The Best 80s Horror Movies

The practical-effects golden age

Horror in the 1980s was built by hand. Latex, foam rubber, air bladders and animatronics — the decade between The Shining (1980) and the arrival of digital effects was the high-water mark of practical creature work, and it produced images no computer has improved on. Rob Bottin was twenty-two when he built the transformations for John Carpenter's The Thing (1982); Chris Walas won an Oscar for turning Jeff Goldblum inside out in Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). The craft mattered because the era's best horror was body horror: films about flesh betraying its owner, made in years when AIDS, biotech anxiety and Cold War dread gave that betrayal cultural weight.

The canonical arc of eighties horror is the genre's usual story told at maximum amplitude: contempt first, canonization later. The Shining opened to mixed reviews and a pair of Razzie nominations — for Kubrick and Shelley Duvall — and now sits in the Sight & Sound critics' top 100 and the National Film Registry. The Thing was a genuine catastrophe in summer 1982, buried two weeks after E.T. by an audience that wanted its aliens friendly; it is now, by community-canon measures, among the most beloved horror films ever made, and its ambiguous final scene is a seminar staple. No genre's films travel further between release and canon, which makes horror the best argument for cross-list measurement: a single source — the 1982 box office, say, or the 1980 critics — gets this list completely wrong.

What the decade seeded

Beyond its top rank, the eighties built horror's modern infrastructure: the slasher franchise economy (Halloween's sequels, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street) that taught studios horror was annuity income; the VHS horror section that raised the next generation of directors; and the genre's habit of smuggling social argument inside genre packaging, which the prestige horror wave of the 2010s (Get Out, Hereditary) inherited directly. The three films at the top of this page are the ones the institutions and communities eventually agreed on — but the decade's whole disreputable shelf is upstream of half of what horror does today.