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13 '90s Movies You Watched At Sleepovers
Part of this whole awkward adulthood thing includes a swift banishing of intentional sleepovers. That is, if a friend of mine is sleeping over my apartment, it means either a) we got way too imbibed last night and passed out or b) they're out-of-town and staying for the weekend so they can get way too imbibed as pass out at their leisure. Nobody ever sleeps over for the sake of sleeping over, and it's the one thing I miss from the '90s. Well, that, and all the great '90s slumber party movies.
Of course, a lot of things would depend on what would be your slumber party movie pick. Are you having a extra girly sleepover with avocado facials and rounds of Mystery Date? Or are you going to tell scary stories while snuggled up in your sleeping bags? Are you going to eat a whole carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream and write Fairly Oddparents fanfiction until 5 am in the morning? Just me?
Well, anyway. Regardless of the situation, here are a slew of '90s films you probably watched at a slumber party at some point... and why they'd still make a great modern sleepover choice today.
1. The Blair Witch Project
If you caught The Blair Witch Project right after it was released on VHS, there's not doubt that it sufficiently freaked you out. I mean, this was before someone could just google "Was The Blair Witch Project real?" on your phone. If you wanted to do some digging, you had to wait 20 minutes for Windows 95 to log you into AOL. That said, I can easily vouch that, by 2001, people were already breaking out parodies at our sleepovers. The Blair Thumb was pretty good. Just saying.
2. Clueless
Clueless always pops up on these lists because of its sheer cultural magnitude... and also it's just so pretty to look at. It's never a bad idea, and, in the moments before Mean Girls hit screen, you never had to make that Sophie's choice. It was the perfect film to watch while giving each other manicures, right before you spilled sparkly blue nail polish on the rug. Your stepdad is going to totally kill you.
3. Titanic
Let's be real, you never actively finished Titanic. It either faded into background noise, stopped when you were supposed to put in tape two, or everyone passed out long before it was over. But, every once in a while, it popped up at sleepovers to honor the sheer beauty of young Leonardo DiCaprio. All hail.
4. American Pie
Actually, any raunchy (and decidedly inappropriate) teen movie would do, mostly because you get to hear about sex stuff and feel like you're basically one of the high schoolers. Incidentally, by the time I actually was a teenager, we just switched up to watching HBO real sex specials because we were so desensitized, but that's a whole other story.
5. 10 Things I Hate About You
If you were too tame for American Pie, you went for something more like this. Plenty of turn-of-the-millennium eye candy in here, plenty of adolescent angst that you weren't quite ready to experience personally.
6. The Craft
For the weird girls in the group, there was always The Craft. A great movie to rent and immediately try to make voodoo dolls of the cheerleaders afterwards.
7. Spice World
Everybody knows that this film is a modern masterpiece and today exists as an unintentional brain-busting lol-factory. But back then? You were wrapped up in Spice Girls mania, and this was the perfect way to cap off your evening as you trade the official Spice Girls stickers that came with your official Spice Girls lollipops.
If you want to break out any of these movies right now and call your best gal pal over, trust me, we are not going to judge.
8. Jawbreaker
This was for only the sassiest of sleepovers, where the hostess had loads of CDs by The Donnas and everyone was pulling pranks all night. It is also a genuinely fantastic movie for a generation that had yet to discover Heathers, and yet to fall into their inevitable alt girl phase. Rest assured, all of the girls I watched this with were so psyched up for the Marilyn Manson cameo, so it was only a matter of time...
9. Pretty Woman
I just think it's important that we start normalizing sex work at a young age. And you DID when you decided to put on Pretty Woman at your seventh grade slumber party. Three cheers for adulthood and hookers getting a happily ever after!
10. I Know What You Did Last Summer
Pretty much the most '90s cast of all time. Sarah Michelle Gellar? Check. Jennifer Love Hewitt? Check. Ryan Phillipe? Check. Freddie Prinze Jr.? Definitely check. With every protagonist in their prime and all the cheap thrills of any other slasher film, it was an easy choice.
11. The Parent Trap
Of course this was long before Lindsay Lohan hit the deep end, and even long before she was churning out tween-friendly films like Freaky Friday and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. In short, The Parent Trap was a safe flick for those not ready for the likes of prostitutes and serial killers, and young Lohan was oh-so-charming in her dual role.
12. Never Been Kissed
It was very plausible that at the time you watched this you had also never been kissed. More than that, you couldn't understand how someone like Perpetual Cool Girl Drew Barrymore could've escaped high school and gone into her mid-20s without doing the deed. And more than THAT, you hoped that such a fate would never happen to you.
13. Romeo + Juliet
At the end of the day, you can never have enough DiCaprio. I feel like Romeo + Juliet—perhaps because it came out before Titanic or because it had less worldwide fame—was a film skewed towards slightly older fans. Like, the eighth graders who actually have a quiz on Shakespeare's play that Monday. Incidentally, this is actually a joke on Daria ("See, in Shakespeare's version, Romeo never goes by the name 'Leonardo' or takes a swim in his clothes") and it doesn't get more '90s than that.
Images: Columbia Pictures; Giphy (13)
