The ’90s was a strange decade for horror. On one hand, this was an era that delivered some incredibly successful horror movies, with the likes of Scream, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Halloween H20, Blade, and The Blair Witch Project all proving to be box office smashes. But on the other, it was not a decade where originality was particularly rewarded. While the ’70s and ’80s had frequently pushed the genre in bold and exciting new directions, the 1990s was largely marked by remakes, sequels, adaptations, and self-referential deconstructions of existing movies.
But what the ’90s did give us were some great monster movies. Every decade has had its fair share of scary creature features, but this was the decade that saw great advancements in CGI; from the moment Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park showed what could now be done with digital effects, filmmakers started to embrace the new technology. And while it’s fair to say that some of these early uses of CG haven’t dated that well, used in moderation, digital effects have allowed horror filmmakers to enhance and improve their physical creations.
The 1990s also showcased a wide variety of monsters. There were giant snakes and crocodiles, alien shapeshifters, gigantic seabeats, subterranean worms, rampaging lizards, demonic invaders, and entire communities of weird and scary creatures. So here’s our look at the 11 scariest horror movie monsters of the 1990s.