20 Films That Prove The 1990s Was The Worst Decade For Horror

Of course, if we're talking about tedious post-Scream slashers, they don't come much more mundane than this. Clearly aiming to repeat the success of Wes Craven's movie, Urban Legend tries to take a similarly post-modern approach to another standard slasher set-up, as a killer on campus starts offing students in a manner reminiscent of local urban legends.

Urban Legend underlines the key problem with the fallout from Scream (a problem which would continue into the 2000s). Whereas the first wave of slasher movies were never really under illusions about being smart or important films, the post-Scream slashers went out assuming themselves to be much smarter than they actually were.

As such, there's an air of smug superiority about these films that is supremely off-putting, and with its collegiate setting Urban Legend is without doubt one of the most pompous of them.

As ever, the cast is largely young faces from TV, with Alicia Witt and future Oscar-winner Jared Leto given little to do but look pretty, whilst Joshua Jackson and future Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum just stand around being snarky.

Still, Urban Legend does earn some horror geek points for the presence of Robert Englund as a professor, and was the first adult horror role for former Halloween 4/5 child star-turned-contemporary scream queen Danielle Harris.