I was part of this, however briefly. My family ran a video
rental store in my small town and I worked there from 1985 to 1988. It was the
best of times, to be sure, and I got to see (by acquiring for the store) lots
of stuff that wasn’t making it to Waco, Texas, for some reason or another. Because
I just liked this stuff, I was somewhat indiscriminate, which made our horror
section the best, most eclectic selection in the area. As a consequence of
this, many of my initial viewings of classic 1980s horror were on good old VHS
magnetic tape.
The decade was one of weird contradictions; the surface,
Cosby Show normalcy was a cover for the AIDS epidemic, a weakening of the
public trust in government, drugs and crime in record numbers, and the dawn of
Big Media in the form of cable television. MTV told us everything was going to
be all right, but we didn’t really believe it.
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| This is the UK poster, known as a British Quad. It was either this or the Elvira VHS box cover. |
5. The Monster Club (1981)
The Monster Club was first introduced to American audiences through Elvira’s VHS series wherein she introduced the films in her inimitable fashion—and that alone makes it the most 1980s-est movie on this list. This little anthology can barely contain itself; 80’s kinda new wave/sorta punk rock, an urban fantasy premise that has since been used to death, and then there’s Vincent Price and John Carradine!
The Monster Club was first introduced to American audiences through Elvira’s VHS series wherein she introduced the films in her inimitable fashion—and that alone makes it the most 1980s-est movie on this list. This little anthology can barely contain itself; 80’s kinda new wave/sorta punk rock, an urban fantasy premise that has since been used to death, and then there’s Vincent Price and John Carradine!
The segments themselves are based loosely on the short
stories of noted horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (who was himself fictionalized
into the framing sequence and played by John Carradine), and run the gamut
between ghoulish fun and pretty scary in a Night Gallery kind of way, and
two out of the three manage to be effectively creepy with some great atmosphere
and good use of the setting. Of course, when you’re filming in England,
everything is creepy over there, even their 7-11 stores. Veteran Hammer director
Roy Ward Baker manages to squeeze every erg-fraction of mood, atmosphere, and suspense
out of the set pieces and also the actors.
Look for bonus artwork by comic book artist John Bolton in a
flashback sequence; he also drew the movie as a comic series (along with David
Lloyd) for the Hammer Halls of Horror magazine. I won’t say it’s the
best thing about the movie, but Bolton’s art is what makes that particular
segment so creepy. It’s a shame that the current version has been stripped
(ahem!) of Elvira’s introduction, but hey, you can’t have everything.
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| How do we know it's the 80's? Mohawks. |
4. Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Probably one of the best-known horror movies of the decade; this
was the zombie movie that, among other things, ushered in the idea that zombies
eat brains. Return of the Living Dead floats the premise that George
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as if that really happened, and the eponymous
living dead in this movie are the remnants of that first black and white
nightmare.
What happens next can only occur in the realm of the 1980s,
when a group of 25-year old teenagers from Central Casting (with names like Scuz
and Trash) break into a cemetery with their rad clothes, their Boom Box, and
their totally radical music and start partying by dancing on the graves. What
could possibly go wrong? How about the two working stiffs at a medical supply
warehouse who are in charge of the chemical effluvia that set the zombies in
motion lo these many years ago? You think they are going to unwittingly release
those chemicals into the air, which rains back down on the graveyard (and the
kids), a la acid rain, and brings the dead back to life? Probably.
Writer/director Dan O’Bannon keeps this movie rolling, and
the zombies running toward their next meal. Return of the Living Dead is
entertaining in the way that only a big, dumb, black comedy set to a heavy
metal soundtrack can be. It’s a farce, really, by proclaiming that the Night
of the Living Dead movie was a cover-up for the actual covert military
operation, and then showing the woeful ineptitude of the military-industrial
complex which leads to brain-eating zombies and darkly comic zombie kills.
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| A more evocative poster considering the subject matter. |
3. Friday the 13th (1980)
This low budget slasher quickie really kicked off the Teen Slasher craze. Granted, there were others before Friday the 13th, notably Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), even in 1980 there were a few other low budget slasher films, but the success of this movie (compared to what it cost to make) started the avalanche of teen-age slasher flicks, featuring nubile young girls being chased around by hulking brutes with gardening equipment or power tools.
This low budget slasher quickie really kicked off the Teen Slasher craze. Granted, there were others before Friday the 13th, notably Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), even in 1980 there were a few other low budget slasher films, but the success of this movie (compared to what it cost to make) started the avalanche of teen-age slasher flicks, featuring nubile young girls being chased around by hulking brutes with gardening equipment or power tools.
Everything
is great out at Camp Crystal Lake, except for those persistent rumors about the
one kid that died, all those years ago... but don’t let that deter you group of
kids, with your partying and carrying on. I’m sure it won’t piss off the person
who’d most like to kill a bunch of irresponsible teenagers. The first movie is
also noteworthy in that the series character that followed, one Jason Voorhees,
isn’t actually the killer. Not yet, sorta. Kinda. I don’t want to spoil the
twist, nor the twist on the twist at the end. If this has somehow not been
spoiled for you, and you are interested in watching 25-year-old actors pretend to
be teenagers, then you can do much worse.
Granted,
the deaths are intentionally gruesome and the movie is certainly informed if not influenced
by the earlier (and genuinely suspenseful) Halloween, but that
doesn’t keep it from being an effective and gory, thanks to special effects
wizard Tom Savini) example of this particular brand of horror film that would
become a staple of the 1980s. Which is a nice way of saying, this one was probably
one of the best—for what it was—and the legion of slasher films that followed
all vary wildly in quality.
2. The Gate (1987)
One of the most enduring phenomenons of the decade was the
so-called “Satanic Panic,” a nation-wide freak out over the idea that the youth
of America weren’t attending Bible Study every Wednesday night, but instead
were hanging out with their friends, listening to heavy metal music and playing
(gasp!) Dungeons & Dragons. There were a number of movies wherein
teenagers summoned demons, and a smaller subset dealt directly with the idea of
heavy metal being the cause of it all, but much like the movie’s monsters, The
Gate manages to be greater than the sum of its parts.
A very young and unrecognizable Stephen Dorff is Glen, a middle
school latchkey kid with an older sister and a best friend who is also largely unsupervised. In the absence of
parental supervision over a long weekend, Glen and his friend Terry find a geode
in the crater in the back yard (where lightning struck and killed a tree, which
was then removed), crack it open, and release demonic forces while big sister
Al throws a party and tries to be a mean girl for her horrible friends. Glen levitates for a party trick,
the dog is killed, and Terry’s dead parents come back to life, and that’s all
just a warm-up to what happens when the gate opens up under the house.
The theme of suburban normalcy hiding dark secrets, and kids
being left to fend for themselves, was huge in the 1980s, and The Gate
is mired in those conceits—which actually saves the film and gives it more
emotional weight than, say, the 1986 metal-fest Trick or Treat. When the
monsters show up, they are unlike other demons from the same time period, more
phantasmagorical than frightening. What ultimately makes The Gate work
as a horror movie is that they play it straight, and the kids all give good
performances without being hammy or caricatures, a real rarity in the 1980s.
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| The Puzzle Box was the must-have fake prop/stash box for all horror fans in the 1980 and beyond. |
1. Hellraiser (1987)
Splatterpunk was the literary movement within horror literature, marked by extreme, often excessive gore and embracing subject matter thought to be transgressive, if not outright taboo. It first came to light in the mid-1980s, and its most prominent participant was Clive Barker, with the American publication of his short story collections, Books of Blood, volumes I – III, (1984-85) The Damnation Game (1985) and The Hell-Bound Heart (1986). This latter novella became Barker’s first, and best, horror movie, Hellraiser.
Splatterpunk was the literary movement within horror literature, marked by extreme, often excessive gore and embracing subject matter thought to be transgressive, if not outright taboo. It first came to light in the mid-1980s, and its most prominent participant was Clive Barker, with the American publication of his short story collections, Books of Blood, volumes I – III, (1984-85) The Damnation Game (1985) and The Hell-Bound Heart (1986). This latter novella became Barker’s first, and best, horror movie, Hellraiser.
What comes next is gross, weird, and strange, but that’s to be expected because Barker wrote and directed the first movie, based on his novella. It’s not a perfect adaptation, but what’s in there is crazy and gonzo enough for the blood-soaked decade and puts a couple of fresh turns on some old reliable clichés. As horror films go, the movie jump-started an impressive franchise that led to more movies (ten in all), books, and a series of comics (some of the best horror comics of the decade, as well), all featuring the head cenobite known as Pinhead. We can quibble about whether or not any of the other Hellraiser movies lived up to the promise of the premise (spoiler: they don’t), but the inaugural outing of Barker’s Cenobites is a beloved horror standard of 1980s horror cinema.
