The yuppie-in-peril thriller, a multiplex mainstay throughout the late 80s and early 90s, tried to expose the vulnerabilities of our day-to-day, suggesting that danger could emerge from anyone and anywhere. It could be a co-worker (The Temp, Disclosure), a spouse (Sleeping With the Enemy, Dream Lover), a lover (Fatal Attraction, Don’t Talk to Strangers), a lodger (Pacific Heights, Single White Female), a parent (Mother’s Boys, Benefit of the Doubt), even a child (The Good Son, The Crush), a subgenre that insisted we maintain militant in spaces we’d assumed were safe.
One of the era’s most creepily effective examples was Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because it played on a specifically awful fear for parents – that the person you’d entrusted to protect your child had a nefarious agenda. Rebecca De Mornay’s vengeful nanny became one of the more indelible villains of the 90s, the horror of an attractive, childless, blond woman wreaking havoc in suburbia striking fear into the hearts of settled cinemagoers across the world (it made $140m globally, a number that would be closer to $320m with inflation today). As the industry continues to plunder that decade (with everything from Buffy to Clueless to Urban Legend soon returning), it makes business sense to rock the cradle once again.
