I am a person that lives on stress. I do not know how to not be stressed, it is just my baseline, and I know where it all started. I was born in the ’80s and all it took was one babysitter letting me watch a movie that was wildly age-inappropriate and I thought I would never watch another horror movie again. My very first horror movie was Leprechaun (1993) when I was just ten. This is still the only horror movie I absolutely cannot watch again so I have to write about other movies of the ’90s that helped fuel my love of the genre.
Scream (1996) is my comfort horror movie. While it has been a while since I have sat down to watch this movie, I still remember every word, twist, turn, and murder. Of all of the horror movies I have seen, Scream has my favorite scene. Drew Barrymore is on the phone with the killer talking about other horror movies, just thinking it is a great wrong number phone call, and well, we all know what happens next. Scream was my introduction to the very real reality that some people are the evil and the reasoning behind the evil only makes sense to the person who thinks that murder is the answer to their problems.
Being a teenager when this movie came out, I had a hard time believing no one could figure out who Ghostface was but seeing how everything played out, I get it know. The whole horror of this movie could have been easily avoided with some therapy and a healthy emotional outlet, but, where’s the fun in that? One of my absolute favorite things about Scream is that Neve Campbell playing Sidney is the hero and at a time when there were other women playing the hero, but they always seemed to need saving by their male counterparts, was a very refreshing change.
As perfect as the first movie was, I feel like creating another five movies around the same premise was and is a bit much. Really though, most of us do not know one killer, let alone 11! What is Sidney doing wrong that would be associated with so many murderers? How does one person, not involved with the FBI, get mixed up with so many serial killers? The only answer is that Sidney has the worst luck of anyone.
This next movie made me realize that I could be both terrorized and have motion sickness at the same time. The Blair Witch Project (1999) was a movie that was set up like a documentary that was being done by some missing film students. This movie was made for an estimated $60,000 and grossed almost $250 million! The Blair Witch Project was the first movie of its kind. I remember the buzz around this movie and people not knowing if it was real or not. This movie was and is easily one of the more stressful for me to watch and I think the reason for this is that we never actually see the Witch on screen and is only amplified by not seeing any of the deaths on screen either.
There was a total of three Blair Witch movies from 1999 to 2016 with a total of 15 deaths that mostly happened off screen. The body count is low by most horror movie standards, but the whole not seeing them happen is what makes them that much more impactful. The directing of the film, the acting, the shots, the lighting, and the indirect violence are all the reasons that I absolutely love The Blair Witch Project.
Interview With a Vampire (1994) was my introduction to vampires. These vampires were everything I thought that vampires should be, beautiful people that drink blood and live in the dark. Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and especially Kirsten Dunst just absolutely made me fall in love with vampires.
This movie, for me, has always been more of a love story drama with horror aspects. The relationships and how they grow and inevitably collapse has just always felt like a natural progression. I always felt that Lestat and Louis were more than just companions, they always felt like a couple on a murder spree that decided to “adopt” a particularly yet understandably angry forever child.
The horror on Interview with a Vampire was not just horror for the sake of horror but to move the story forward. The violence was not too over the top which was perfect because the violence that was there was more impactful. My favorite scene of the movie comes when Louis (Brad Pitt) and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) have decided to leave Lestat (Tom Cruise) so they feed him a dead person which is harmful to vampires and then feed him to the gators in the swamps. The only other scene that was more graphic was the scene that Claudia is punished for her crimes against vampires.
Interview with a Vampire, while not the scariest vampire movie I have ever seen, if was the first fantasy horror movie that I saw and paved the way for my discovery of other vampires, werewolves, other monsters, and the hunters/slayers that seek to destroy them.