Rewatching Three 90s Horror Movie Classics: Scream, The Blair Witch Project, & Seven

This October, I’ve decided to continue the tradition I began last year of reviewing three well-known horror movies in honor of Halloween. In 2023’s post, I went over Psycho, The Exorcist, and The Shining, three supposedly very scary horror classics to see how they held up.

What I found is that what was once perceived as truly terrifying is often by modern standards not very scary at all. While I enjoyed those three movies to varying degrees, on the Scary Factor scale, none graded higher than a 4 out of 10.

For Halloween 2024, I decided to rewatch movies from a more recent decade: the 1990s. Let’s find out if this more recent decade offers more frights, and just how good these well-known modern classics actually are!

Scream (1996)

Dimension Films, 111 minutes

To date, there have been six films in the Scream movie franchise. Without a doubt, the original Scream, directed by horror legend Wes Craven, is the best of the bunch. The film is the perfect mix of slasher/teen horror and suspense, with a sort of fun, lightheartedness, that despite the brutality of the story being told, manages to keep the experience of watching Scream a supremely enjoyable one.

Scream was written by screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and his script is what made the film such a hit. Many slashers have bland, typical dialogue that takes a backseat to onscreen kills. Williamson, in contrast, wrote a film that is creatively self-referential to the fact that it’s a horror movie and also has fun, fast-paced dialogue.

Characters go over horror movie rules (which are great), and there are there are references to countless other scary movies. Do all the references become a little too much at times? Probably. But it never becomes so distracting that it detracts from the overall experience of the film on the screen.

Story-wise, Scream is a whodunnit. Despite a large number of suspects/characters, everyone feels well-defined and colorful. Characters have quirks that make them feel unique and everyone works in a teen horror movie sort of way (where twenty-somethings play high schoolers). The performances fit the story, with Neve Campbell really excelling as the lead, Sidney Prescott.

Scream is scary in a jump scare sort of way. There are some successful moments of suspense too, but overall, I don’t tend to find slashers to be as truly scary as other types of horror movies. That’s not to say that Scream isn’t good horror – it is, and I think it’s the benchmark for teen slashers.

Grade: 8/10

Scary Factor: 5/10

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Artisan Entertainment, 81 minutes

Though it wasn’t necessarily the first found footage film ever, there’s no denying that the critical and commercial success of The Blair Witch Project ushered in a new wave of that type of horror film. While the amount of found footage horror movies has subsided in recent years, for a while there in the early 2000s it seemed like every other horror movie that came out used the formula of characters holding the camera (to varying degrees of success).

But how good a movie is the godfather of the subgenre really? Honestly, it’s better than you’d expect, and it holds up well. It’s easy to see why The Blair Witch Project had the large cultural impact that it did. In part, this was due to the fact that there was a lot of successful marketing with the movie (partially from presenting the story as factual and not a work of fiction), as well as great word of mouth, since the movie was quite different from the majority of horror films being released at the time.

The story itself is simple and straightforward. A trio of young filmmakers enter the Maryland woods to create a documentary about the mythical witch who supposedly resides there. With the exception of several scenes showing the three students interviewing townsfolk at the start of the movie, the bulk of the runtime focuses on Heather, Michael, and Josh.

The impact and success of The Blair Witch Project arises from the effectiveness of these three characters at making the story feel believable. The actors are all equally great – without their performances this movie wouldn’t have found the success that it did.

The horror in the story is created not by frightening visuals, but by observing the raw emotion of the characters as they deal with growing feelings of despair and helplessness as they become hopelessly lost in the haunted woods. There are some scary ideas in The Blair Witch Project, and, while it’s not exactly terrifying, it’s scary enough, and a worthwhile movie experience overall.

Grade: 8/10

Scary Factor: 6/10

Seven (1995)

New Line Cinema, 127 minutes

In a post earlier this month, I wrote about The Silence of the Lambs, and whether or not that film should be considered a horror movie. I argued that film, though it has horror elements, is more of a thriller/drama. Seven is similar to The Silence of the Lambs in that it also contains aspects of many genres, and it can be debated whether or not it’s truly a horror movie.

After careful consideration though, I think that while The Silence of the Lambs barely misses the horror movie categorization criteria for this post, Seven clears the bar. I think that what differentiates the two movies is that Seven is a more horrific, grotesque, and disturbing film. The Silence of the Lambs is mainly concerned with just telling a great story (and it happens to have disturbing elements), while part of the main point of Seven seems to be to disturb moviegoers.

Simply put, Seven takes being horrific to another level. It goes to a place that most movies aren’t willing to go. These sorts of horror movies, the type that try to disturb more than actually frighten, are not really my favorite.

The acting from Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, as a pair of detectives in a hopelessly awful city, is as good as you’d expect. I’d argue though that the movie cares more about its characters as a vehicle for expressing the film’s message than it does about exploring them on a deeper level.

The point of Seven is basically that the world is an awful place. To say that this film has a bleak, pessimistic outlook would be putting it lightly. I don’t think it’s a bad movie, but I don’t personally enjoy it too much. It’s a well-told story – but also is overrated. Once you get past the simplistic gimmick premise of a killer brutally murdering people based off of the seven deadly sins, there isn’t much more to the movie.

Grade: 5.5/10

Scary Factor: 5.5/10