Shudder Like It's 1999: The Most Influential Horror Films of an Influential Year

Everybody saw dead people in 1999! Photo courtesy of IMDb

The final year of the 20th Century was a bumper year for horror, mind-bending and dark fantasy films. Very influential films like The Matrix, Fight Club, ExistenZ, and The 13th Floor ruled the mind-bending/dark fantasy box office. The impending Millenium stimulated an avalanche of cinematic speculation about what the next century would bring, and most of it was dark in nature, not light.

On the horror front, there were a slew of big-budget flops like The Haunting, End of Days, and the rremake of House on Haunted Hill. However, there were also films that were excellent but seriously underrated, like David Koepp's Stir of Echoes. And there were a handful of highly directional films that debuted in 1999 that are still influencing horror today.

Here are my votes for the three most influential horror films of 1999. Note, I said the following films were the most directional and influential of 1999, not necessarily the best or even my personal favorites.

1.) The Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. It’s fashionable to diss this hybrid horror/family drama because it was so famous, so commercially successful, and so influential. People still use “I see dead people” as a snarky catchphrase almost 20 years later. And nearly everyone claims they deduced the notorious “twist” long before the big revelation at the end. I saw it in the theater when it first came out, and I didn’t see the twist coming at all. (Of course, watching it again years later, I kick myself for not noticing that Bruce Willis wears the same light blue oxford shirt, charcoal gray dress slacks, and white undershirt in every scene.)

The sentimental aspects of the plot are often the reason cited for why The Sixth Sense is disliked in some quarters of horror fandom. I disagree with this; the film has its undeniable sentiment, but it’s never sappy. The boy who sees dead people, Cole Sear, is not going to grow up and have an easy life; at best he’ll end up as a professional Ghost Whisperer; at worst he’ll go quietly mad. Hardcore horror fans will also point out that the famous twist is hardly original; it was done before, in the early 60s cult film Carnival of Souls, and in no less than three episodes of the original Twilight Zone:, entitled The Hitchhiker, The Hunt and The Passersby.

But wherever you stand on The Sixth Sense question, one thing can’t be denied: it revived moviegoers’ interest in the classic, character-driven, slow-burn ghost story, a revival that’s still going on to this day. This film was quickly followed by a succession of strong entries into the genre, like The Gift, The Others, and The Devil’s Backbone, among many more.

2.) The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Just as The Sixth Sense revived the traditional ghost story, so The Blair Witch Project created an entirely new genre of horror: the "found footage" story, quickly inspiring imitators like the popular [REC] and Paranormal Activity franchises.

Blair Witch may look tame today, because the found footage genre is now so common that it’s easy to forget how truly groundbreaking it was back in 1999. Thousands of fans inititally thought the footage was real, a phenom that was helped along by a clever marketing campaign that featured a fake academic website devoted to the Blair Witch “legend” (easy to get away with when the internet was still new). The prospect that the footage could be authentic made the film that much more terrifying to its legions of fans.

3.) Audition,directed by Takashi Miike, is the movie that made torture porn respectable for Western audiences. Torture porn is my least favorite horror genre, but I can’t deny that it has a significant following in the horror fan community.

Audition is a mind-boinking film that starts out like a slow-burn Hitchcock yarn about a lonely middle-aged widower who hooks up with the “perfect” young woman, who unfortunately has a hinted-at dark past. At about the two-thirds mark, it switches to a full-on torturefest, as the audience finds out just how dark Miss Perfect can really act. (Very dark.)

The situation is cheaply exploitive, but the film itself is too intellectual and well-made to be dismissed as an exploitation flick. Audition is gore made respectable by fantastic cinematography, acting, and framing; it's torture porn served on a caviar platter with a nice bottle of Chianti.

For better or for worse, depending on your taste in horror, Audition helped pave the way for movies like Hostel, The Human Centipede, and the highly popular Saw franchise. For that reason, it’s my final choice for one of the most influential horror films of that most influential cinematic year, 1999.