While, on the one hand, The Blair Witch Project borrows from one of the oldest of scary-woods stories, Hansel and Gretel, there are elements to it which are quintessentially Nineties. It has been said that while Seventies films such as The Stepford Wives played on confusion over the changing roles of women, recent revelations about the horrific abuses children often suffer have fed into a profound fear for their wellbeing, a fear which has been exploited in today's scarier films - the tiny handprints on the wall are surely what makes the final sequence of Blair Witch so effective.

"Children are to the 1990s what women were to the 1970s," Philip Dodd, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, has remarked. The Blair Witch Project is only one of several horror films either in cinemas now, or coming soon.

The Sixth Sense, the story of a troubled boy who can see the dead is a big success in the US at the moment. Stigmata, starring Patricia Arquette as a hairdresser who exhibits the wounds of Christ, is doing well. Meanwhile, Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp, and even Arnold Schwarznegger star in horror films due for US release before the end of the year. John Carpenter's Vampires is in Irish cinemas.

The end of the last century also saw quite a demand for literary horror. Nervousness about an unpredictable future has been cited as the source of fascination with horror both then and now.