The Midnight Cafe’s Top Five Horror Movies of the 1980s

Many years ago I created a Facebook group called the Top Five, whereupon me and some friends would list our top five favorite…whatevers – opening tracks to albums, John Cusack movies, etc. The idea actually came from a Cusack movie, High Fidelity, where his character in that movie makes a lot of top five lists.

The group didn’t last that long; we were all too busy to keep it going, but I love the idea. I actually posted one of those lists on this site, and I’m thinking about doing it again. The Internet (and search engines) loves lists, and while I’ve basically accepted the fact that I’m never going to draw huge crowds to this site, finding ways to bring in a few more readers while also having some fun sounds like a plan.

I should probably do bigger lists, top 25 or 50s or something, but that’s a lot of work. A top five sounds more manageable, and it fits in with that old group, so here we go.

As it is October and Halloween is coming soon, and I’ve been doing my tradition of 31 Days of Horror, I thought we would start with my top five horror movies of the 1980s. The 1980s were a grand time for horror, and I figure doing more specific lists will be helpful for the numbers game.

The 1980s were a fascinating time for cinema and for horror. By the 1970s the studio system was dead, allowing for all sorts of more independent cinema to rise up. This ushered in the New Hollywood directors and allowed for cinema to flourish in ways it never had before. At the same time, the new ratings system pushed out the old Production Code, which allowed films to express themselves in ways they’d not been allowed to previously.

Horror took great advantage of this in the 1970s, creating films that pushed the envelope in terms of what could be shown, and they often did it in interesting and artistic ways. But as we moved into the 1980s, things changed once again. Those independent studios got big and less independent and more mainstream. That meant they were chasing the $ more than the art. Home video revolutionized movies. Suddenly films that didn’t do so well at the box office could have another chance on video. Some movies were made just for the video market.

Horror took great advantage of this outlet. You could make a relatively cheap movie and release it straight-to-video and make money. Horror hounds have never been known for their keen acumen and academic approach to the genre. Give us some blood and guts and maybe a little nudity, and we are good to go. This is why slashers were so popular during this period. A guy with a knife killing pretty girls was an easy sell.

But that isn’t to say that there weren’t some great horror movies being made in the 1980s. There were lots of interesting, well-made, even brilliant horror films from that decade, and here are my Top five.

5. Re-Animator (1985)

I no longer remember how I stumbled onto Stuart Gordon’s gonzo horror flick Re-Animator, but I instantly loved it. It was so wild, so violent and gore-filled, so full of full-frontal nudity, and so very, very funny. I had never seen anything like it.

Loosely based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, Re-Animator stars Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, a completely mad scientist who has discovered a serum that brings the dead back to life. The trouble is he can’t seem to get the mixture exactly right, so the dead keep coming back as murdering psychopaths. Luckily, his roommate has a key to the morgue, and he’s got plenty of corpses to experiment on.

The film begins as a fairly dramatic bit of science fiction, but before its 90 minutes are up, it will turn into a completely gonzo freakout. This was the first film from director Stuart Gordon, and he’s spent the rest of his career trying to be marvelously goofy, gory, and glorious. I reviewed the Arrow Video Blu-ray of this film which you can read here.

4. Tenebre (1982)

Dario Argento’s best films (Suspiria, Deep Red, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) were all made in the 1970s, but you shouldn’t sleep on his 1980s output. Tenebre is the story of a writer (Anthony Franciosa) who is questioned by the police because a crazed killer is murdering girls in the same way the killer in his latest book is doing it. Soon enough the killer comes for the writer and his friends.

There is a way you can look at this film as a meta commentary about violence in movies. Argento was often criticized for the extreme violence in his movies, and here he is making a movie about a writer being stalked by his own creation. Or you could just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Tenebre is filled with some incredible images – a woman’s face being revealed when the killer slashes through a white sheet is an all-timer. The story is good, and it mostly makes sense (which is unusual for Argento). It has a great soundtrack from Goblin. It is a great freaking movie and more than proves Argento had plenty to say in the 1980s.

You can read my full review here.

3. A Nightmare on Elm Street

In a decade full of mindless slashers, Wes Craven created something truly original with this film. Freddy Krueger is one of the great horror villains of the 1980s, or of any time, really. Setting him inside of dreams, or nightmares if you will, allowed the film to get really weird and visually interesting.

The sequels are of varying quality, but the first film remains an utterly classic and is one of the best horror films of the 1980s.

I recently reviewed the 4K UHD release of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which you can read here, and I also reviewed the UHD release of the boxed set of the first seven films which you can read here.

2. Evil Dead II

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, I subscribed to Spin Magazine. This was back when that rag was actually good. It had good writers and covered good music. This was post-Nirvana so they covered a lot of alternative acts, which I loved, but it was still mainstream enough that the artists weren’t too obscure for a guy living in rural Oklahoma with limited access to CDs.

They mostly covered music, but they did a few movie reviews, and one time they did some kind of list of the greatest movies ever. If memory serves, Evil Dead II was their number one pick. I’d never heard of that film. I’d never heard of director Sam Raimi or actor Bruce Campbell. But I immediately went out and rented it. I loved it instantly.

Raimi and Campbell made The Evil Dead on a shoestring budget in 1981. Plotwise, it is a straightforward story: stupid young people go to a remote cabin in the woods and are attacked by supernatural forces. But even at this stage Raimi knows how to move a camera and create interesting images (it was his first film.).

Made six years later, Evil Dead II is basically a bigger-budget remake of the original, but with jokes. The plot is almost identical, but it is full of goofy gags, slapstick, and hilarity. This is a film in which our hero Ash’s (Campbell) hand (and only his hand) becomes possessed and tries to kill him by strangulation and then smashing plates over his head. To stop this, Ash chops his hand off and then inserts a chainsaw over the stump.

It is a wild, kinetic, gory, joy-filled romp, and I just love it.

1. The Thing

I didn’t like The Thing the first time I watched it. I think my expectations were too high, as I’d heard it named as one of the greatest horror movies ever made for years and years. Also, the setting I watched it in wasn’t great. We had a small TV at the time, and my wife had gone to bed, so I had to keep the volume down. But mostly I just didn’t like the effects.

The movie is about a group of scientists living on the frozen wasteland that is Antarctica who come across a shape-shifting alien. Much of the film’s tension comes from how our characters can never be sure who is human and who is an alien. The effects are all practically done, and they are intentionally made to look just a little bit off. At some point one character pushes on another’s chest, and the chest opens up, grows teeth, and chomps the other dude’s hands off. Another time the alien gets stuck mid-transformation and looks like a human head with spider legs. There was something about all of that that just felt weird to me.

I’ve seen the film many more times since then, and I now find that stuff part of the film’s charm. I love the practical effects and how tactile and goopy they are. That works for me so much better than CGI.

But more than that, the film is just one long, tense ride. It takes its time setting things up. It allows us to live inside this strange, frozen wasteland. We get to know these people’s quirks and personalities. Then they find the alien, and it starts killing people, but since it can look just like them, they can’t rely on anyone for help. And there is nowhere to go. And Kurt Russell has never been better.

Just writing about it now, I want to stop and go watch it again. It is a brilliant film and my favorite horror movie of the 1980s. You can read my full review of The Thing here.

And that’s it. That’s my list. I suppose I should make some caveats. I’ve not seen every horror movie of the 1980s. I’m sure there are some amazing films that didn’t make my list because I’ve never seen them. Feel free to recommend them to me in the comments. I have no doubt that there are films that I have seen that didn’t make my list that leave you scratching your head over. That’s great. That’s what’s fun about these lists. I encourage you to (politely) disagree. You might change my mind. In a month, I’ll probably change my own mind. I’ll probably revisit this list next year and think I was crazy for picking these films.

If you all like this sort of thing, please leave a comment. I enjoyed writing this post, but if I get no feedback on it then I’ll probably never do another one. But good feedback will encourage me to make more lists.