Sorry, But No Decade Will Ever Top The ‘90s For Halloween Movies

It doesn’t take much to get a millennial to wax poetic about the ‘90s, especially the ‘90s in the fall. It was a time for friends and flannel and the smell of a Blockbuster carpet crunching under your Chuck Taylors as you picked out the perfect Halloween movie to watch. Which, naturally, you would watch in between rounds of “Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board” or while trepidatiously placing your fingers, nails coated in chipping layers of Sky by Hard Candy, atop a Ouija board.

Any given October Friday in the ‘90s looked like a stack of rentals on the living room floor, with whatever your mom chided was “too scary” hidden at the bottom of the pile... a secret you and your friends would snicker about when she was in the room and reach for as soon as she left.

And now, as a grown adult with a house payment and skincare that isn’t apricot-scented sandpaper, I’ve come to accept something: the ‘90s were the peak era of Halloween. Not just a good era. The era.

The decade didn’t just give us a handful of spooky favorites. It was much more than that. It gave us a ladder to climb. You started at the bottom rung with family-friendly fare, and by the time you reached the top, you were watching a Japanese supernatural scare-fest that revolutionized modern atmospheric horror (Ringu, anyone?).

We began our ascent with the movies that taught us Halloween could contain multitudes. It could be cozy and funny and a little bit creepy and utterly rewatchable. What ‘90s kid didn’t channel Sarah Sanderson from atop a tire swing hanging from a tree in their backyard, singing “Come Little Children” as they “flew” through the air? Who among us didn’t dream of kissing Devon Sawa, er, Casper, and being asked: “Can I keep you?” Or wish we had a cool, magical Grandma Aggie?

To this day, I quote Christina Ricci, our ‘90s patron saint of Halloween, as Wednesday Addams (“Are they made from real Girl Scouts?”). Thanks to Sally and Gillian and Aunt Franny and Aunt Jet, I know that the correct response to pretty much anything is midnight margaritas.

Of course, at some point, we started to crave more than friendly ghosts. We wanted to be scared. Like, actually scared, and whew, did the ‘90s deliver. The late, great Tony Todd gave us a villain who was terrifying and, at once, curiously elegant in Candyman. That movie also gave us the most dangerous dare you could get at a ‘90s slumber party: go into a dark bathroom and say his name five times in the mirror. Did you do it? Or did you chicken out at No. 4?

Then came my personal favorite horror franchise to watch at Halloween, the weirdly nostalgic slasher flicks my soul craves as soon as the air turns cooler in the fall: Scream. Seeing Drew Barrymore, the biggest name on the poster at the time, get killed off in the opening scene was the first time we reckoned with the notion that nobody was ever really safe. And how do we repay the debt of being gifted Stu Macher?! Our obsession with Ghostface lives on, always.

The ‘90s dangled basically every teen heartthrob who mattered as bait for a deranged, hook-handed man in I Know What You Did Last Summer: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe.

The decade also introduced a new (to us) Halloween genre in found footage. I mean, it’s hard to explain to anyone younger how legitimately unsure people were about whether The Blair Witch Project was real. I’m still not sure we’re convinced it wasn’t, tbh.

We got gothic, fog-drenched Halloween classics like Sleepy Hollow (with Ricci once again, natch), alongside movies that planted the seeds of fears we wouldn’t outgrow for years.

Sure, Stephen King’s It was technically a TV miniseries, but by the time we were old enough to sneak it into our VHS players, it was packaged like a movie… one that ruined clowns and storm drains and red balloons for an entire generation. Wes Craven, a man clearly hellbent on scaring the living daylights out of all of us, really said, "You know what else you should be irrationally afraid of? The. People. Under. The. Stairs.” And let’s just say I still don’t trust dolls thanks to Chucky.

But part of the ‘90s being a peak time for Halloween movies is that some of our favorite Halloween movies of the decade weren’t actually Halloween movies. Or even truly horror. They were adjacent, yet they’ve all become essential Halloween viewing. Think Death Becomes Her (Meryl’s twisted-around neck and Goldie’s hollowed-out midsection launched a million Halloween costume recreations) and The Craft, with Fairuza Balk’s Nancy holding it down as one of the all-time great unhinged performances.

What made this such a magical time for Halloween movies? Mostly, I think the ‘90s trusted us. They trusted us to handle a little fear, to laugh at the campy stuff, to sneak into the scary stuff when we were ready. The decade gave us a complete education.

So it’s no surprise that now, as parents ourselves, we’re picking out the October movie lineup and still reaching for Hocus Pocus and Practical Magic or, when the kids are a little older, introducing them to Sidney Prescott. And every year, when the leaves start to turn and that first Sanderson sister cackle hits our bloodstream, we lament: They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

They can’t. The ‘90s already did it best. But I guess that’s what those of us who grew up then would say. After all, we are the weirdos, mister.