A decade by decade guide to the horror film genre
Key horror movies from the 1990s
Kevin Williamson’s horror satire about a group of high school students who fall prey to a serial killer hits all its targets. Fully aware that they are tumbling through a series of slasher clichés, the characters make constant allusions to Freddy, Michael and Jason as they head for the inevitable bloodbath at the hands of a masked killer.
Jodie Foster described Se7en as “about as close to a perfect film on the topic as I can think of”. Dark, inexorably pessimistic, with a plausible, reasonable, honest, empathic killer at its core, Se7en twisted genre paradigms in ways that had never been seen before – but which have been much emulated since.
In 1994 Freddy’s creator, Wes Craven, reclaimed the franchise and wrote and directed the seventh entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series himself.
