Horror Films: 1990-1999

The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy ends in 1992. Most of its entries from 1984 on are by Kim Newman. For the 1990s, they saw horror moving into the mainstream, discussing at relative length how Basic Instinct uses the narrative strategies of the horror film despite not being marketed as a horror film. They consider Henry... Portrait of a Serial Killer to be the standout of the decade but consider much of the genre to be repetitious, noting that Oscar-winner The Silence of the Lambs broke less new ground than Henry. They find that the demographic shift of the period suggests that more family-oriented fare is likely to turn into franchises and spin-offs, which seems to be predicting the rise of PG-13 horror of the coming decades, more interested in suspense than gore. Gothic horror was kept alive in big-budget horror with Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein, the latter in production as the book went to press.

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