Horror films of the 1980s

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Don't Go in the Woods

Shot in Utah for 100,000 dollars with a score that never stops. Beloved by a small and stubborn group.

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Night of the Demon

Bigfoot tears a man's genitals off. That is the scene, that is the film, that is why it was prosecuted.

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Don't Go Near the Park

Cursed cave dwellers from 12,000 BC eating people in modern Los Angeles. Incoherent throughout.

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Revenge of the Bogey Man

Roughly 40 percent flashback to the first film. A sequel assembled rather than made.

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The Slayer

A painter's nightmares kill people on an off-season island. Genuinely atmospheric and badly underrated.

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Unhinged

Three women, a mansion, rain, and a twist. Shot in Oregon and stranger than its reputation.

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Forest of Fear

Marijuana growers, a herbicide and some very slow zombies. On the list by accident of title.

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Terror Eyes

A motorcycle killer in Boston with a kukri. Rachel Ward's debut and a real giallo influence.

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Evilspeak

Clint Howard, a military academy, a computer and a lot of pigs. Better than it has any right to be.

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Madhouse

A deaf teacher, a disfigured twin and a rottweiler. Shot in Savannah and better made than most of the list.

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Visiting Hours

Michael Ironside stalking a hospital. A real cast, a real budget, and no business being on the list.

Cannibals who look like they were recruited outside the catering truck. Almost impressively bad.

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Pranks

A dorm over Christmas break and a plot that runs out. Notable mainly for an early Daphne Zuniga.

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Devil Hunter

Franco at his most indifferent. Ninety minutes of jungle and a monster with bulging eyes.

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Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

Its distributor's executives went to prison over this one. The DPP case that ended in jail sentences.

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Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans come home with a bite that spreads. A better idea than the film delivers.

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Nightmare Maker

Susan Tyrrell as the aunt, giving a performance far too committed for the film around it.

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Parents

A boy in 1950s suburbia suspects the leftovers his parents keep serving are people. Bob Balaban directed.

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Absurd

D'Amato remaking his own Anthropophagous as a Halloween knock-off. Grim and dull in equal measure.

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Angst

An Austrian film about a killer released from prison, shot with a camera rig nobody had used before.

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Contamination

An Alien knock-off with exploding chests and a Goblin score doing heavy lifting throughout.

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Motel Hell

A folksy farmer makes the best smoked meat in the county. The secret is people, planted in the garden up to their necks.

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Pieces

A chainsaw killer on a Boston campus, made by Spaniards, and it is gloriously incoherent.

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Q: The Winged Serpent

An Aztec god nests atop the Chrysler Building and eats sunbathers, and Michael Moriarty is extraordinary.

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The Boogey Man

A haunted mirror and a Halloween score Ulli Lommel could not afford to license properly.

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The House on the Edge of the Park

Deodato's Last House riff with David Hess again. Mean, cheap and effective at exactly one thing.

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Zombie Creeping Flesh

Bruno Mattei splicing stock documentary footage into a zombie film and hoping nobody notices.

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Bloody Moon

Jess Franco doing a slasher for German money. Contains the stone-saw scene and little else.

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Xtro

A British alien-abduction film so incoherent and disturbing it has never been fully explained, by anyone, including its director.

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Mr. Vampire

Hopping Chinese vampires, a Taoist priest, and sticky rice as a medical treatment. It invented a whole genre.

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Night of the Comet

A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.

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Stage Fright

A killer in a giant owl mask trapped in a theatre with a dance troupe. Michele Soavi's debut and the best late giallo.

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The Stuff

A white dessert oozing from the ground becomes a national craze, and it is eating the people who eat it.

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Anthropophagous: The Beast

Famous for two shots and unwatchable between them. George Eastman wrote himself the title role.

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Dead & Buried

Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.

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The Funhouse

Hooper on a real budget with Rick Baker's monster. Nowhere near nasty enough to be on this list.

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Wolfen

Not really a werewolf film. Something older is hunting in the ruins of the South Bronx.

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Society

A Beverly Hills teenager suspects his family are not human. The last twenty minutes prove it, wetly.

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Ms .45

Abel Ferrara's second film. A mute seamstress, a .45, and a nun's habit at the end.

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The House by the Cemetery

Fulci's dream logic at its least coherent and most atmospheric. The dubbing of the child is a war crime.

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The New York Ripper

Fulci's most repellent film, and it is truly designed to make you feel bad for watching it.

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Maniac

Joe Spinell wrote himself the lead and Tom Savini blew his own head off on camera.

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Santa Sangre

Jodorowsky's most coherent film, which is a comparative statement. A circus, an armless mother and a son who lends her his hands.

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Basket Case

A young man carries his surgically-separated deformed twin in a wicker basket, and they are taking revenge.

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Sleepaway Camp

A cheap, badly acted summer camp slasher with an ending that has been argued about for forty years.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man

67 minutes of black and white industrial noise made over eighteen months by a crew that mostly quit.

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The Entity

A woman is repeatedly assaulted by an invisible entity, and the film sides with her against the psychiatrists.

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Demons

Lamberto Bava, produced by Argento, and it is a film about a cinema audience being turned into monsters inside the cinema.

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From Beyond

Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs reunite after Re-Animator for a Lovecraft story about a machine that reveals what is always there.

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Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper's space-vampire epic, adapted from Colin Wilson, and it is completely insane in the best way.

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Opera

Argento's last great film, and the needles taped under the eyes are the image of his career.

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The Burning

The best film on the prosecuted list. Savini's raft scene is why it was on it.

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The Company of Wolves

Angela Carter adapting herself. Nested fairy tales about what adults tell girls about men.

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Cannibal Ferox

Sold as the most violent film ever made. Lenzi chasing Deodato and killing more animals to do it.

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City of the Living Dead

A priest hangs himself and opens a gate. Fulci at his least coherent and most upsetting.

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A Chinese Ghost Story

A tax collector shelters in a haunted temple and falls in love with a ghost enslaved by a tree demon with a very long tongue.

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Alligator

A baby alligator flushed down a toilet grows huge on discarded lab animals in the sewers. John Sayles wrote it and it is a delight.

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The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wes Craven in Haiti, adapting a real ethnobotanist's account of the drug behind zombie folklore.

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The Vanishing

A man spends three years looking for his girlfriend and is finally offered the answer on one condition.

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Inferno

The Suspiria sequel. Less coherent, more beautiful, and has the best underwater sequence Argento shot.

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Near Dark

Kathryn Bigelow's vampires are a violent family in a camper van. The word is never used.

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Possession

A divorce film with a tentacle in it. Adjani's U-Bahn scene is the most extreme acting on this site.

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Phenomena

Jennifer Connelly communicates with insects at a Swiss boarding school, and there is a chimpanzee with a razor.

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Tenebrae

Argento's last great giallo, and the one with the three-minute crane shot up the side of a house.

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The Beyond

Almost no coherent plot and that is the argument for it. One of the bleakest endings in the genre.

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The Changeling

A widower, an empty mansion and a wheelchair coming down the stairs. Enormously effective.

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The Return of the Living Dead

Makes them fast and talkative. Easily the funniest film in this category, and a bleak ending under the jokes.

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The Howling

Rob Bottin was 21. Released months from American Werewolf and between them they finished the subgenre.

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Creepshow

Romero and King doing EC Comics, with panel borders, primary lighting and a story about a cake.

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Pet Sematary

King wrote the novel and thought it too bleak to publish. The film keeps the bleakness.

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Re-Animator

The funniest Lovecraft adaptation ever made, which is not what anybody expected.

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Scanners

Everybody remembers the head. The film underneath is about a pharmaceutical company and a custody dispute.

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Day of the Dead

The bleakest of Romero's trilogy, hated on release, and Tom Savini's best work.

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Prince of Darkness

The second of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, and it is quantum physics as a book of the dead.

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Videodrome

Predicted most of what people now say about the internet, using a Betamax slot in a man's stomach.

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Fright Night

A teenager works out his new neighbour is a vampire and no adult will believe him, so he hires a washed-up TV host.

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Dead Ringers

Jeremy Irons plays twin gynaecologists who share everything, and Cronenberg's coldest, saddest film.

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The Dead Zone

Cronenberg's most restrained film, and Christopher Walken plays a man who can see how it ends.

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The Fog

Carpenter's follow-up to Halloween: a Californian coastal town, a hundredth anniversary, and something owed.

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The Lost Boys

Joel Schumacher's MTV vampires in a California beach town, and it made the genre cool for a decade.

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Angel Heart

Mickey Rourke hunts a missing crooner for a client called Louis Cyphre, and the answer is the worst possible one.

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Hellraiser

Clive Barker adapting his own novella, and the Cenobites are on screen for about eight minutes.

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An American Werewolf in London

Rick Baker won the first Academy Award for Best Makeup for a transformation that hurts to watch.

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Cannibal Holocaust

Found footage nineteen years before Blair Witch, and six animals actually died to make its point.

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Christine

Carpenter directing King's killer car in the same year he made almost nothing else work.

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Evil Dead II

Half remake, half sequel, and it turns the first film into slapstick without losing the nastiness.

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Poltergeist

A suburban family, a television, and a chair-stacking sequence that has never stopped being copied.

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They Live

Carpenter's angriest film, disguised as a B-movie, about sunglasses that let you see the ads underneath everything.

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The Fly

Under the effects it is a film about watching someone you love get a terminal illness, and Goldblum plays it that way.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

Craven's best idea: a killer who gets you where you cannot stay awake to avoid him.

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Friday the 13th

Copied Halloween without any of the craft, added Savini, and proved the formula worked anyway.

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The Evil Dead

Prosecuted dozens of times and won more often than it lost. Raimi was 21 and it shows in the best way.

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The Shining

King hated it. Everyone else was right. The geography of the hotel is deliberately impossible.

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The Thing

Flopped, was called empty and disgusting, and is now the most imitated horror film of its decade.