies.

While Seven was one of the nastier pieces of cinema we got in ’95, it wasn’t the nastiest. Unless I’ve overlooked something, I’d have to give that award to Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre. While I didn’t see it until probably nine years later, it was goddamn harrowing. In terms of scariness, 1995’s Outbreak was fairly nerve-racking as a product of the first round of ebola fears I can recall from my lifetime.

The more modern masters of horror had yet to emerge as such. Eli Roth had only made his recently released student film Restaurant Dogs the year prior, and Rob Zombie has just unleashed the metal masterpiece Astro-Creep 2000, still as part of the immortal White Zombie.

I’m not going to get too deep into the horror literature scene, but let’s at least reflect on what was going on with the Stephen King universe. For books, it was the year of Rose Madder. As mentioned, Tom Holland gave us the Langoliers mini-series. As far as theatrical releases, we got Taylor Hackford’s Dolores Claiborne.

I’m not going to get too much into video games either, but it was a year before the world would get Resident Evil, so try to remember what horror gaming was like before that. Games I remember playing include Phantasmagoria (PC), which was awesome, and The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (PC). I was also playing 1994’s Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse, which came with my computer at that time.

Other films released in ’95 included: Evil Ed, Screamers, Mosquito, Tales from the Hood, Copycat, Hideaway, Carnosaur 2, Faces of Death 5, Hideaway, Wes Craven’s Mind Ripper (marketed in some areas as The Hills Have Eyes 3 despite no relation), a remake of Piranha with William Katt, Sleepstalker, and Witchboard III: The Possession.

What were you favorites from ’95? Do you think the state of the genre has improved?