Horror Hall of Awesome: Attack of the 80s!
The list of the best horror films of all times (by decade!) continues…
Top of the Awesome
1. The Shining (1980). Kubrick’s very liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining draws its power from being unlike most traditional horror films. It’s so quiet and monotonous (even boring, at times) that you almost don’t realize how scared you are until all hell breaks loose. In that way, the experience of watching The Shining is not unlike Wendy Torrance’s experience of sudden dread and terror when she realizes her world has been falling apart all along. What’s more, Kubrick evokes madness, ghosts, psychic phenomenon and family dysfunction in the most economical of ways, mixing the ordinary with the terrifying and then totally confusing the two. The Shining makes the banal creepy and then makes the creepy REALLY creepy. It’s the kind of film than can and does stick in your lizard brain forever.
2. The Thing (1982). John Carpenter’s remake of the The Thing From Another World (1951) is a high-tension chiller, a barftastic visual effects bonanza, and a surprising contemplation on identity (is the shape-shifting space alien changing the men it inhabits or uncovering their primal, unsavory selves?). Carpenter is at his claustrophobic best in The Thing, and the action is all the more unsettling because it’s set against such a vast Arctic landscape, featuring an ending that is at once super bleak and dismaying hilarious.
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). A Nightmare on Elm Street derived its scares from collapsing the boundaries between the real and the imagined. It’s now quite cliché for a character in a horror film to wake up in a dream, but Nightmare was pretty much the first – and definitely the best – at making that truly terrifying. It’s also a study in Final Girl ingenuity. How awesome is it when Nancy Thompson (the mighty Heather Langenkamp) gets all MacGyver on her bedroom and then goes into her dream and pulls out Freddy Krueger? TOTALLY awesome. A Nightmare on Elm Street also deserves props for launching a dependably interesting line of sequels. They weren’t always great, and they were never as good as the original, but they always tried to achieve something technically innovative or add something thoughtful and fun with the mythology.
More! More! More!
4. An American Werewolf in London (1981). It’s scary, it’s funny and it features one of the greatest monster transformations to ever appear on screen (the pre-CGI make-up effects in this film are stunning). It set the standard for werewolf films and raised the bar on monster flicks altogether.
5. Near Dark (1982). Kathryn Bigelow’s Western vampire flick is the best horror film about making a living ever to hit the screen. It’s gorgeous, far smarter than any standard vampire film, and it’s got the cast of Aliens in it.
6. The Changeling (1980). This elegant haunted house story starring George C. Scott is both frightening and moving – a real standout that blends stellar craftsmanship and a good story. It will also make you terrified of wheelchairs.
7. Pick Yer Favorite Cronenberg: Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988). I know I’m cheating here, but any of these films are contenders for this list (and all for different reasons). David Cronenberg’s 1980s canon is totally unprecedented.
7. Evil Dead (1981)/Evil Dead 2 (1987). I’m putting these two together so they don’t dominate this list, and also because Evil Dead 2 is both a sorta-sequel and a re-imagination of the first one, anyway. The Evil Deads set the benchmark for both cult films and horror comedies in the 1980s.
9. Re-Animator (1985). An adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft story Herbert West: Reanimator, this film gives Evil Dead 2 a run for its money in both the humor and the gore departments. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
10. The Hitcher (1986). The Hitcher anticipated the legions of cat-and-mouse thrillers that dominated 90s film – but still retains its horror origins and outscares them all. It also features a Jennifer Jason Leigh taffy pull that is not for the faint of heart.
It Came From the 80s!
It would be a crime if I didn’t mention just a few more treasures from this decade….
- Parents (1989). Domestic horror flick about a couple of conservative, cannibal parents directed by none other than Bob Balaban. Whoah!
- Poltergeist (1982). I’m sure this would make a lot of top ten lists, and it’s a near-miss for me. It’s still very scary, even though we know all of its tricks inside out.
- Hellraiser (1987). The whole of Hellraiser was never quite as big as the sum of its parts, but its parts were completely awesome: great creature ideas, marvelous visuals, and really interesting story concepts.
- Return of the Living Dead (1985). The early standard for zombie comedy.
Next Up: The 1990s!
