It Came From the Eighties – A Random Horror Listicle (Part 1)
REPOST: 5 October 2023. I like to repost this one, every year in the lonesome October.
Ah, Horror. The “lesser genre”.
Eternally demeaned, abused, and snubbed by the elders of the film industry.
Yet almost all of the major filmmakers started out in it. The only genre that has produced more mainstream directors is no-shit porn and I am not kidding about that.
Rather than do some best-of-all-time horror movies list I will just concentrate on the 1980s.
The Eighties represent a unique period in the genre. You can’t mistake those films for anything else. For one thing, there was money on the table. That hasn’t always been the case although at the very start it was.
The 1930s was genesis for the genre and they were expensive movies for their day. The much-maligned Studio System actually had quite a few things going for it. It was often very daring and innovative, much more so than today. It was capable of putting a lot of resources behind something new and seriously drive it forward. The Universal Monsters of the Depression-era did exactly that.
Universal’s images of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman, were all suddenly and indelibly pressed into the fabric of American culture. For better than eighty years, no one ever had to guess who these guys were, you knew just by looking at their pictures.
But by the end of the 1940s, there were enough real-life monsters out there that interest in fake ones died out in America. And the Big Three of horror were reduced to comedy relief in an Abbot and Costello movie.
However, the genre was kept alive in postwar Britain; Dead of Night, Quatermass, (anything written by Nigel Kneale come to that), plus a few others.
This led to the next boom in the field. The Hammer Films revival in the fifties. The blood was in gorgeous technicolor and the English came up with an innovation that had been missing in the Universal run of monster movies.
Left and Right
Sex was a big part of Hammer Horror and it dragged women to the theaters like a magnet. Flesh and Blood has a lot more attraction going for it than just blood.
Eventually, Hammer films drifted into self-parody in the late sixties and open embarrassment in the early Seventies. So, the genre died yet again.
The mid-1970s saw a minor revival of American studio-driven horror. The Howling. The Hunger. Rosemary’s Baby and so on. They forgot all about sex, everything was always hopeless for the protagonists and the ending was always bleak. The characters were unlikable and doomed from the start. The production value was there but these films took themselves way too seriously.
1980s horror films did not.
They were their own thing. Pretty much a genre unto themselves. It wasn’t just big hair, headbands, and tight jeans. There were laughs as well as scares. The big thing is that there was a Gen-X flavor to them. The heroes may have been faced with an utterly hopeless situation but they always took whatever they could find and fought back.
The quality was good but not great. The budgets were low but not basement dwelling. The makeup and special effects innovations of the 1970s were cheap enough by then to be within the reach of most producers. And sex appeal was invited back to the party. Occasionally.
Now I am going to confuse a lot of you with this next statement but I don’t regard every horror movie made in the eighties as an Eighties Horror Movie.
John Carpenter’s The Thing while produced in 1982 carries the hopeless ennui of a 1970’s horror film as does his Prince of Darkness. Yet, Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China is damn near the quintessential Eighties Horror Film except for the fact that it is never scary in the least.
It’s a fine line, I know. It’s tricky.
And now on with my completely arbitrary click-bait listicle.
First up.
8. The Gate 1987
An underrated and nearly forgotten film, yet it is genuinely good. The reason it succeeds is that it is respectfully aimed at its core audience, boys that were aged 8-13. It isn’t condescending to them. It comes up with the kind of fears that boys that age have:
The Thing Under the Bed.
The Thing Under the Stairs.
Your Older Sister’s Bitchy Friends.
The Plot is that Glen is alone in the house. His sixteen-year-old sister Alex (who is no longer to be called “Al” has been left “in charge.” He and his big sister were clearly closer at one time. She probably fetched diapers when he came home from the hospital and held his hands when he learned to walk. But now she is at an age where she is actively pushing him away.
The methodology of fear in this film is the betrayal of the familiar. It’s, ‘Mom eating snakes on the kitchen floor.’ Glen is entering adolescent manhood. He isn’t quite ready to be separated from his parents yet, although that is coming soon. Alex distancing herself from him is leaving him very lonely.
The tree that held their childhood treehouse falls over and the hole it leaves behind leads somewhere…else. Which is a fantastic metaphor.
Glen and his metalhead, nerd, and best friend Terry accidentally begin the ritual that will open the Gate and unleash the forces of Hell on Earth.
Small creatures start appearing in the empty house but bigger ones are starting to follow these pathfinders. Alex at first doesn’t believe them but is forced to accept that these demons are real. And that she and her baby brother are in danger.
Terry figures out what has happened and discovers the secret of reversing it. The Closing Ritual is on a metal album that can only be heard if it’s played backward, which is a nice eighties touch that inverts one of the standard tropes of the Metal-Demonology panic from that time.
The Gate has stood up well to the passing of time. It is still a good Goosebumps-level horror flick that is way scarier than anything R.L. Stine ever came up with
7. Vamp (1987)
Vamps is very much dumb fun. It worked in its day as horror and is still worth a laugh today. The theme of this one is, “How do Vampires get away with feeding in the modern world?” Now, this has been explored so much by now that it has gone from great idea to cliche but it was still a pretty new concept when Vamps was released in 1987.
It starred Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler and Deedee Pfeiffer. These actors are all still working and have decent enough resumes but in 1987 it looked like they were all about to break out and make the jump to the big time. It never happened for any of them and I’m afraid this film is probably why.
The reason it failed at the box office was the inexplicable choice of Grace Jones as the lead Stripper/Vampire Queen Katrina. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell they were thinking. Even in her prime she just wasn’t hot. Her English was so weak that they didn’t let her have any lines. All the signs of a director having to shoot around an incompetent actress are present. Her “performance-artist-stripper” routine in this film was weird and off-putting. It wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Salma Hayek’s famous snake dance ten years later.
It just didn’t work as sexy and it needed to in order to carry this film. That one scene was critical. The bottom line was you just didn’t want to bang Grace Jones. The general insistence at the time, that Jones was actually sexually desirable when she obviously wasn’t was one of the first hints of reality-denying SJWism entering the world.
(*Future Herald here: I was told at a convention that Jones was a last-second replacement. Originally the vampire stripper queen was to be played by Brigitte Nielsen. Stallone flipped when he found out about the nudity and she dropped out. I can’t confirm this but it does scan. They got divorced about the time this hit the theaters*)
Back to the movie. This flick almost feels like a John Hughes horror film. It’s that Eighties.
The plot: two frat pledges go on a mission to collect some strippers for their fraternity. They don’t have much money so they look for a down-at-the-heels titty bar in the bad end of town and find the wrong strip club. The vampire strippers drain their low-rent clientele on skid row because no one would ever miss them. And now our heroes have discovered their secret and must be eliminated. The super cool guy Alpha is killed and turned, leaving his Bravo Male best friend as the protagonist. That was innovative and clever. The Bravo wasn’t completely lost but his Alpha best friend had been a protector and then that protector is forced to join the other side, leaving him more vulnerable and shifting the power dynamic firmly against him just as the Second Act gets underway.
The Bravo hooks up with a cute blonde stripper who we never see nude (Dede Pfieffer) they spend the rest of the film on the run first from the vampires and then a gang of albinoes and their black girlfriends with bad teeth, led by career heavy Billy Drago.
They finally get rounded up by the vamps and the Renfield explains the operation. Dede starts a fire and The best friend turned vampire, pulls it together and changes sides as the club burns down. It ends at sunrise with the Bravo his girlfriend and the Alpha walking and talking. The Alpha is in the sewer.
If they remade this film today the Bravo would be a Gamma and the Alpha his bully.
Basically, Vamps is Dusk ’til Dawn, although I don’t know if Tarantino ever gave it a thimble of credit.
This movie was Eighties Horror in full swing. The Dark Herald Recommends with Confidence
