1991: Best/Favorite Horror Films of Each Year

This is the second entry in a series that I am doing on the best, or at least my favorite, horror films of each year. This series structurally follows the outline that I have set up for my metal albums series. This includes a winning film along with up to five or so honorable mentions for each year. Once a decade is completed, I will compile the individual posts into a mega-list of the best horror films of each decade, similar to what I have done thus far for the metal albums series. I also throw in some of what I call “tangential bonus films” that incorporate horror elements but do not primarily fit within the horror genre.

Overall, 1991 might not have been as strong of a year as 1990 when it comes to horror film. However, there were some true highlights from this year, including a couple that are up there with some of the best films ever made. On today’s list I picked out six of my favorite horror films from 1991, and of course they all come recommended. The winner though is simply one of the greatest films ever made, so I cannot recommend that one enough. I also included four entries in the category of the tangential bonus film. I recommend those as well, as good films from other genres that incorporate some horror elements.

Horror is one of these truly underappreciated film genres, and the 1990s as a decade is one of the truly underappreciated eras in horror film. That decade is often thought of as a bit of a ‘dark ages’ situation between the numerous horror classics of the 1970s and 1980s and the modern revival of the genre and the emergence of highbrow and artsy horror films during the 2000s and especially during the 2010s. That reason, and that we are now culturally in a bit of a 1990s nostalgia period, is why I wanted to start here in the 1990s, and move forward through the decade year by year. There were quite a few quality horror films that came out during the 1990s that are worth rediscovering. So whether you are a horror fan, or just looking for a hit of that sweet 1990s nostalgia, I hope you enjoy this list.

Winner: The Silence of the Lambs

MPAA Rating: R

This film taking the top spot should surprise no one. This one also topped my recent ranking of the Lecterverse films. The Silence of the Lambs is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror/thriller films of all time. And this is not simply a reputation that it has earned over time, though it definitely holds up now thirty years later. This film was critically lauded at the time and dominated at the Academy Awards, winning for all five of the major categories. It is actually one of only three films in history to win all of the ‘big five’ Academy Awards. These of course included Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film is of course adapted from the book of the same name from 1988, which was the second of author Thomas Harris’ books to feature the character. Again, there is no end to the praises that could be made about this film. It truly is one of the best of all time. I would be remiss if I did not throw in here that the active serial killer in this story, Buffalo Bill (played wonderfully by Ted Levine), was inspired by real life serial killer Ed Gein. Notably, this film marks the first portrayal of the Hannibal Lecter character by Anthony Hopkins. While his performance is almost synonymous with the character, he was actually not the first actor the play the character. That honor goes to Brian Cox who portrayed him in Manhunter back in 1986, which was the first film adaptation of the Red Dragon book. Obviously I have not done a horror movie list for 1986 yet, but it is a safe bet that Manhunter will make an appearance. Again, Silence of the Lambs is simply one of the greatest films of all time, not just one of the greatest horror films of all time. There is no other place for it on this list than at the top.

Honorable Mention: Cape Fear

MPAA Rating: R

Cape Fear is our only other horror film on today’s list to have been nominated for an Academy Award. Robert De Niro was nominated for Best Actor and Juliette Lewis was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Sadly though, neither of them won. And De Niro of course lost to the aforementioned Anthony Hopkins in that category. De Niro and Lewis were also nominated in the corresponding categories in the Golden Globes as well, but again did not win. However, the multiple nominations is indicative of the quality of the film and the strength of the performances. Notably, Martin Scorsese directed this film, which makes it the rare horror film from him. Though people often like to couch films like this in the language of a ‘psychological thriller’ to make them palatable to a mainstream audience, I prefer to label this type of film as ‘dramatic horror’. So with both Scorsese and De Niro involved, Cape Fear represents one of their numerous quality collaborations, and is actually situated right between their iconic mafia movies Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) in the timeline of their joint filmography.

Cape Fear is the second film of this name, and is essentially a remake of the 1962 film starring Gregory Peck. However, both films are adaptations of the 1957 book The Executioners by John D. MacDonald. As for the plot of the film, De Niro plays Max Cady a convicted rapist that is released from prison and begins to stalk and terrorize the family of his own defense attorney (played by Nick Nolte). The story is a perverse revenge plot against the lawyer because he supposedly suppressed evidence that might have lightened Cady’s sentence, and thus he intentionally botched the defense of his client. While the plot itself is simple, the strength of the performances and the various ways that Cady stalks and terrorizes the family makes this a truly disturbing film to watch. De Niro turns in an all time great villain performance that is unceasingly menacing and creepy.

Honorable Mention: Body Parts

MPAA Rating: R

The premise of Body Parts is that a man loses an arm in a traffic collision, and has an experimental surgical procedure to replace the arm he lost with one from a recently deceased donor. However, as he adjusts to this new arm and goes through physical therapy he finds that at times he loses control of his new arm in violent ways. This is coupled with disturbing and murderous dreams. He becomes suspicious and gets the arm fingerprinted, and finds that the donor was a recently executed murderer. He tracks down others who similarly received appendages from this donor through these experimental surgical procedures performed by this one doctor. Each person is affected differently by their new appendages, though all in darker ways. The film climaxes when the executed murder is resurrected when the doctor attaches his head to a new body, and he then pursues the people that now possess his limbs. The film delves into the themes of body horror and the questioning of whether ‘the self’ is spiritual or material, and thus with the new appendage there is a conflict within the material body itself. The film exhibits the social and individual anxiety around these new types of surgical procedures involving the transplanting of organs and potentially eventually entire limbs themselves. It presents an extreme version of the Ship of Theseus question, where if we keep changing out body parts at what point do we truly become a different person.

Body Parts is effective as a film for raising these types of social questions around medical technologies in a classic sci-fi horror manner. The film is essentially just a modern update on some of the truly classic horror films on this subject, with Hands of Orlac being the obvious one, but even harkening back to Frankenstein. The acting performances are actually surprising decent for this type of film. Jeff Fahey is convincing in the lead role. Brad Dourif is a horror staple and always an enjoyable performer. He is good in this as one of the other patients to receive a limb. Perhaps my favorite performance though was Lindsay Duncan as our villainous Dr. Webb. I am not that familiar with her, but she was also great in Reflecting Skin from 1990, which you will remember from that list. So I am hoping she shows up in more of these horror films going forward.

Honorable Mention: Dead Again

MPAA Rating: R

Dead Again was Kenneth Branagh’s second film in the director’s chair. While not as critically beloved as his debut film, Henry V, Dead Again exhibits the skill and creative ambition of this director. Like with that film, Branagh stars in the lead role and shares the screen with his then-wife Emma Thompson. Both turn in strong performances in this one, especially given that they both play multiple characters.

Dead Again takes place in the then-present of the early 1990s but features numerous flashbacks to the late 1940s. Branagh plays a private detective named Mike Church who gets tasked with trying to investigate an amnesiac women and help her discover who she is. The two develop romantic feelings for each other and begin a relationship. They are approached by a hypnotist and the woman agrees to undergo hypnosis to attempt to recover memories of who she is. The hypnosis brings her to a past life regression where she remembers the relationship of Roman and Margaret Strauss. Roman was convicted of killing Margaret and was executed. She believes that she and Mike Church are the reincarnation of Roman and Margaret Strauss and that they are destined to repeat that relationship and thus that Mike Church will kill her, and that they are doomed to repeat this cycle seemingly forever.

Film critics may be divided over this film in terms of whether it succeeds or is overly ambitious, but I am definitely on the side of the former. Branagh succeeds at most of what he is going for in terms of the presentation of the film. At its best, Dead Again is reminiscent of some of the truly great Hitchcock classics from the 1940s like Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Spellbound (1945). This is very much a Hitchcockian style romantic-dramatic horror story whose setting in the late 1940s is in all likelihood an intentional reference back to those Hitchcock classics. The acting performances are reasonably strong, and in terms of the visual style I love the contrast in the presentation of the present in color with the past in black-and-white.

Honorable Mention: The People Under the Stairs

MPAA Rating: R

I am a bit of a Wes Craven fan, so his films will likely make frequent appearances on these annual horror lists. If you a regular reader you might remember that I included Craven’s Swamp Thing film from back in 1982 on my classic-era superhero films list. The People Under the Stairs was both written and directed by Craven. The story centers around a young boy and two adult thieves who are trapped in the house of their landlords who they came to rob. Once in the house they discover that there is far more going on than they knew, including an incestuous couple and numerous abducted and abused children. The two thieves are killed, but the young boy evades the couple by navigating between the walls of the house in an attempt to free the children being kept in the house.

The People Under the Stairs is at its strongest when it leans into its contextual themes of class struggle and social alienation. While the film can be read on the surface as just about a scary and creepy couple, the film actually functions as a deeper metaphor for the mechanisms and effects of capitalist society. The landlords (and capitalists in general) are grotesque in that their wealth and existence is based not in anything that they themselves have produced, but is instead based around what they have structurally been able to steal from working people via wage labor or rent, etc. These dynamics are shown throughout the film as the story begins when the boy’s family is going to be evicted from their apartment. He and the two thieves wanted to track down and rob their landlords both as a way to get back at them as well as to take a treasure that they were rumored to possess. We learn that this incestuous couple is multiple generations removed from the original family business which was operating a funeral home at the house. However, through being landlords the family could both achieve greater wealth and no longer even provide a useable service to the community, which made them generationally even more removed from the lives of real people. They live in this fortress house removed from society and everything they have was stolen from those around them, in terms of both literally the generational wealth as well as the children they have literally stolen. They try to create this absurdly pristine household of perfect children defined by their own perverse standards, and when the children fail to meet those strict rules they are discarded. As the story develops, the attempt to survive and escape from the house takes on the metaphor of attempting to escape from and even overturn these violent and exploitative relationships. The overall point is while it is certainly an extreme example, the film is at its best when it leans into these class dynamics and the perverse social conditions produced by these exploitative relations.

When Wes Craven is at his best, his films tend to deliver on not just the carnage that one expects from the horror genre but also on a more cerebral level. There are some better Craven films out there as the man is responsible for some of the all time classics in the horror genre. However, this one is definitely worth checking out both for Craven completists and for those looking for a bit of social commentary in their horror films.

Honorable Mention: Popcorn

MPAA Rating: R

Popcorn is one of these films that ends up being better and more enjoyable than it has any right to be. For the plot, this university film club puts on a screening of several old horror movies with the bonus being that they will actually integrate in person effects, smells, etc. within the theater to add to the experience. However, the show is interrupted when a man begins killing off the students and teachers putting on the show. Years earlier a young director had killed his family on stage at a similar horror marathon at that theater, and this killer is trying to recreate that event.

Popcorn combines a lot of different horror and story elements which together make the film work. Overreliance on any one of them would have likely made it feel one dimensional. But the range of elements means that the film does not get too locked into the tropes and conventions of any one of them. It is a slasher film and follows several of those conventions, but it also goes beyond that. It incorporates a Phantom of the Opera element, as well as the dream premonitions of one of the film students, and several films-within-a-film which are the movies they are screening. The three films are 1950s style campy monster movies and add a degree of levity and even humor into the overall story. While the film works overall, the scenes of the films-within-a-film are a particular delight.

While it does not go as far as subsequent films would in the decade, one could make the argument that Popcorn marks one of the early shifts toward a postmodernist bent and self-awareness in horror film. Unlike Scream (1996), the characters are not aware that they are in a slasher film. However, the homages to the horror films of the past, including the almost Phantom of the Opera style killer, and this idea of the killer completing a film through staged murder in real life demonstrates that the filmmakers have a degree of self-awareness and are reflecting on the history of horror film, even if they are not yet to the point of reflecting on the tropes of slashers. Again, overall this film ends up being better than it should be through the balance of the various horror tropes and even levity and humor.

Tangential Bonus 1: The Addams Family

MPAA Rating: PG13

Like with Darkman on the 1990 list, this place for tangential bonus films is really just a section to talk about quality films from the year that are only tangentially horror or that are films from other genres that incorporate some horror imagery and elements. And that is really what The Addams Family is. This is ostensibly a comedy but one that uses the overly macabre characters to a comedic effect. The film is of course based on the 1960s television show of the same name. What really makes this movie standout are the strong performances from the cast who in my mind have come to define the characters. For me, this film and its 1993 sequel are the definitive versions of the characters. Everyone is good in this, but the casting and performances that really come to mind and have become iconic are Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams, Raul Julia as Gomez Addams, and Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.

Tangential Bonus 2: Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

MPAA Rating: PG

This movie is on here for two reasons. For one, the plot of this movie is basically just Bill and Ted Go to Hell, which automatically makes it a bit of a horror comedy. The second reason is that I love this movie and have loved it since I was a kid. Both Bill and Ted movies at the time, Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey, were movies that I rented from the local video store on a regular basis throughout the 1990s. I mean we are talking probably on a bi-monthly basis for years. It got to the point where I can almost recite these movies verbatim.

Now Bogus Journey is of course a sequel. Excellent Adventure was the original film released in 1989 and that was a time travel movie about these two high school slackers whose rock/metal band will one day unite humanity, so they receive some intervention from the future in order to help them graduate history class. Hijinks ensure as these two characters travel throughout time collecting historical figures for their final project for their high school history class. Bogus Journey takes place a few years later and the band is trying to gain exposure and break into the local music scene only to learn that they are not good musicians. There is once again intervention from the future around the time when the guys are trying to compete in a local battle of the bands competition, except this time the source is villainous rather than benevolent. This time someone who wants to change the future sends two evil robots back in time (yes like Terminator) to kill them and replace them in their lives ruining their relationships with those around them and thus ensuring that the band never succeeds and that future never comes to fruition. The bulk of the movie is Bill and Ted navigating hell and the rest of the afterlife to both find a way back to life and a way to defeat their evil robot doppelgangers. Now I am aware that the plot sounds bonkers, and it is, but it works and is a lot of fun.

Keanu Reeves (as Ted) and Alex Winter (as Bill) are perfect for the roles and their sincerity an energy really sell the characters and thus make the two movies work. William Sadler is also wonderful as the Grim Reaper. Bogus Journey is one of the few sequels in all of film that is as good and arguably even better than the original. It wisely does not retread the time travel premise of the original and really takes the story and the characters in a completely different direction from the original but does so in a way that still feels rooted to and consistent with the established fictional world. That is a difficult thing to pull off but Bogus Journey nails it. And for you rock/metal fans out there, this movie has a great heavy rock/metal soundtrack including Megadeth’s “Go To Hell”.

Tangential Bonus 3: Cast A Deadly Spell

MPAA Rating: R

The quote on the poster from USA Today describes this film as Who Framed Roger Rabbit except with witches and zombies instead of cartoon characters. While that statement is stylistically entirely accurate, it worth also throwing in there the reminder that Roger Rabbit was itself essentially just Chinatown except with cartoon characters. This is all just a way of saying that at its core, Cast a Deadly Spell is neo-noir film that incorporates Lovecraftian and other horror elements, and presents them in a generally lighter tone. Fred Ward turns in another solid performance here, especially after 1990’s Tremors which was on the 1990 list. We also get a relatively strong early career performance from Julianne Moore. Clancy Brown is in this as well and he is always a treat. It is also directed by Martin Campbell who would go on to direct all time great James Bond films like Goldeneye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006) as well as the greatest Zorro film, The Mask of Zorro (1998). Yes, this is a television movie, but do not let that fool you. It is a quality neo-noir mystery film (a la Chinatown) that incorporates witchcraft and presents it all with a lighter tone.

Tangential Bonus 4: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

MPAA Rating: R

In all likelihood, you do not need me to recommend this film to you. Terminator 2 is one of the most highly acclaimed and commercially successful action-horror films in existence. And it is likewise considered to be one of the greatest sequel films of all time, with some people even arguing that it surpasses the already quality original. I would not go that far, as I definitely prefer the original Terminator film from back in 1984. However, Terminator 2 is a solid and well executed film. James Cameron of course returns as both writer and director. Terminator 2 succeeds as a sequel because it is not just a carbon copy of the original. It operates on a similar premise of a killer robot coming from the future to kill off Sarah and John Conner. However, it flips who the villain is, and thus allows Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the hero as a terminator that was reprogrammed by humans in the future and sent back to defend the Conners. Thus, it is a sequel that falls into the category of ‘same but different’. There is always a little debate with these action-horror type movies of how to classify them, and whether they belong in the tangential section or on the list proper. I have always seen the Terminator series as leaning more on the action side, which explains its placement here. Whichever way you feel about it, we can all agree that Terminator 2 is one of those essential films for the year and for the era of peak Arnold.