The Best 80s Horror Movies: 20 Films That Defined the Decade

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining doesn't behave like a normal haunted-house movie.

The Overlook Hotel feels wrong before anything supernatural even happens. Its corridors seem endless, its enormous rooms make people look tiny, and the silence is often more uncomfortable than anything hiding around the corner.

Then Jack Torrance starts to unravel.

Jack Nicholson's increasingly unhinged performance gave horror some of its most recognisable images, but it's the atmosphere that makes The Shining endure.

More than four decades later, we're still arguing about what everything inside that bloody hotel means.

A group of young counsellors arrives at Camp Crystal Lake to reopen a place the locals would rather leave alone.

That goes about as well as you'd expect.

Friday the 13th wasn't the first slasher movie, but its enormous success helped establish the formula that would dominate horror throughout the early 80s.

Campgrounds, teenagers, creative deaths and a killer whose identity remains hidden until the final act.

And although Jason Voorhees wouldn't become the hockey-masked killer everyone recognises until later sequels, this is where the Crystal Lake legend began.

Five friends. An isolated cabin. One extremely unfortunate book.

Sam Raimi didn't have a Hollywood-sized budget when he made The Evil Dead, so he compensated with imagination, camera movement and an almost unreasonable determination to make his audience uncomfortable.

The result feels wild even now.

The camera tears through the woods, demonic possession spreads through the cabin and Bruce Campbell's Ash begins the journey that would eventually turn him into a horror icon.

It is rough, relentless and completely alive.

John Landis somehow made a movie that can make you laugh one minute and horrify you the next.

In American Werewolf in London, two American backpackers encounter something unpleasant on the Yorkshire moors. One dies. The other survives.

Unfortunately, survival comes with complications.

Rick Baker's transformation sequence remains one of practical-effects cinema's great achievements. There are no convenient shadows hiding the process. David changes under bright lights while the camera watches bones stretch and his body transform.

The effects are spectacular.

The fact the film is also genuinely funny makes it even better.

Antarctica is already a fairly terrible place to become trapped.

John Carpenter then added a creature that can perfectly imitate anyone around you.

That's what makes The Thing so effective. The extraordinary practical effects get most of the attention, but underneath them is a brilliantly simple question:

Who can you trust?

Kurt Russell's MacReady and the rest of the isolated research team slowly turn against one another as paranoia becomes almost as dangerous as the creature.

It wasn't universally loved when it arrived in 1982.

Time was considerably kinder.

The Freeling family has a comfortable suburban home, three children, and a television that suddenly starts talking to their youngest daughter.

Things deteriorate rather quickly from there.

Poltergeist takes the supposedly safe American suburb and fills it with ghosts, disappearing children, possessed toys and one clown doll that has probably been responsible for several decades of therapy.

It's huge, imaginative supernatural horror with a surprisingly warm family story at its centre.

And yes, the clown is still horrible.

A possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury shouldn't have much emotional range.

Christine somehow manages it.

John Carpenter's adaptation of Stephen King's novel turns a beautiful red car into a jealous, murderous presence that gradually transforms awkward teenager Arnie Cunningham along with it.

The car repairing itself remains a fantastic effects sequence, but what makes the movie work is Arnie's relationship with Christine.

This isn't simply a killer-car movie.

It's a toxic love story where one half happens to have four wheels.

Whatever you do, don't fall asleep.

Wes Craven found one of the few places a horror villain hadn't properly conquered and put his monster there.

Freddy Krueger didn't need to chase teenagers around a campsite. He could wait for them inside their dreams.

Robert Englund's performance would eventually make Freddy funnier and more theatrical, but the original version is considerably nastier.

And the concept is almost unfairly brilliant.

You can leave the haunted house.

You can avoid Crystal Lake.

Eventually, everybody has to sleep.

Yes, Gremlins is a Christmas movie.

It's also a horror movie about small monsters terrorising a town, murdering people and apparently having the greatest night of their lives.

Joe Dante takes the adorable Gizmo and surrounds him with increasingly horrible creatures who attack suburbia with complete enthusiasm.

The result sits beautifully between horror, comedy and family fantasy.

And beneath all the chaos is one of cinema's most important lessons:

If somebody gives you a mysterious creature with three extremely specific rules, follow the bloody rules.

George A. Romero's zombies had already walked through a farmhouse and overwhelmed a shopping mall.

By Day of the Dead, humanity appears to be losing.

Scientists and soldiers shelter underground while the dead dominate the world above them, and the supposedly safe bunker becomes increasingly dangerous as tensions between the survivors explode.

Then there's Bub.

Romero gave us a zombie capable of learning, remembering and displaying something resembling humanity.

Which raises an uncomfortable question about who the real monsters actually are.

Charley Brewster has a problem.

The handsome new neighbour next door is a vampire.

Unfortunately, nobody believes him.

Fright Night takes classic vampire mythology and drops it straight into 1980s suburbia. Charley knows the rules because he loves old horror movies, but knowing how vampires work isn’t particularly useful when everyone thinks you’re losing your mind.

Enter Peter Vincent, a washed-up television horror host suddenly asked to become the vampire hunter he spent his career pretending to be.

Funny, affectionate and occasionally properly frightening, Fright Night is one of the decade’s great vampire movies.

"Send more paramedics."

That tells you almost everything you need to know.

The Return of the Living Dead took zombies, punk rock, black comedy, and absolute chaos and threw it all into one gloriously messy movie.

These zombies aren’t Romero’s slow-moving dead either.

They run. They talk. And most importantly, they want brains.

It shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.

But that's 80s horror for you.

James Cameron took Ridley Scott's claustrophobic nightmare that was Aliens and asked a simple question:

What if there were loads of them?

Aliens pushes the series towards action without forgetting that the Xenomorph is still terrifying.

Sigourney Weaver's Ripley becomes one of cinema's great heroes, the Colonial Marines discover that confidence isn't particularly useful against an alien hive, and the introduction of the Queen gives the franchise another unforgettable creature.

"Get away from her, you bitch."

Enough said.

Seth Brundle just wants teleportation to work.

For a little while, it appears that he's succeeded.

Then his body starts changing.

David Cronenberg turns a science-fiction premise into one of the decade's most disturbing pieces of body horror, with Jeff Goldblum slowly transforming from brilliant scientist into something increasingly inhuman.

The effects are disgusting.

But what makes The Fly powerful is that underneath all the mutations is a tragedy.

You're not simply watching a monster emerge.

You're watching a man disappear.

Tobe Hooper waited more than a decade to return to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Then, rather wonderfully, he refused to make the same movie again.

The sequel is louder, gorier, funnier and completely deranged.

Leatherface returns, Dennis Hopper brings a chainsaw of his own, and the whole thing becomes an explosion of black comedy and grotesque practical effects.

It's not interested in reproducing the grim realism of the original.

It wants to turn the volume all the way up.

Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die.

It's fun to be a vampire.

Joel Schumacher took the vampire movie and gave it a complete 1980s makeover.

Leather jackets. Motorbikes. Earrings. Massive hair. A brilliant soundtrack. And Kiefer Sutherland looking like the coolest person you're definitely better off avoiding.

But beneath the style is a genuinely clever vampire story about temptation, family and belonging.

The Lost Boys didn't simply bring vampires into the 80s.

It made them cool as hell.

Released the same year as The Lost Boys, Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark couldn't feel more different.

These vampires aren't glamorous creatures hanging around amusement parks.

They're drifters.

A violent makeshift family travelling across America's back roads and feeding wherever they can.

The word "vampire" is famously avoided, but there's never any doubt what we're dealing with.

Dark, dusty and beautifully atmospheric, Near Dark remains one of the decade's most distinctive takes on the vampire myth.

Clive Barker wasn't particularly interested in giving horror another masked killer.

Instead, he gave us the Cenobites.

Hellraiser is a strange, uncomfortable mixture of supernatural horror, desire and extraordinarily unpleasant things happening to human flesh.

Doug Bradley's Pinhead would eventually become the franchise's recognisable face, but the original movie isn't really about creating another Freddy or Jason.

It's far stranger than that.

The Cenobites don't simply promise pain.

They've stopped recognising the difference between pain and pleasure.

A serial killer uses voodoo to transfer his soul into a children's doll.

There are movie ideas that require twenty minutes of explanation.

Child's Play is not one of them.

Chucky works because the concept is immediately understandable and wonderfully horrible. Something designed to be comforting and harmless becomes a foul-mouthed murderer hiding in a child's bedroom.

Brad Dourif's performance gives Chucky his personality, but the original movie wisely takes its time before revealing exactly how alive that doll really is.

Good Guys dolls were never quite as reassuring afterwards.

Sometimes dead is better.

Few Stephen King adaptations have a premise quite as cruel as Pet Sematary.

A burial ground beyond the Creed family's new home can return the dead to life.

That sounds miraculous.

It isn't.

The movie turns grief into the thing that destroys its characters, because knowing something terrible will happen isn't necessarily enough to stop somebody who desperately wants a loved one back.

By the time little Gage picks up a scalpel, the film has already crossed into some extremely dark territory.

It's a suitably nasty way to finish an extraordinary decade of horror.