10 Underappreciated 90s Horror Movies

As we mentioned earlier, it's widely agreed that iconic filmmaker John Carpenter lost momentum in the 1990s. However, he got well and truly back in gear with this 1995 effort, arguably his last real horror masterpiece.

Working from a script by Michael De Luca (who also wrote the abysmal Freddy's Dead; go figure), In The Mouth of Madness starts out as a thinly veiled satire on the obsessive cult that had sprung up around Stephen King in the 1980s. However, as the story proceeds the line between fiction and reality draws ever thinner, presenting us with a vision that's really out of this world.

Sam Neill stars as John Trent, a cynical insurance fraud investigator assigned to help investigate the disappearance of massively popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), whose books are reported to have an extreme psychological impact on readers.

Though sceptical, Trent soon encounters alarming evidence that Cane's work does indeed have a tremendous power - a power which may be altering the very fabric of reality.

Though playing on the cult status of Stephen King, In The Mouth of Madness draws most heavily on iconic horror author HP Lovecraft. The title comes from Lovecraft (a play on his book At The Mountains of Madness), as does the core theme of ancient entities of unimaginable size and power trying to influence our reality.

Unofficially classed as the final installment of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy (after The Thing and Prince of Darkness), it's arguably the largest-scale vision of horror the acclaimed director ever produced. But grandiose as it is, it never sacrifices tension, atmosphere, terror, and outright entertainment value.