Why the 1980s is the best decade for horror

The reactionary as the wellspring of fright

I've been busy with a piece this week but I don’t think it's ready to go out yet. So I dug into my archive to present this piece on the apotheosis of genre scares, 1980s’ horror.

‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (1984)

Let’s say you’re a horror fan – at least for the purposes of this article – and let’s imagine all horror films were to disappear except for one decade’s worth. Which decade would you keep?

The '50s were great for classic ghost stories, the '90s witty and self-referential, and for J-Horror the 2000s represent the peak – but in the end the choice for most lovers of horror would be the 1980s. You’d retain multiple iconic franchises (‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’; ‘Friday the 13th’), the best horror anthologies (‘Creepshow’, ‘Cat’s Eye’) and several kids' horror classics too. Hell, you’d even get ‘Hellraiser’. Yet the enduringness of '80s horror goes beyond individual good films, many as there are, with '80s horror being particularly worthy of celebration for offering a happy coincidence of an artistic, political and cultural context which saw the genre both establish itself and ascend to unsurpassed heights.

Firstly, '80s horror still looks great. The technology of the period was in just in the right place to profit from new developments in prosthetics and special effects, and the rise of the synthesizer offered a piquant and impactful musical accompaniment. Even the film stock of the period possesses a disconcertingly lurid quality. The best 1980s horrors, such as 'Hellraiser', 'The Fly' and 'The Thing' are design classics, their aesthetics perched perfectly between the homespun and the futuristic. In the 1970s pictures such as Jaws and Alien offered substantial advances in effects – and such extravagant curiosities as 'Zombi 2’s' (1979) shark vs. zombie sequence – but it was the fact that impressive effects had become so established (and accessible to lower budgets) which saw them become so much of a part of the furniture for ‘80s horror; think of the twisted visions of ‘Re-Animator’, conjured up for less than a million dollars.

Nothing is less scary than bad CGI, a bane of the horror of the decade which followed. In contrast to the reserve of earlier eras, 1980s horror fully embraces the possibilities of intricate gore, as the period’s emerging ‘body horror’ genre reveals. Much 1980s horror gets the viewer through its inimitable style – a style that whole series such as ‘Stranger Things’ profit from skimming off today.

Yet there’s plenty of 1980s horror which now looks terrible and remains somehow more interesting than the terrible-looking films of other eras (films like ‘Critters’ or ‘Creepozoids’). There is something iconic even in the committed schlockiness of a film like ‘Dead and Buried’ (1981), as sense that even when this era’s horror is bad, it’s bad in a memorable way. Why then does your average 1980s average horror flick still intrigue more than the misfires of other times?

Here it perhaps helps to situate the films in the wider political context of the time. The 1980s were, in the Anglo-American world at least, a time of political paranoia, with the rise of the AIDs crisis and a re-escalation of the Cold War. If horror as a genre is the exploration of unspoken terror through narrative, the 1980s offered an ideal background of repression and subjugation; even the era’s most famous monster, Freddy, literally haunts unconscious minds. One could even argue, and indeed I am doing, that the more reactionary an era’s politics, the better it is for horror as a genre – not least if paranoia and dread is coupled with increasing material wealth; Brian Yuzna’s 'Society', with its epochal closing debauchery, imagines what might grow in this space. If Walter Mondale had won the 1984 US Presidential election, that film may not exist.

‘They Live’ (1988)

This unease can also be extended to the social culture of the time. The era’s often gratuitous female nudity is instructive here; the female-attracted viewer can’t deny they enjoy the (almost always) female flesh on show, while also admitting it contributes to a generally sleazy and fevered atmosphere. The both satirically-appropriate and utterly gratuitous sex scene at the end of 'They Live' is a good example of this; the scene both satirizes the female body as commodity and gets a cheap laugh and minor sexual thrill out of it. We’ll satirize capitalist exploitation, the director seems to be saying, but we also want to show off some breasts.

And a lot of 1980s horror doesn’t even bother with the satirical element. Take ‘The Raft’ sequence of the anthology film 'Creepshow 2', where the female protagonist is stuck between unsolicited groping from the main male character and suction death by underwater monster. For many of the 1980s’ Final Girls, there are no real safe spaces, and surviving the immediate horror means only going back to surviving the horror of the everyday.

That’s just in terms of the heteronormative and heterosexual relationships. In LGBTQ+ terms, a lot of 1980s horror has astoundingly reactionary sexual and cultural politics, like the gobsmackingly transphobic ending to ‘Sleepaway Camp’ or the confused treatment of gay male sexuality of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2’, where Freddy Krueger becomes a manifestation of repressed sexual desire. Both of these films equate having a minority sexual or cultural identity with being a serial killer. Cruel politics that, along with the era’s dated attitudes (with honourable exceptions) to gay people, trans folks and women, make up a distinctive part of why '80s horror exudes the sordid. Tetsuo the Iron Man, who fuses himself into a gigantic scrap-metal testicle in order to realize his queer desire, counts for 1980s' horror as a relatively progressive figure.

Looking back even the era’s children’s films like 'The Goonies' or 'Gremlins' are also noticeably nastier than their modern equivalents; they present horrible worlds in which horrible things happen, even to children, and don’t offer us bromides of liberal piety to guide us to what we should think about it all. Even the most notable Stephen King adaptions of the decade ('The Dead Zone', 'The Shining', ‘Christine’) are relatively free of the author’s trademark sentimentality. To put it facetiously, ‘80s horror is good because the 1980s were fucking horrible.

‘Society’ (1989)

However, as befits a reactionary time, the '80s were also a decade when countercultures sprung up all over the place – in music, lifestyle and print culture. Horror is no exception. Just as there is great mainstream horror with dated politics, the 1980s is also home to brilliant subversive horror from independent filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and John Carpenter (aforementioned gratuitous nude scenes aside). Perhaps it is actually simple; in the 1980s an awful lot of very talented people thought that horror was a genre worth bothering with, or perhaps better establishing, one in which there were still new things to be done.

Decades later, we’ve seen multiple horror films for every permutation of the grotesque and even Human Centipede levels of perversity don’t summon much more than a ‘That’s nice dear’ for the modern horror devotee. Indeed, much of the most acclaimed horror of recent years, such as 'It Follows' or 'Hereditary', has been sharply indebted to 1980s horror; as enjoyable as these films are, they are inevitably less scary than their precursors – at the worst they become horror films about horror films rather than about the world of human fears. The genuinely scariest horror films of recent years, such as Liam Gavin’s 'A Dark Song' or Rose Glass’ 'Saint Maud', are those located entirely in a contemporary world and not dedicated to the perfect recreation of an already achieved aesthetic tradition; by definition, homage is not scary. Indeed, the most influential new horror forms since the 1980s, such as the found footage genre, are notably ones unrelated to the period.

In fact, of all genres it may well be horror that suffers most from connoisseurship and established markers of quality; something we are certifiably aware of, as a ‘prestige’ horror film can no longer surprise us enough to scare us. And, above all, 1980s horror was very scary. Even some of its most comically-dated films contain moments of genuine terror. Indeed, so much so that even after decades of watching it horror fans are still digging up new classics and curiosities both unforgettable and sometimes best forgotten. (‘Pumpkinhead’ springs to mind; I also never need to watch ‘Anguish’ again.) Arguably the years that followed have suffered as a result of the 1980s’ legacy and struggled to expand on the benchmarks for horror and repository of horror tropes the decade handed down.

Can this golden period really be surpassed? Certainly no decade could ever again create films so uneasy with suburban paranoia, fear of sexuality and unexpected explosions of gore, and no horror filmmaker could or should attempt to adopt the era’s sexual politics today. Right now modern horror can be influenced by '80s horror or it can deviate from it entirely. What it can’t do is beat the ’80s on its own terms, problematic as they might often strike us as now. One thing the era shows though is that, for the horror genre, ‘problematic’ means you’re in business.