A decade by decade guide to the horror film genre
Key horror movies from the 1980s
Child’s Play (1988) introduced horror audiences to Chucky, who, as well as drawing on the long tradition of malevolent dolls on page and screen, creates a bridge between the monster children of the 1970s and the serial killers of the 1990s.
Wes Craven, a former college professor responsible for two of the darkest and most deranged movies of the 1970s (Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes) unveiled a brash, commercial franchise in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Overlook, as imagined by Kubrick, is a series of nightmare-inducing spaces that simultaneously cause claustrophobia and agoraphobia… something rotten in the architecture and the carpet designs burrows into Jack’s brain and sends him over the edge.
Made on a shoestring budget by three guys barely out of their teens, The Evil Dead attracted worldwide notoriety for an extraordinarily graphic rape scene. It was banned outright in many countries and slashed by censors in others.
Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing offers a discourse on what it is that makes us human, by examining what happens when our humanity is engulfed by alien biology.
