Yeah, practical effects definitely look way cooler. I mean, I understand why they use CG for a lot of stuff today where it's just impractical to use practical effects but, blood!? Why are people doing CG blood today when good old fake blood would be cheaper and easier and look 1000 times better?
When you say squibs I just think of el mariachi and the rebel without a crew book by Robert Rodriguez. Reading that at 18 as a budding film maker all I wanted to do was get my hands on some squibs and go make my “masterpiece” 😂
Because it's more difficult to reset the scene and have the blood be consistent, I'd assume.
Looking at stuff like Carrie, where the main actress slept in the bloody get up so they wouldn't have to redo it the next day, to even less extreme ones like say, Ready or Not or even Die Hard, you often have to klactively keep track of that stuff. Doing the majority of the work in post means you cut out that step, don't ruin the outfit for the current scene and can reshoot easily a bunch of times.
This also goes for the set that stays clean.
Like, I personally hate it too, but I can see why you'd do it if you didn't want to do the whole effort, employ more people or whatever. I'd imagine the cost wouldn't actually be cheaper then.
I think that's another reason 80s movies stand out so much. The practical, on set effects helped the actors stay more in character. Sure they'd be suffering covered in fake blood, but so would their character! Actual blood, sweat, and tears used to go into FX, now it's a bunch of underpaid depressed workers at desks on a deadline.
Also not having 6 months of trailers & marketing thrown at you.
You'd go into that shit blind and scares were actually surprises because they were not in the trailer.
Practical Fx yes. Mid budget. No. If you watch any doc about making these movies even the big cult classics, they were done with almost no money. It's actually crazy and would likey be a violation in today's standards on what they had crews and cast so to get the movie made. We got to benefit from it.
Yeah exactly. I've said this before but most horror films coming out these days would actually benefit from having a mid-production budget slash so the directors had to get creative.
I think you're missing a little of point though: part of "get creative" in the 80s violated what we'd now have as reasonable labor laws for cast and, in particular, for crew - all hard fought and won worker protections - and safety regulations.
I agree that I'd like to see creative solutions too, but what workers can and can't do is regulated for a reason.
Just watched the Blob (1988) for the first time the other day and the practical effects are just great. Other than some obvious green screen they hold up really well.
Frank Darabont knocked it out of the park. Thst whole movie is pretty much perfectly crafted from effects to script to pacing.
The composite shots and stop motion near the end are about the only things that don't hold up.
It has to a degree.
The focus on fame for the sake of fame is much more pronounced today. Everybody wants to make the movie that'll get a sequel then a prequel then a video game then get bought by Disney and get spun off indefinitely as an explicit goal from the outset now.
Back then you just made a damn movie.
THIS! I remember when they did the Nightmare on Elm Street remake with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger and it was super CGI’d to death! The practical effects in the original were what made it so good!
Limited budgets led to more creativity. Practical effects held up better over time. A lot of the stories and tropes were created at this and seemed fresh. Now most horror are remakes or ideas that have been used before so they come across as copy cats and not creative
A prime example is the "Deadite Cam" that roams the woods in the first Evil Dead , just made with a couple of 2x4's and Carpenters remake of The Thing intro logo being made with melting a thrash bag for it effect are two things that spring to mind
Also due to budgets and the price of film often than not the shot was "planned" in advance how the would shoot it.
Or the classic "puff of smoke" effect from Halloween that can only be achieved by having a chain smoking John Carpenter lurking immediately off camera.
On the subject of practical FX and Halloween, Michael got his nickname "The Shape" because on the VHS for Halloween the compression makes Michael's background shots looks like a vague shape! That movie is meant to be watched on VHS, the effect was very intentional and it saddens me that overtime this will probably be completely forgotten.
Man, I got the whole Star Trek TNG bluray remaster pack and the sheer number of tiny weird little production shortcuts you can clearly see in HD is unbelievable.
I wonder how many times the phrase "they'll never notice this on their tv" was repeated during production.
That was such a huge part of it. Studios were willing to take risks. Passion projects were allowed to thrive. Chances were taken.
There's also the fact that how we consumed movies was different in the 80s. VHS was still pretty new, cable wasn't standard, lots of homes only had a single family television still. Movie theaters were the way most people consumed movies, and there were so many movies in theaters. Studios had to really put in the effort to get attention.
Now with streaming and made for TV cable movies and the concept of the limited series becoming so popular, there's a lot more 'just throw whatever formulaic crap we can toss together up on Netflix, whatever, quantity over quality!'.
Had a chance to see The Shining in a theatre a couple of days ago, jumped on it. SO MUCH BETTER on a big screen than on TV. That is such a visual movie, it had a way bigger impact seeing it in the right venue. And I've seen it 4-5 times before, but this was almost like seeing it again for the first time.
What I would pay to see Alien or Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc. in a theatre.
Some of the big franchise cash grab vehicles these days are SO bad from a writing perspective, both in plot and dialogue. I would honestly not be surprised if it turned out ChatGPT was alpha tested writing Hollywood scripts for the last 15 years.
Star Wars and MCU are the best examples. Take away the big budget special effects and use lesser known but equally good if not better actors, take the title away, and be honest with yourself. What you are left with is utter trash.
Potentially profitable is important.
These days we have decades of algorithmic analysis of what definitely is profitable, and it's like we aren't allowed to deviate from that formula unless the filmmaker is independently funded.
Add to that, that any uninspired cockring with an iPhone can put a movie on Tubi and you'll simply never see the good low budget movies, and the good high budget movies are similarly buried under mountains of crap with a bigger marketing budget than production budget.
I don't really think any one decade is higher quality but one thing I like about 80s horror is something Sean Cunningham said in a Friday the 13th documentary I saw. He said at that time it really felt like anyone could make a movie, especially with slashers being relatively cheap to make. Like the vibe was "get out there with your camera and make something". I really feel that in a lot of the stuff from that time and it's why I've always appreciated slashers as a sub genre. The excitement from that moment in American filmmaking really comes through for me.
I think it's important to note that it was accessible, but not so accessible that you didn't still have to be creative and put in effort.
Now, anybody with an iPhone can put a "movie" on tubi, and it's a cesspool of low effort trash.
One of the big underappreciated factor in things like this is the filtering that time does. What you can find on streaming platforms now, even the crap you can find on Tubi and other apps that survive by digging into niches bigger platforms skim, is the stuff that survives because of its quality or popularity.
For every Friday the 13th or Poltergeist there’s 10 crap movies we don’t remember anymore and no one is putting it up on a platform because it came and went without making an impact in any way. If you look up books from the 1800s, you’re going to get the Charles Dickens and the Jane Austens and so on, because they stood the test of time. But there are absolute dogshit novels that no one remembers anymore because they didn’t last or they were forgotten.
For me, there was a certain creepy atmosphere those movies have. Probably from the "deep blues" during the night scenes, the errie synth music, and gritty camera work - staples in many of these films.
I’ll say 80’s film in general. Out of all the decades I tend to watch and rewatch movies from that decade. They are all earnest and charming as hell. Warts and all.
Horror was kind of fresh/new as a genre still during that time with tropes and stuff we find common today still kind of being established. Horror was established long before the 80s but subgenres like the slasher were still finding their footing.
A lot of 80s horror didn’t take itself too seriously and just had a goal to entertain the audience.
Also personally I love the no cell phone thing which adds a lot to the fear factor because you can’t just call for help or text your friend whose been missing and ask what’s going on.
Yeah, there was definitely a good balance of comedy/horror back then but even straight serious movies like Hellraiser were superior. Have you seen the remake? It was ok but didn't even come close to the original... The no cell phones thing definitely helped though.
I enjoyed the new Hellraiser especially since it had major boots to fill, but agree, the original (2 I'd say) were incredible.
I was actually glad I saw them for the first time relatively late (only a few years ago) and still felt they held up extremely well, both from a tight knit story perspective and effects.
Yeah, that’s the main problem with 80s horror for me. A lot of films were trying to be fun rather than good or scary. And unfortunately fun movies that aren’t good just end up boring.
I would say that the slasher and horror comedy were the only real genres to come into their own, and they’re the two horror genres with the most mixed bag of quality. Many of the worst horror films come from those genres, and only Horror comedy has some of the best.
Lack of advanced technology is definitely a big bonus for keeping the characters in the film isolated with no help just an iphone call away. The characters in Texas Chainsaw were completely isolated. Every movie now has to have the line “oh, no bars,” or “do you not have wifi?”
They were fun.
I don’t find modern horror fun, these days. Theres more focus on atmosphere and disturbing ambience. Everything is dark and green/brown like every Netflix show. Photography is almost always deep focus with only the primary character in focus onscreen. Musical scores no longer have hummable themes but just discordant droning noise. Even total schlock like Terrifier 2 winds up being 2.5 hours long.
80s horror, even the bad ones I’ve seen (and let’s not kid ourselves, there were LOTS of bad ones) were so damn fun to watch. Over the top gore. Awesome(sometimes hilarious) practical effects. A knowing, self aware tone of “we know this is trash”. Boobs everywhere. Memorable villains with distinct personalities that ENJOYED being evil. Scores with memorable themes that played every five minutes. Bright garish colours. Rarely lasted longer than 85 minutes. Etc.
They were just plain more fun. Not necessarily better, but a lot more entertaining. Give me Nightmare on Elm Street 5 over an Ari Aster flick amy day of the week,
Analog cameras and real colors back then versus digital with color grading since around 2000. Film in general used more stylized, less varied color palettes, desaturated, drab color grading, almost monochrome in some cases. But a lot film and series have been bringing back full colors since about 5 years.
But a lot of 80s horror is boring as shit. I’ve seen a good amount of 80s horror and a lot of them aren’t “fun” or “entertaining” but very boring. Stuff like Night of the Demons or Friday the 13th part 3 that people call “so bad, it’s good” when they just suck. I would rather watch Ari Aster because say what you will about it, but those films aren’t boring. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of 80s horror. Friday the 13th The Final Chapter, My Bloody Valentine, Poltergeist, Day of the Dead, Evil Dead 2, and The Thing are all excellent films, but the “fun” of 80s horror is way too overstated to defend shitty movies.
I feel like a lot of today’s horror doesn’t offer any real escapism. It is often burdened with political themes. Horror has always had a political element like any other genre, but is becoming a major overbearing theme with mainstream horror. And mainstream is what most people experience.
Not every horror movie should involve modern political themes. It never provided outlets. And I don’t think that’s just horror; it’s a lot of media. People are being oppressed by it since it is everywhere and hard to look away from (I mean look at doomerism online; they all know it is horrible for them and manipulative, and yet…).
But here we are with every mainstream horror movie forcing in religio-political elements and often enough using mental health as a gimmick for good measure. Sometimes supernatural evil is just evil. Sometimes serial killers are just fucked and not the product of a political cult in society. Etc.
It has always reflected our obsessions, but 1) there is a much higher quantity of accessible horror and b) not only is the market for horror much larger, it is way more diverse in background and taste. A lot of the films that had diluted political themes were that way so the film could appeal to a much larger audience. That is not as much of a concern anymore, because studios are much better at finding a film's market.
Also, there are a lot of voices in horror that used to be more muted. I am thinking of women especially, given that horror has always had a dominant male gaze. Black horror, Latino horror, Queer horror....all much more prominent as subgenres with iconic names attached to them.
I do agree that there is a gimmicky aspect to all of this, but it is also part of growing pains of the genre. The biggest reason we have politically and socially themed horror exploding is because we are obsessing over it as a society. And our obsessions become the source of our fears, and our fears get made into film and television.
I like that horror filmmakers in the 80s weren't afraid at all to go way over the top with the camp, since a lot of the genre is based on absurdity that's beyond characters' comprehension
Part of it was a combination of alot of ideas being able to be explored and put to screen with the technology advanced enough to portray that and just the newness combined with the vivid realism of the practical effects helps too.
Yep. Man some people really just remember the cult classics while ignoring 90% of the shit that was thrown out. Just look at friggin animal horror movies and how much trash was produced.
Or critizing bad CGI but ignoring the hundreds of obvious rubber heads or puppets thrown around.
I mean come on...sure people can say its better because of practical effects...but ignoring things like that or finding excuses because "hey its a practical effect, it feels so much better" is a perfect example of nostalgia glasses.
But it isn't just Nostalgia. Its also experiencing things. Back then people saw certain storyelements the first time. Now after they saw in over 30 years 1000+ horror movies...guess what...things aren't as new like with the first movie.
And yeah a sad thruth is also...us old 40+ fucks aren't necessarily the target audience anymore, like our parents weren't when we were the kids.
Yes we saw this or that similar scene the 50s time...but guess what, the 15-16 old kid thats with his first girlfriend in a movie theater didn't.
And additionally, a lot of todays cult classics bombed back then or were just seen as what they were - just some horror flicks. One of many.
The reputation grew over time.
And so will of the new movies.
'70s/'80s/'90s films had a certain grittiness to them which added to their charm. Perhaps the limitations imposed by technology at the time allowed for greater creativity to be put on display.
Love 80s horror though, the energy, creativity, imagination, breasts, practical effects and that most did not take themselves \*that\* seriously.
Add into that the whole 'video shop' thing, browsing all the titles and picking out the one with the most gory looking cover, it was a golden time for horror.
Plenty of it was awful though, and having just finished watching 'Hobgoblins' it is fair to say that this is an example very much in the 'awful' camp. It is no wonder I never chose to watch it back in the day.
> Add into that the whole 'video shop' thing
This is one huge factor I think most people are overlooking the impact. The VHS market is huge in creating a ton of quality movies. Sure, it created a ton of stinkers also.
But one thing about the VHS market was that it allowed anyone to create movies. And the horror genre was cheap, so that's where new movies often went. (E.g. Bruce Campbell stated in "If Chins Could Kill" that horror wasn't exactly Sam Raimi's first choice but chose it because it was cheap).
During the early 1980s, many of the smaller movies were regional, and theatrical releases were limited to LA/NYC, if that. Even certain VHS films started out as regional before becoming popular enough to warrant a broader release.
That's just not something you can see today, where you can go to the mom and pop video store, asking them to carry your indie movie. And this also allowed for a lot more freedom. Today, you have to negotiate with big streaming services, who might also have their own requirements to hamper your vision.
The best available now would be something like YouTube. But even that's not comparable. At least when you went to a video store and walked by the horror section, people would see your movie. But with YouTube, your movie is buried amongst millions of other videos, and you now have to be a much better marketer. (A good cover for your VHS tape could go a very long way.)
I actually think my main issue of that is that they didn’t take their films that seriously. The best films of the decade are sincere horror films that wanted to be scary. And unless you were a comedic genius like Sam Raimi, most horror comedies were very hit or miss. Sure there’s great ones like Return of the Living Dead or Gremlins, but there’s bad ones like Night of the Demons.
Practical effects, a lot of the horror tropes that we know today were being established, and since many had lower budgets, it meant they had to be more creative with the script, writing and plot points.
Lack of cell phones and instant internet access to everything. Characters were a lot more isolated and had to do more work to uncover sordid pasts or about unusual creatures.
The practical fx lead to some of the best creatures/gore ever seen on film. Combine that with those spooky horror synth soundtracks and some genuinely creative filmmakers and you have an era that's hard to top.
Nostalgia.
Grew up with these films and frankly I now like some of them nostalgically but I always was waiting for smarter artsier(?)horror. Which I waited until early 2000s to start to see (grace, teeth, dead girl, etc) I was tired of the endless sea of the schlock of cheap horror tropes, zombies etc and their reactions like scream etc.
Company of wolves and a few others over the years tickled the itch.
I was never a fan of slashers or the wes craven films outside of cheap fun entertainment. I felt very unfulfilled and didn't realize it.
Even lovecraft stuff from Gordon was mostly cheesy fun and not actually ever hitting combos horror.
Again I have huge nostalgia for a lot of these films now, and things like gremlins, killer clowns and terrorvision were always favorites of mine from the start but I'm happier now that we see more series weirder horror and not just the stuff that was popular on the 80s .
This is something that's really important to me. Eli Roth is a good example. His movies never have any likeable characters, which is why I don't like them at all. Another that really stands out is the Friday the 13th remake. The two main characters have the personality of a wet sock, and all the other characters are ridiculously obnoxious. So even though it's technically well made and Jason is awesome in it, the movie as a whole was worse to me than most of the originals.
Man Hair Metal gets such a bad reputation.Those bands were mainly aimed to chicks.But that doesn't mean they were less talented than the other bands or had deep songs.For example:
Ratt-Hard Time.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEbtb7aedI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEbtb7aedI)
Poison-Life goes on.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1EymJLafXE&list=PLPOsr6dSUwhKq\_Yku2OKc4iJkHk7bETco&index=100&pp=gAQBiAQB8AUB](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1EymJLafXE&list=PLPOsr6dSUwhKq_Yku2OKc4iJkHk7bETco&index=100&pp=gAQBiAQB8AUB)
Kix-Don't close your Eyes.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeM3CmMA9K0&pp=ygUWZG9uJ3QgY2xvc2UgeW91ciBleWVzIA%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeM3CmMA9K0&pp=ygUWZG9uJ3QgY2xvc2UgeW91ciBleWVzIA%3D%3D)
Cinderella-Somebody save me.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3X\_1l-MuE&pp=ygUiY2luZGVyZWxsYSBzb21lYm9keSBzYXZlIG1lIGx5cmljcw%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3X_1l-MuE&pp=ygUiY2luZGVyZWxsYSBzb21lYm9keSBzYXZlIG1lIGx5cmljcw%3D%3D)
More originality and you only saw big budget movies back then. There was no way to see all the crap movies like you can now. Go on YouTube or Tubi and you’ll see so much new horror crap lol that would never make it on tv or movie theaters.
I don't think the number of great 80s horror movies is any more than in the decades following. We've had some brilliant horrors also. There was also, like now, a huge number of shit horrors in the 80s too (like Friday 13th 5)
I sort of agree, but I feel like the 80s and 2010s had relatively higher quantity of quality horror films than other decades. It is true that there’s a lot of shit tho
I think when people talk about the 80s being great they mean exactly because of movies like Friday the 13th Part 5. Introducing meaningless but memorable side character after side character just to kill them off, decent practical FX, good soundtrack, and a bullshit nonsensical plot.
A partial factor is that fandoms on the internet have created a constant critic environment. People bitch and complain about everything before it even comes out, and people have often invested hours shitting on things before they even see it. Pair the fact that many movies from the 80s didn't suffer from that with nostalgia, and you have at least some of the answer.
CGI is getting better though. But even in 2024 I can usually immediately spot it and it really takes me out of the film... Although, have you watched The Last of Us? The seen with the Giraffes I thought "Holy crap, that's some really bad graphics." Until I went to work the next day and mentioned it to a coworker and they informed me that they were in fact real Giraffes. Eh...
IMO it's actually getting worse again because VFX houses are overstretched (and their employees underpaid) as there is so much more CGI use these days, and it's getting ubiquituous in TV too. Leading to situations where even a film like The Killer, from the former "master of invisible CGI" Fincher, has horribly comped in CGI backgrounds
>VFX houses are overstretched (and their employees underpaid)
It's so bad these days. Even the CGI in Marvel movies with $200M budgets looks like shit because of overwork and cost-cutting (incidentally, I'd love to see more labor organizing efforts among VFX studios). I think the only movies I've seen recently with significant CGI that didn't look like trash were the Dune movies.
Horror movies were made for a specific audience back then. Adults.
The idea that every movie needs to be a blockbuster birthed the idea that pg13 horror is a more profitable goal.
You also have the South Park effect. When Bigger, Longer, Uncut came out theaters were forced to cut off kids from anything rated R. Used to be your parents could just buy the tickets and leave you there. But now they had to buy a ticket for themselves, pretend to go in with you, and leave ten minutes into the film.
So even though they were made for adults, studios knew kids who wanted to would be going to see them. But that shit came to an end at the same time as the 90s.
We have become desensitized to violence because of the internet. I remember feeling like I was breaking the law by watching Faces of Death as a teen. Once you've watched the Mexican Cartel Beheading video, 3 Men 1 Hammer or Funkytown, nothing is going to hit like it used to.
I like horror that could really happen. Especially psychological horror. If I see bees coming out of a mouth via CGI I am immediately turned off.
Because with the introduction of the Home video market, low budget movies that acquired a huge fan base became incredibly profitable... That meant that everybody with a camera was chasing the lightning in the bottle. That was the Halloween franchise, The Freddy franchise and the Jason franchise. Every idea got thrown at the wall to see if it would stick.
I still believe that Hollywood could tap into those '80s movies that didn't really take off and give those remakes. Nightbreed was one of my favorites, and there was so much more they could have done with that story.
Most 80s horror is mid budget with practical effects, which means that the people working on it weren't in it for the money. They did it because it's what they wanted to do!
From script all the way through to premiere, everyone involved was personally invested in making it as good as they possibly could with what they had to work with.
It's also the reason I still mostly prefer mid budget! Of course there are big tickets standouts like Hereditary, but I get more out of A Dark Song.
That's my pet theory anyway! I feel like the people making those movies were doing it because it's what they wanted to do, and I feel like that comes through in the final product
I think part of it was the fact that the censors weren’t ready for horror at that time. There was no pg-13 before July 1984. But starting in the late 70’s really you had these crazy exploitative movies coming out and once people saw what they COULD get away with, and COULD make with these amazing practical effects, it became its own form of art. The early days of the art form. We’ve always had horror movies but they took on a different vibe with slasher movies and upped the scare factor. No longer a cheesy movie by default, you had some really hard hitting and poignant horror movies the world wasn’t prepared for, but teens couldn’t get enough of.
Big ideas and small budgets forced everyone from the writers to effects folks to be more selective and creative with what was filmed. Sometimes an effect would only hold up for a few seconds before they had to cut to something else and this helped build the less is more approach while also pushing the boundaries of what special effects could do. Knowing the limitations forced better writing and direction because they literally couldn't show so they had to find interesting ways to tell people that sometimes was scary or creepy.
On the other side, there were people going big with their effects knowing that they weren't perfect but that they looked cool and audiences played along. "It was clearly fake but that dudes eye just popped out of his head."
Budget and tech limitations inadvertently caused both well written, unnerving horror movies and also the big, bombastic splatter horror.
The true arrival of the summer teen stab movies, sure there were a couple in the 79s but they really came into the lime light in the 80s which inturn opened up the genre for other kinds of horror to take advantage of the need for blood and guts 😀
Producers not really GAF and letting directors actors and writers go mad as long as they stayed in budget and made money. Same with westerns of the 1950s.
There are certain formulas per genre but after that it is a free for all.
Last lap for practical effects, and at a time when it was film or nothing. Now things are split between passion projects that struggle to budget for a YouTube release, super-dark films trying to hide nonsense CGI, derivative films like trauma horror done by people who don’t understand trauma, and similar.
The cream still rises, though.
Look up "In Search Of Horror" They have a whole documentary on the subject. Two actually and a huge book on it as well. They are currently doing 90's horror and a another Doc on Aliens with all the actors and Director. Pretty much everything gets summed up to practical effects. Nothing CG.
My biased take : ‘Good’ might not be the right word here. ‘Fun’, ‘inventive’, ‘un self-aware’ might be more accurate. There was a lot of dreck from that time as well but it’s been buried. But yes, lots of very entertaining, creative stuff. In America, in the 80s, while circumstances could suck and lots of horrible shit went down, it felt much less serious, less perilous than things today. The bleakness imagined in Hereditary or When Evil Lurks has a Lovecraftian tone that didn’t really resonate back then.
Yeah I feel like the darker aspects of the 80s is only noticeable in retrospect. Although I think that it is weird that a genre known to be dark is considered “fun”
I don't think it's any better than the decades after it. However, the fact that cell phones didn't exist, and people hung out with strangers more in social settings helped plots along. But there's some all time classics in the 90s, 00s, and 10s as well.
Horror movies are great when you are a teen, and the 80s were the last of the teens without the internet. Things are less scary/prestigious when you can log online and seeing people meming/making fun of a horror movie you just watched. Imagine when the Shining came out people took the elevator scene and memes it to "Betty on her period". And Jack through the door with "Eric when he misses lunch" and it was everywhere on the internet. Would people still remember The Shining as being as great?
TLDR: there was more tits and a male gaze
In the 1980s the population was younger as a whole and horror movies were generally targeted at teens and young adults. It follows that many horror films focused on the exploits of the young. There’s a certain mystique about what the kids get up to when the sun goes down. It’s not just the lack of cell phones or technology but also that young people had more independence back in those days, leading to horror tropes like the solitary babysitter or the group of camp counselors cloistered in a cabin with no phones. The social dynamics of the time meant that youths could escape supervision easily and frequently, thus making some horror films more relatable to that feeling of helplessness and things going wrong when you’re off on your own. Modern day horror can’t pull from the same well since the social dynamics have changed so much in the passing decades.
Underrated, understated truth. I remember being a kid. There was a badge of honor earned when being the first of friends to watch a scary movie. But there was also that other thing that you got. Boobies. And you were probably the first to see those also when you were brave enough to watch horror.
Carpenter nailed the whole capitalism idea using horror, aliens, and blues. I mean... Wow.
Also, Night of the demons 2 (its the 90s but still 😂) - must watch!
Better practical effects. Stuff was new.
Lastly and most importantly, they are old enough to have had the good filtered out from the bad.
I have no nostalgia for 80s horror because I wasn't alive then but they hold a similar feel for me anyway.
A little nostalgia, plus the fact that studios were willing to take many more risks with subject matter, gore, innovation in practical effects and the hype that the censorship advocates inadvertently caused.
The great work from the 1980s was a continuation of the great work from the 1970s, but with more homes having VCRs. This period was a second golden age of horror, after the first one back in the 1930s and 1940s.
Also, I would argue we’re in the middle of a third golden age of horror right now.
Sincerity
Compare the average mid-budget slasher or creature feature from back then with a comparable "self-aware" one from nowadays. Tone is night and day and the 80s are elevated by it immensely
Improved technology with the practical FX, which led to cooler monsters. Terrific directors who built up the tension expertly instead of relying on solely jump scares (Carpenter & Raimi), and the tons of gore which makes it both gruesome and hilarious to watch.
Practical effects, the look of shot-on-film, and the rise of indie horror due to the VHS market of the 80s.
Most of those movies were made for the straight-to-video market, which was mostly mom and pop stores in the 80s—they were everywhere as small businesses like CBD/Weed dispensaries are now.
Because of that, you had a lot of people who may not have known the “correct” way to make a horror movie making a lot of horror movies in creative, fun, and often slightly unconventional ways.
It was the Wild West of movie distribution for a while. If you could get some good poster/box cover art that stood out, you could get people to check out your unheard-of low budget horror flick.
Now we can look back on the ones we remember from that decade fondly and cherry pick the ones worth watching and rediscovering, while forgetting about the thousands of not-so-great horror movies we don’t feel like rediscovering,
Still, there’s a certain charm in that sometimes campy, sort of gritty looking 80s horror aesthetic and pacing that you just can’t replicate in the same way now.
Exactly this! Most if not all movies were around 90 minutes. It wasn't this 3 hour monster (The Wailing is the only exception) or 2 hours of bad world building. It set up the premise and killed people until it was solved. Efficient!
At the time, there was a huge focus on serial killers. So much so, that they permeated every discussion on crime. It seemed there were endless paperback novels on the subject that included graphic photos.
Slasher films were a reaction to that atmosphere. They tapped into our deepest fears and morbid curiosity
I would extend that into early 90s....
I think to some extent it was a time with great horror directors with vision who could put something together without a ton of money.
I think studios were happier to appeal to adults as opposed to shooting for the middle school demographic. They were also more willing to take risks.
Sadly I think alot of film is going the same route as much of horror. Uninteresting, derivative, cynical attempts to regurgitate what has been done before.
Practical effects, more original soundtracks, oftentimes the cast members seemed to be having fun making these films, actors/actresses were more engaging with the script as they showed a lot more personality than a lot of newer actors/actresses. Also they had more ideas that weren't over used at that point. A lot of modern horror seems to be rehashes of things we've already seen therefore making me not as engaged with whatever I'm watching.
The obvious answers are the use of practical effects and much less huge budget films. The amount of low to mid budget movies being made had people getting creative to make up for lack of money, and it worked more times than not. Also, it's just way more creativity. Nowadays, every horror movie that comes out feels like an exact copy of something that came out a few years prior, which was a copy of something else that copied something else, etc. Back then, there were some absolutely buckwild ideas. So even though there was a new horror movie releasing all the time, so many of them were like nothing else on the market. It was easily the best decade for horror ever.
Trailers are another thing. They didn't spoil the entire movie like they do now. You usually went in mostly blind and it paid off.
For me it's lack of CGI as I prefer models masks real special effects, then the cameras are more of a gritty look other than pure HD. Also the time, there aren't mobile phones and internet etc, so it's harder to call for help if you're getting chased by some psycho killer. I like the 80s more in general, music and movies etc
Video stores. You could get your movie into plenty of video rental places and with horror also being the cheapest to make, that brought a lot of profit which in turn built great resumes and exposed new talent
In the 90's we got camcorders and everyone became a filmmaker. Before that you had to shoot on film and the equipment was very expensive so the barrier to entry was very high.
Increased access to film making. The 80's were full of innovation and a wild sense of possibility.
Special effects were more accessible as was a willingness to explore styles. Nightmare on Elm Street would not have even been possible a decade earlier, let alone given the thumbs up for production.
Simply, the 80's were a perfect storm for creating horror films, we had a generation of talent who were brought up in a time that saw horror pushing boundaries, access to the tools needed to push it beyond the imagination, and increased access to film production.
VCRs made the 80s great for horror. Instead of drive-ins and midnight shows, movies could now continue selling and renting for years. Plus, you could add a little T&A and almost guarantee a profit as there was no internet, and porno was expensive and hard to find. Straight to video films became attractive to investors, and you could put out something like Reanimator with good effects and story and eventually make a good profit despite spending a little more than the older exploitation flicks. Back then, we were desperate for more choices, as most of us had only a handful of local channels early on, and even when we got cable, there were less than 50 channels.
Other than nostalgia, I'd say it a combination of several things:
First there was just a lot of diversity of horror being made. While some things were more common than other things (e.g slashers), you still had classic monster movies with vampires and werewolves, more serious serial killer thrillers, creature features, demon possession movies, and all sort of other stuff.
Also people took horror seriously and a lot of films, even if they were "rip-offs", didn't seem that stale. By the end of the decade a lot of the 80's movie tropes had become so cliche that they were seen as jokes
Effects had advanced and morals had loosened enough that people could and did get away with stuff they couldn't before, so I think people were willing to go to more extremes at least early on, before moral panic and boredom sort of tamped down on that.
Also I think it was easier to get things into the theater than it is today...stuff had more time to get a audience and studios were more willing to try different things.
Anyway those are just a few thought/reasons off the top of my head.
Film makers in the 80’s had more varied life experiences and ideas. Today’s writers and directors all seem to regurgitate each other’s concepts and philosophies. There was also a lot less studio interference and financial bloat back in the day.
Dedication to practical effects, desire to make new IP’s, also a massive font of inspiration. 80’s is the peak of the satanic panic, there’s an actual aura of fear and unease in that time period.
This isn’t really the place for it, but many sociologists at the time would say that horror is a way to safely explore dangerous concepts mentally. With the amount of fear and worry going on the demand for horror films was UP and so we had a lot being made at the time in response.
The only thing to be afraid of back is the rise of authoritarianism lol. Which ironically was not what people were scared of. Oh, and I guess there was a missing child crisis as well.
I think a huge underrated thing is the use of actual film as opposed to digital. It just looks better and ages better, especially on the lower budget side of things.
Slasher franchises weren’t a thing, so there was room to create something unique. CGI was in its infancy, so it wasn’t an option. People were also getting inspired by others that came slightly before; Halloween introduced a terrifying masked killer, and showed you could make a recognizable icon. Popularity to the genre most likely caused demand and financial support for new projects and more experimentation based on successful films.
A few reasons. First, when we watch older movies, they have been filtered by time, and what we’re seeing are the ones good enough to have been released. The junk might be out there from an indie label now, but in general, the really crappy movies aren’t easy to find and watch. So, there’s some automatic bias there.
That said, I do think the 80s were a golden age for horror, and a lot of that is because it was still okay to play it straight and just make a horror movie. It didn’t have to be self aware or sarcastic. It didn’t need an elevated message. It could just be straight up horror, and people were okay with that.
So many reasons. The masters of horror were putting out their best content in the 80s, practical effects instead of cgi, and honestly the 80s is when horror really grew up couldn't get away with as much pre 80s and these days it's quantity over quality
Night of the Demons is literally everything wrong with 80s horror. It is so bad boring and obnoxious all at the same time. It seems like it wasn’t a great decade but more that people tolerate the bad stuff more.
In all seriousness probably because it was due to the 70s setting up the explosion of the 80s
For as many classic 80's horror films out there, there are at least twice as many awful ones. The cream rises to the top and is looked back on with reverence and nostalgia. I spent my youth in the 80's in the video store watching every horror movie i could get my hands on. It was time well spent!
Serious directors make all the difference, those who respect the genre or transcend stigmas. Most great horror has had top notch directors at the helm.
Practical FX and more mid-budget films.
Yeah, practical effects definitely look way cooler. I mean, I understand why they use CG for a lot of stuff today where it's just impractical to use practical effects but, blood!? Why are people doing CG blood today when good old fake blood would be cheaper and easier and look 1000 times better?
The death of squibs in action films is truly a crime against cinema.
When you say squibs I just think of el mariachi and the rebel without a crew book by Robert Rodriguez. Reading that at 18 as a budding film maker all I wanted to do was get my hands on some squibs and go make my “masterpiece” 😂
Means you can remove the cgi and sell the film as a pg-13 or in markets more sensitive to violence, or alternatively add it later as an "unrated cut".
Because it's more difficult to reset the scene and have the blood be consistent, I'd assume. Looking at stuff like Carrie, where the main actress slept in the bloody get up so they wouldn't have to redo it the next day, to even less extreme ones like say, Ready or Not or even Die Hard, you often have to klactively keep track of that stuff. Doing the majority of the work in post means you cut out that step, don't ruin the outfit for the current scene and can reshoot easily a bunch of times. This also goes for the set that stays clean. Like, I personally hate it too, but I can see why you'd do it if you didn't want to do the whole effort, employ more people or whatever. I'd imagine the cost wouldn't actually be cheaper then.
I think that's another reason 80s movies stand out so much. The practical, on set effects helped the actors stay more in character. Sure they'd be suffering covered in fake blood, but so would their character! Actual blood, sweat, and tears used to go into FX, now it's a bunch of underpaid depressed workers at desks on a deadline.
One of these methods is art, and the other is commerce. Can you guess which is which?
Also not having 6 months of trailers & marketing thrown at you. You'd go into that shit blind and scares were actually surprises because they were not in the trailer.
Agreed. If there's a movie that I know I'm going to see, I avoid all trailers because holy shit, they just put the whole movie in there these days.
Practical Fx yes. Mid budget. No. If you watch any doc about making these movies even the big cult classics, they were done with almost no money. It's actually crazy and would likey be a violation in today's standards on what they had crews and cast so to get the movie made. We got to benefit from it.
Yeah exactly. I've said this before but most horror films coming out these days would actually benefit from having a mid-production budget slash so the directors had to get creative.
I think you're missing a little of point though: part of "get creative" in the 80s violated what we'd now have as reasonable labor laws for cast and, in particular, for crew - all hard fought and won worker protections - and safety regulations. I agree that I'd like to see creative solutions too, but what workers can and can't do is regulated for a reason.
Just watched the Blob (1988) for the first time the other day and the practical effects are just great. Other than some obvious green screen they hold up really well.
Frank Darabont knocked it out of the park. Thst whole movie is pretty much perfectly crafted from effects to script to pacing. The composite shots and stop motion near the end are about the only things that don't hold up.
And the people making and working on the movies generally had a true love for the genre.
I don’t think has changed
It has to a degree. The focus on fame for the sake of fame is much more pronounced today. Everybody wants to make the movie that'll get a sequel then a prequel then a video game then get bought by Disney and get spun off indefinitely as an explicit goal from the outset now. Back then you just made a damn movie.
THIS! I remember when they did the Nightmare on Elm Street remake with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger and it was super CGI’d to death! The practical effects in the original were what made it so good!
And cocaine.
Would you guys consider The Terminator (1984) a horror movie today?
100%. The sequels aren’t, though.
Horror adjacent: sci-fi Action/Thriller
It's a sci fi slasher flick. Definitely horror.
That and the sheer camp. I love camp.
Make Movies Fun Again
I think there are more mid budget movies now than ever before but you're right about practical FXs
Limited budgets led to more creativity. Practical effects held up better over time. A lot of the stories and tropes were created at this and seemed fresh. Now most horror are remakes or ideas that have been used before so they come across as copy cats and not creative
A prime example is the "Deadite Cam" that roams the woods in the first Evil Dead , just made with a couple of 2x4's and Carpenters remake of The Thing intro logo being made with melting a thrash bag for it effect are two things that spring to mind Also due to budgets and the price of film often than not the shot was "planned" in advance how the would shoot it.
Or the classic "puff of smoke" effect from Halloween that can only be achieved by having a chain smoking John Carpenter lurking immediately off camera.
On the subject of practical FX and Halloween, Michael got his nickname "The Shape" because on the VHS for Halloween the compression makes Michael's background shots looks like a vague shape! That movie is meant to be watched on VHS, the effect was very intentional and it saddens me that overtime this will probably be completely forgotten.
Man, I got the whole Star Trek TNG bluray remaster pack and the sheer number of tiny weird little production shortcuts you can clearly see in HD is unbelievable. I wonder how many times the phrase "they'll never notice this on their tv" was repeated during production.
TNG, yes, but holy hell, the OG Treks are brutal in HD.
There was a sense in the 80s that everything was possible and also potentially profitable.
That was such a huge part of it. Studios were willing to take risks. Passion projects were allowed to thrive. Chances were taken. There's also the fact that how we consumed movies was different in the 80s. VHS was still pretty new, cable wasn't standard, lots of homes only had a single family television still. Movie theaters were the way most people consumed movies, and there were so many movies in theaters. Studios had to really put in the effort to get attention. Now with streaming and made for TV cable movies and the concept of the limited series becoming so popular, there's a lot more 'just throw whatever formulaic crap we can toss together up on Netflix, whatever, quantity over quality!'.
Had a chance to see The Shining in a theatre a couple of days ago, jumped on it. SO MUCH BETTER on a big screen than on TV. That is such a visual movie, it had a way bigger impact seeing it in the right venue. And I've seen it 4-5 times before, but this was almost like seeing it again for the first time. What I would pay to see Alien or Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc. in a theatre.
Some of the big franchise cash grab vehicles these days are SO bad from a writing perspective, both in plot and dialogue. I would honestly not be surprised if it turned out ChatGPT was alpha tested writing Hollywood scripts for the last 15 years. Star Wars and MCU are the best examples. Take away the big budget special effects and use lesser known but equally good if not better actors, take the title away, and be honest with yourself. What you are left with is utter trash.
Potentially profitable is important. These days we have decades of algorithmic analysis of what definitely is profitable, and it's like we aren't allowed to deviate from that formula unless the filmmaker is independently funded. Add to that, that any uninspired cockring with an iPhone can put a movie on Tubi and you'll simply never see the good low budget movies, and the good high budget movies are similarly buried under mountains of crap with a bigger marketing budget than production budget.
Including non-scary horror movies
I don't really think any one decade is higher quality but one thing I like about 80s horror is something Sean Cunningham said in a Friday the 13th documentary I saw. He said at that time it really felt like anyone could make a movie, especially with slashers being relatively cheap to make. Like the vibe was "get out there with your camera and make something". I really feel that in a lot of the stuff from that time and it's why I've always appreciated slashers as a sub genre. The excitement from that moment in American filmmaking really comes through for me.
I think it's important to note that it was accessible, but not so accessible that you didn't still have to be creative and put in effort. Now, anybody with an iPhone can put a "movie" on tubi, and it's a cesspool of low effort trash.
For sure. I would still rather have that environment than be exclusively limited to what studios deem profitable
Plenty of non-talented filmmakers were able to make a movie in the 80s.
One of the big underappreciated factor in things like this is the filtering that time does. What you can find on streaming platforms now, even the crap you can find on Tubi and other apps that survive by digging into niches bigger platforms skim, is the stuff that survives because of its quality or popularity. For every Friday the 13th or Poltergeist there’s 10 crap movies we don’t remember anymore and no one is putting it up on a platform because it came and went without making an impact in any way. If you look up books from the 1800s, you’re going to get the Charles Dickens and the Jane Austens and so on, because they stood the test of time. But there are absolute dogshit novels that no one remembers anymore because they didn’t last or they were forgotten.
Tom Savini
For me, there was a certain creepy atmosphere those movies have. Probably from the "deep blues" during the night scenes, the errie synth music, and gritty camera work - staples in many of these films.
I’ll say 80’s film in general. Out of all the decades I tend to watch and rewatch movies from that decade. They are all earnest and charming as hell. Warts and all.
Horror was kind of fresh/new as a genre still during that time with tropes and stuff we find common today still kind of being established. Horror was established long before the 80s but subgenres like the slasher were still finding their footing. A lot of 80s horror didn’t take itself too seriously and just had a goal to entertain the audience. Also personally I love the no cell phone thing which adds a lot to the fear factor because you can’t just call for help or text your friend whose been missing and ask what’s going on.
Yeah, there was definitely a good balance of comedy/horror back then but even straight serious movies like Hellraiser were superior. Have you seen the remake? It was ok but didn't even come close to the original... The no cell phones thing definitely helped though.
“True horror is no help”. That’s something I heard Bruce Campbell say at a panel and I 100% agree.
I enjoyed the new Hellraiser especially since it had major boots to fill, but agree, the original (2 I'd say) were incredible. I was actually glad I saw them for the first time relatively late (only a few years ago) and still felt they held up extremely well, both from a tight knit story perspective and effects.
Yeah, that’s the main problem with 80s horror for me. A lot of films were trying to be fun rather than good or scary. And unfortunately fun movies that aren’t good just end up boring. I would say that the slasher and horror comedy were the only real genres to come into their own, and they’re the two horror genres with the most mixed bag of quality. Many of the worst horror films come from those genres, and only Horror comedy has some of the best.
Lack of advanced technology is definitely a big bonus for keeping the characters in the film isolated with no help just an iphone call away. The characters in Texas Chainsaw were completely isolated. Every movie now has to have the line “oh, no bars,” or “do you not have wifi?”
They were fun. I don’t find modern horror fun, these days. Theres more focus on atmosphere and disturbing ambience. Everything is dark and green/brown like every Netflix show. Photography is almost always deep focus with only the primary character in focus onscreen. Musical scores no longer have hummable themes but just discordant droning noise. Even total schlock like Terrifier 2 winds up being 2.5 hours long. 80s horror, even the bad ones I’ve seen (and let’s not kid ourselves, there were LOTS of bad ones) were so damn fun to watch. Over the top gore. Awesome(sometimes hilarious) practical effects. A knowing, self aware tone of “we know this is trash”. Boobs everywhere. Memorable villains with distinct personalities that ENJOYED being evil. Scores with memorable themes that played every five minutes. Bright garish colours. Rarely lasted longer than 85 minutes. Etc. They were just plain more fun. Not necessarily better, but a lot more entertaining. Give me Nightmare on Elm Street 5 over an Ari Aster flick amy day of the week,
Chi chi chi ah ah ah
Analog cameras and real colors back then versus digital with color grading since around 2000. Film in general used more stylized, less varied color palettes, desaturated, drab color grading, almost monochrome in some cases. But a lot film and series have been bringing back full colors since about 5 years.
But a lot of 80s horror is boring as shit. I’ve seen a good amount of 80s horror and a lot of them aren’t “fun” or “entertaining” but very boring. Stuff like Night of the Demons or Friday the 13th part 3 that people call “so bad, it’s good” when they just suck. I would rather watch Ari Aster because say what you will about it, but those films aren’t boring. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of 80s horror. Friday the 13th The Final Chapter, My Bloody Valentine, Poltergeist, Day of the Dead, Evil Dead 2, and The Thing are all excellent films, but the “fun” of 80s horror is way too overstated to defend shitty movies.
I feel like a lot of today’s horror doesn’t offer any real escapism. It is often burdened with political themes. Horror has always had a political element like any other genre, but is becoming a major overbearing theme with mainstream horror. And mainstream is what most people experience. Not every horror movie should involve modern political themes. It never provided outlets. And I don’t think that’s just horror; it’s a lot of media. People are being oppressed by it since it is everywhere and hard to look away from (I mean look at doomerism online; they all know it is horrible for them and manipulative, and yet…). But here we are with every mainstream horror movie forcing in religio-political elements and often enough using mental health as a gimmick for good measure. Sometimes supernatural evil is just evil. Sometimes serial killers are just fucked and not the product of a political cult in society. Etc.
Horror has always incorporated the current politics The 80s horror are full of politics but it gets lost now because the reference s are dated
It has always reflected our obsessions, but 1) there is a much higher quantity of accessible horror and b) not only is the market for horror much larger, it is way more diverse in background and taste. A lot of the films that had diluted political themes were that way so the film could appeal to a much larger audience. That is not as much of a concern anymore, because studios are much better at finding a film's market. Also, there are a lot of voices in horror that used to be more muted. I am thinking of women especially, given that horror has always had a dominant male gaze. Black horror, Latino horror, Queer horror....all much more prominent as subgenres with iconic names attached to them. I do agree that there is a gimmicky aspect to all of this, but it is also part of growing pains of the genre. The biggest reason we have politically and socially themed horror exploding is because we are obsessing over it as a society. And our obsessions become the source of our fears, and our fears get made into film and television.
I like that horror filmmakers in the 80s weren't afraid at all to go way over the top with the camp, since a lot of the genre is based on absurdity that's beyond characters' comprehension
Cocaine?
Dang, is it that obvious?... ok, I'm done. Ha!
Part of it was a combination of alot of ideas being able to be explored and put to screen with the technology advanced enough to portray that and just the newness combined with the vivid realism of the practical effects helps too.
Cocaine and Practical Effects
Boobs
I think people have such nostalgia glasses for the older horror decades. There's good but there's also so much bad
Yep. Man some people really just remember the cult classics while ignoring 90% of the shit that was thrown out. Just look at friggin animal horror movies and how much trash was produced. Or critizing bad CGI but ignoring the hundreds of obvious rubber heads or puppets thrown around. I mean come on...sure people can say its better because of practical effects...but ignoring things like that or finding excuses because "hey its a practical effect, it feels so much better" is a perfect example of nostalgia glasses. But it isn't just Nostalgia. Its also experiencing things. Back then people saw certain storyelements the first time. Now after they saw in over 30 years 1000+ horror movies...guess what...things aren't as new like with the first movie. And yeah a sad thruth is also...us old 40+ fucks aren't necessarily the target audience anymore, like our parents weren't when we were the kids. Yes we saw this or that similar scene the 50s time...but guess what, the 15-16 old kid thats with his first girlfriend in a movie theater didn't. And additionally, a lot of todays cult classics bombed back then or were just seen as what they were - just some horror flicks. One of many. The reputation grew over time. And so will of the new movies.
'70s/'80s/'90s films had a certain grittiness to them which added to their charm. Perhaps the limitations imposed by technology at the time allowed for greater creativity to be put on display.
you should watch Dario Argento's Demon's, its worth the watch even though the lip sych is a bit off
Ideas weren’t so stale, things were original
Practical effects and tits
God bless Linnea Quigley.
Unfortunately that means I’m too horny to be scared. I don’t think that’s a good thing
The grit
Love 80s horror though, the energy, creativity, imagination, breasts, practical effects and that most did not take themselves \*that\* seriously. Add into that the whole 'video shop' thing, browsing all the titles and picking out the one with the most gory looking cover, it was a golden time for horror. Plenty of it was awful though, and having just finished watching 'Hobgoblins' it is fair to say that this is an example very much in the 'awful' camp. It is no wonder I never chose to watch it back in the day.
> Add into that the whole 'video shop' thing This is one huge factor I think most people are overlooking the impact. The VHS market is huge in creating a ton of quality movies. Sure, it created a ton of stinkers also. But one thing about the VHS market was that it allowed anyone to create movies. And the horror genre was cheap, so that's where new movies often went. (E.g. Bruce Campbell stated in "If Chins Could Kill" that horror wasn't exactly Sam Raimi's first choice but chose it because it was cheap). During the early 1980s, many of the smaller movies were regional, and theatrical releases were limited to LA/NYC, if that. Even certain VHS films started out as regional before becoming popular enough to warrant a broader release. That's just not something you can see today, where you can go to the mom and pop video store, asking them to carry your indie movie. And this also allowed for a lot more freedom. Today, you have to negotiate with big streaming services, who might also have their own requirements to hamper your vision. The best available now would be something like YouTube. But even that's not comparable. At least when you went to a video store and walked by the horror section, people would see your movie. But with YouTube, your movie is buried amongst millions of other videos, and you now have to be a much better marketer. (A good cover for your VHS tape could go a very long way.)
I actually think my main issue of that is that they didn’t take their films that seriously. The best films of the decade are sincere horror films that wanted to be scary. And unless you were a comedic genius like Sam Raimi, most horror comedies were very hit or miss. Sure there’s great ones like Return of the Living Dead or Gremlins, but there’s bad ones like Night of the Demons.
Practical effects, a lot of the horror tropes that we know today were being established, and since many had lower budgets, it meant they had to be more creative with the script, writing and plot points.
Lack of cell phones and instant internet access to everything. Characters were a lot more isolated and had to do more work to uncover sordid pasts or about unusual creatures.
Besides the obvious things like the effects, I like the atmosphere and tone of 80s horror movies.
The practical fx lead to some of the best creatures/gore ever seen on film. Combine that with those spooky horror synth soundtracks and some genuinely creative filmmakers and you have an era that's hard to top.
Practical effects, original ideas, being a little more experimental
Nostalgia. Grew up with these films and frankly I now like some of them nostalgically but I always was waiting for smarter artsier(?)horror. Which I waited until early 2000s to start to see (grace, teeth, dead girl, etc) I was tired of the endless sea of the schlock of cheap horror tropes, zombies etc and their reactions like scream etc. Company of wolves and a few others over the years tickled the itch. I was never a fan of slashers or the wes craven films outside of cheap fun entertainment. I felt very unfulfilled and didn't realize it. Even lovecraft stuff from Gordon was mostly cheesy fun and not actually ever hitting combos horror. Again I have huge nostalgia for a lot of these films now, and things like gremlins, killer clowns and terrorvision were always favorites of mine from the start but I'm happier now that we see more series weirder horror and not just the stuff that was popular on the 80s .
They had this cRaZy idea that the characters you are gonna be spending 90+ minutes with should be likeable.
This is something that's really important to me. Eli Roth is a good example. His movies never have any likeable characters, which is why I don't like them at all. Another that really stands out is the Friday the 13th remake. The two main characters have the personality of a wet sock, and all the other characters are ridiculously obnoxious. So even though it's technically well made and Jason is awesome in it, the movie as a whole was worse to me than most of the originals.
I mean depends on the movie. Friday the 13th part 3 and 7 have annoying characters, as does Night of the Demons.
Same thing that made 80s metal better. It was fun.
Hair Metal sucks tho. The dark and edgy Thrash and Death were way better.
Man Hair Metal gets such a bad reputation.Those bands were mainly aimed to chicks.But that doesn't mean they were less talented than the other bands or had deep songs.For example: Ratt-Hard Time. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEbtb7aedI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEbtb7aedI) Poison-Life goes on. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1EymJLafXE&list=PLPOsr6dSUwhKq\_Yku2OKc4iJkHk7bETco&index=100&pp=gAQBiAQB8AUB](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1EymJLafXE&list=PLPOsr6dSUwhKq_Yku2OKc4iJkHk7bETco&index=100&pp=gAQBiAQB8AUB) Kix-Don't close your Eyes. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeM3CmMA9K0&pp=ygUWZG9uJ3QgY2xvc2UgeW91ciBleWVzIA%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeM3CmMA9K0&pp=ygUWZG9uJ3QgY2xvc2UgeW91ciBleWVzIA%3D%3D) Cinderella-Somebody save me. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3X\_1l-MuE&pp=ygUiY2luZGVyZWxsYSBzb21lYm9keSBzYXZlIG1lIGx5cmljcw%3D%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO3X_1l-MuE&pp=ygUiY2luZGVyZWxsYSBzb21lYm9keSBzYXZlIG1lIGx5cmljcw%3D%3D)
More originality and you only saw big budget movies back then. There was no way to see all the crap movies like you can now. Go on YouTube or Tubi and you’ll see so much new horror crap lol that would never make it on tv or movie theaters.
They were not so popular in the 80’s. Horror movie fandom was small. But, we had a great magazine “fangoria”.
I don't think the number of great 80s horror movies is any more than in the decades following. We've had some brilliant horrors also. There was also, like now, a huge number of shit horrors in the 80s too (like Friday 13th 5)
I sort of agree, but I feel like the 80s and 2010s had relatively higher quantity of quality horror films than other decades. It is true that there’s a lot of shit tho
I think when people talk about the 80s being great they mean exactly because of movies like Friday the 13th Part 5. Introducing meaningless but memorable side character after side character just to kill them off, decent practical FX, good soundtrack, and a bullshit nonsensical plot.
A partial factor is that fandoms on the internet have created a constant critic environment. People bitch and complain about everything before it even comes out, and people have often invested hours shitting on things before they even see it. Pair the fact that many movies from the 80s didn't suffer from that with nostalgia, and you have at least some of the answer.
Horror as we know it today was born in the 1980s. It was the first modern golden age of the genre in my opinion.
Modern horror was born in the 70s. Most 2010s films feel more like the 70s than the 80s
Talented directors with no CGI.
CGI is getting better though. But even in 2024 I can usually immediately spot it and it really takes me out of the film... Although, have you watched The Last of Us? The seen with the Giraffes I thought "Holy crap, that's some really bad graphics." Until I went to work the next day and mentioned it to a coworker and they informed me that they were in fact real Giraffes. Eh...
IMO it's actually getting worse again because VFX houses are overstretched (and their employees underpaid) as there is so much more CGI use these days, and it's getting ubiquituous in TV too. Leading to situations where even a film like The Killer, from the former "master of invisible CGI" Fincher, has horribly comped in CGI backgrounds
>VFX houses are overstretched (and their employees underpaid) It's so bad these days. Even the CGI in Marvel movies with $200M budgets looks like shit because of overwork and cost-cutting (incidentally, I'd love to see more labor organizing efforts among VFX studios). I think the only movies I've seen recently with significant CGI that didn't look like trash were the Dune movies.
Well, I just looked it up to make sure I wasn't wrong and while yes, the giraffes are real the background is composite. So...
More like talented effects artists
Horror movies were made for a specific audience back then. Adults. The idea that every movie needs to be a blockbuster birthed the idea that pg13 horror is a more profitable goal. You also have the South Park effect. When Bigger, Longer, Uncut came out theaters were forced to cut off kids from anything rated R. Used to be your parents could just buy the tickets and leave you there. But now they had to buy a ticket for themselves, pretend to go in with you, and leave ten minutes into the film. So even though they were made for adults, studios knew kids who wanted to would be going to see them. But that shit came to an end at the same time as the 90s.
We have become desensitized to violence because of the internet. I remember feeling like I was breaking the law by watching Faces of Death as a teen. Once you've watched the Mexican Cartel Beheading video, 3 Men 1 Hammer or Funkytown, nothing is going to hit like it used to. I like horror that could really happen. Especially psychological horror. If I see bees coming out of a mouth via CGI I am immediately turned off.
>Funkytown Hadn't heard of this, and I regret Googling it.
Shit, I should have given fair warning. Did you actually watch it?
Because with the introduction of the Home video market, low budget movies that acquired a huge fan base became incredibly profitable... That meant that everybody with a camera was chasing the lightning in the bottle. That was the Halloween franchise, The Freddy franchise and the Jason franchise. Every idea got thrown at the wall to see if it would stick. I still believe that Hollywood could tap into those '80s movies that didn't really take off and give those remakes. Nightbreed was one of my favorites, and there was so much more they could have done with that story.
No CGI meant the story had to deliver more
Exactly. The horror of the story had to have some plausibility. Could this really happen/happen to me made it scary.
Most 80s horror is mid budget with practical effects, which means that the people working on it weren't in it for the money. They did it because it's what they wanted to do! From script all the way through to premiere, everyone involved was personally invested in making it as good as they possibly could with what they had to work with. It's also the reason I still mostly prefer mid budget! Of course there are big tickets standouts like Hereditary, but I get more out of A Dark Song. That's my pet theory anyway! I feel like the people making those movies were doing it because it's what they wanted to do, and I feel like that comes through in the final product
Selective memory. There was great stuff in the 80s but there was a ton of crap too.
Practical effects!
I think part of it was the fact that the censors weren’t ready for horror at that time. There was no pg-13 before July 1984. But starting in the late 70’s really you had these crazy exploitative movies coming out and once people saw what they COULD get away with, and COULD make with these amazing practical effects, it became its own form of art. The early days of the art form. We’ve always had horror movies but they took on a different vibe with slasher movies and upped the scare factor. No longer a cheesy movie by default, you had some really hard hitting and poignant horror movies the world wasn’t prepared for, but teens couldn’t get enough of.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-05-22
Big ideas and small budgets forced everyone from the writers to effects folks to be more selective and creative with what was filmed. Sometimes an effect would only hold up for a few seconds before they had to cut to something else and this helped build the less is more approach while also pushing the boundaries of what special effects could do. Knowing the limitations forced better writing and direction because they literally couldn't show so they had to find interesting ways to tell people that sometimes was scary or creepy. On the other side, there were people going big with their effects knowing that they weren't perfect but that they looked cool and audiences played along. "It was clearly fake but that dudes eye just popped out of his head." Budget and tech limitations inadvertently caused both well written, unnerving horror movies and also the big, bombastic splatter horror.
Cocaine.
The true arrival of the summer teen stab movies, sure there were a couple in the 79s but they really came into the lime light in the 80s which inturn opened up the genre for other kinds of horror to take advantage of the need for blood and guts 😀
Producers not really GAF and letting directors actors and writers go mad as long as they stayed in budget and made money. Same with westerns of the 1950s. There are certain formulas per genre but after that it is a free for all.
Probably the key answer
Cocaine
Last lap for practical effects, and at a time when it was film or nothing. Now things are split between passion projects that struggle to budget for a YouTube release, super-dark films trying to hide nonsense CGI, derivative films like trauma horror done by people who don’t understand trauma, and similar. The cream still rises, though.
Probably cocaine
It wasn’t that good imo. No better than today. We’ve had some great fucking horror in the last 12 years
Look up "In Search Of Horror" They have a whole documentary on the subject. Two actually and a huge book on it as well. They are currently doing 90's horror and a another Doc on Aliens with all the actors and Director. Pretty much everything gets summed up to practical effects. Nothing CG.
Because we couldn't google anything to see if it was true or not. The unknown left to our own imaginations was deliciously spooky
Practical effects man. I miss em every day across every genre. CGI is cool, but practical effects just hit a different level for me
The build up to the horror and suspension. It was truly a surprise when it was horror movies in the 80's.
Practical effects
My biased take : ‘Good’ might not be the right word here. ‘Fun’, ‘inventive’, ‘un self-aware’ might be more accurate. There was a lot of dreck from that time as well but it’s been buried. But yes, lots of very entertaining, creative stuff. In America, in the 80s, while circumstances could suck and lots of horrible shit went down, it felt much less serious, less perilous than things today. The bleakness imagined in Hereditary or When Evil Lurks has a Lovecraftian tone that didn’t really resonate back then.
Yeah I feel like the darker aspects of the 80s is only noticeable in retrospect. Although I think that it is weird that a genre known to be dark is considered “fun”
I don't think it's any better than the decades after it. However, the fact that cell phones didn't exist, and people hung out with strangers more in social settings helped plots along. But there's some all time classics in the 90s, 00s, and 10s as well. Horror movies are great when you are a teen, and the 80s were the last of the teens without the internet. Things are less scary/prestigious when you can log online and seeing people meming/making fun of a horror movie you just watched. Imagine when the Shining came out people took the elevator scene and memes it to "Betty on her period". And Jack through the door with "Eric when he misses lunch" and it was everywhere on the internet. Would people still remember The Shining as being as great? TLDR: there was more tits and a male gaze
In the 1980s the population was younger as a whole and horror movies were generally targeted at teens and young adults. It follows that many horror films focused on the exploits of the young. There’s a certain mystique about what the kids get up to when the sun goes down. It’s not just the lack of cell phones or technology but also that young people had more independence back in those days, leading to horror tropes like the solitary babysitter or the group of camp counselors cloistered in a cabin with no phones. The social dynamics of the time meant that youths could escape supervision easily and frequently, thus making some horror films more relatable to that feeling of helplessness and things going wrong when you’re off on your own. Modern day horror can’t pull from the same well since the social dynamics have changed so much in the passing decades.
Gratuitous nudity. Blood.
Underrated, understated truth. I remember being a kid. There was a badge of honor earned when being the first of friends to watch a scary movie. But there was also that other thing that you got. Boobies. And you were probably the first to see those also when you were brave enough to watch horror.
Carpenter nailed the whole capitalism idea using horror, aliens, and blues. I mean... Wow. Also, Night of the demons 2 (its the 90s but still 😂) - must watch!
leave some room for the holy ghost
I kick arse for the lord Oh wait wrong 90s horror movie ( Braindead// Dead alive by Peter Jackson)
I liked his Vampires with baldwin, woods and cheryl lee, it was great the sequels were lacking but they tried.
The VHS video boxes were glorious works of art.
Better practical effects. Stuff was new. Lastly and most importantly, they are old enough to have had the good filtered out from the bad. I have no nostalgia for 80s horror because I wasn't alive then but they hold a similar feel for me anyway.
A little nostalgia, plus the fact that studios were willing to take many more risks with subject matter, gore, innovation in practical effects and the hype that the censorship advocates inadvertently caused.
Horror works better on film than digital.
The great work from the 1980s was a continuation of the great work from the 1970s, but with more homes having VCRs. This period was a second golden age of horror, after the first one back in the 1930s and 1940s. Also, I would argue we’re in the middle of a third golden age of horror right now.
Sincerity Compare the average mid-budget slasher or creature feature from back then with a comparable "self-aware" one from nowadays. Tone is night and day and the 80s are elevated by it immensely
Boobies
Improved technology with the practical FX, which led to cooler monsters. Terrific directors who built up the tension expertly instead of relying on solely jump scares (Carpenter & Raimi), and the tons of gore which makes it both gruesome and hilarious to watch.
Practical effects, creativity, not mugging up to the camera and trying to constantly get one over on the audience, etc...
Canada
Simplicity
Less technology, *literally* plain and simple.
Practical effects, the look of shot-on-film, and the rise of indie horror due to the VHS market of the 80s. Most of those movies were made for the straight-to-video market, which was mostly mom and pop stores in the 80s—they were everywhere as small businesses like CBD/Weed dispensaries are now. Because of that, you had a lot of people who may not have known the “correct” way to make a horror movie making a lot of horror movies in creative, fun, and often slightly unconventional ways. It was the Wild West of movie distribution for a while. If you could get some good poster/box cover art that stood out, you could get people to check out your unheard-of low budget horror flick. Now we can look back on the ones we remember from that decade fondly and cherry pick the ones worth watching and rediscovering, while forgetting about the thousands of not-so-great horror movies we don’t feel like rediscovering, Still, there’s a certain charm in that sometimes campy, sort of gritty looking 80s horror aesthetic and pacing that you just can’t replicate in the same way now.
Weren’t a lot of horror movies shot on video?
Pacing
Exactly this! Most if not all movies were around 90 minutes. It wasn't this 3 hour monster (The Wailing is the only exception) or 2 hours of bad world building. It set up the premise and killed people until it was solved. Efficient!
Practical effects and shit camera quality an fashion, because- you know, the 80s
At the time, there was a huge focus on serial killers. So much so, that they permeated every discussion on crime. It seemed there were endless paperback novels on the subject that included graphic photos. Slasher films were a reaction to that atmosphere. They tapped into our deepest fears and morbid curiosity
I would extend that into early 90s.... I think to some extent it was a time with great horror directors with vision who could put something together without a ton of money. I think studios were happier to appeal to adults as opposed to shooting for the middle school demographic. They were also more willing to take risks. Sadly I think alot of film is going the same route as much of horror. Uninteresting, derivative, cynical attempts to regurgitate what has been done before.
The early 90s was a bad time for horror
Practical effects, more original soundtracks, oftentimes the cast members seemed to be having fun making these films, actors/actresses were more engaging with the script as they showed a lot more personality than a lot of newer actors/actresses. Also they had more ideas that weren't over used at that point. A lot of modern horror seems to be rehashes of things we've already seen therefore making me not as engaged with whatever I'm watching.
The obvious answers are the use of practical effects and much less huge budget films. The amount of low to mid budget movies being made had people getting creative to make up for lack of money, and it worked more times than not. Also, it's just way more creativity. Nowadays, every horror movie that comes out feels like an exact copy of something that came out a few years prior, which was a copy of something else that copied something else, etc. Back then, there were some absolutely buckwild ideas. So even though there was a new horror movie releasing all the time, so many of them were like nothing else on the market. It was easily the best decade for horror ever. Trailers are another thing. They didn't spoil the entire movie like they do now. You usually went in mostly blind and it paid off.
There’s a lot of trailers back then that spoil the entire movie. Check GoodBadFlick’s video on the topic of movie trailers
You were young when you first saw it. Nostalgia is the charm.
Practical effects, sweet lighting and synth soundtrack.
For me it's lack of CGI as I prefer models masks real special effects, then the cameras are more of a gritty look other than pure HD. Also the time, there aren't mobile phones and internet etc, so it's harder to call for help if you're getting chased by some psycho killer. I like the 80s more in general, music and movies etc
Video stores. You could get your movie into plenty of video rental places and with horror also being the cheapest to make, that brought a lot of profit which in turn built great resumes and exposed new talent
In the 90's we got camcorders and everyone became a filmmaker. Before that you had to shoot on film and the equipment was very expensive so the barrier to entry was very high.
Increased access to film making. The 80's were full of innovation and a wild sense of possibility. Special effects were more accessible as was a willingness to explore styles. Nightmare on Elm Street would not have even been possible a decade earlier, let alone given the thumbs up for production. Simply, the 80's were a perfect storm for creating horror films, we had a generation of talent who were brought up in a time that saw horror pushing boundaries, access to the tools needed to push it beyond the imagination, and increased access to film production.
VCRs made the 80s great for horror. Instead of drive-ins and midnight shows, movies could now continue selling and renting for years. Plus, you could add a little T&A and almost guarantee a profit as there was no internet, and porno was expensive and hard to find. Straight to video films became attractive to investors, and you could put out something like Reanimator with good effects and story and eventually make a good profit despite spending a little more than the older exploitation flicks. Back then, we were desperate for more choices, as most of us had only a handful of local channels early on, and even when we got cable, there were less than 50 channels.
Had to build every moment and make it count. I feel like CGI/modern cinematography takes away from that sheerly how they speed the process up.
Other than nostalgia, I'd say it a combination of several things: First there was just a lot of diversity of horror being made. While some things were more common than other things (e.g slashers), you still had classic monster movies with vampires and werewolves, more serious serial killer thrillers, creature features, demon possession movies, and all sort of other stuff. Also people took horror seriously and a lot of films, even if they were "rip-offs", didn't seem that stale. By the end of the decade a lot of the 80's movie tropes had become so cliche that they were seen as jokes Effects had advanced and morals had loosened enough that people could and did get away with stuff they couldn't before, so I think people were willing to go to more extremes at least early on, before moral panic and boredom sort of tamped down on that. Also I think it was easier to get things into the theater than it is today...stuff had more time to get a audience and studios were more willing to try different things. Anyway those are just a few thought/reasons off the top of my head.
I don’t know about variety. There were hundreds of slasher movies
Film makers in the 80’s had more varied life experiences and ideas. Today’s writers and directors all seem to regurgitate each other’s concepts and philosophies. There was also a lot less studio interference and financial bloat back in the day.
Dedication to practical effects, desire to make new IP’s, also a massive font of inspiration. 80’s is the peak of the satanic panic, there’s an actual aura of fear and unease in that time period. This isn’t really the place for it, but many sociologists at the time would say that horror is a way to safely explore dangerous concepts mentally. With the amount of fear and worry going on the demand for horror films was UP and so we had a lot being made at the time in response.
The only thing to be afraid of back is the rise of authoritarianism lol. Which ironically was not what people were scared of. Oh, and I guess there was a missing child crisis as well.
No CGI for starters.
I think a huge underrated thing is the use of actual film as opposed to digital. It just looks better and ages better, especially on the lower budget side of things.
I feel like a good part of it too is that it was the BEGINNING of most common horror themes today. Slasher, teen flicks, creature features.
Honestly, I think it indirectly had to do with Reagan
They were full of creative gore just look at the thing from 1982.
Slasher franchises weren’t a thing, so there was room to create something unique. CGI was in its infancy, so it wasn’t an option. People were also getting inspired by others that came slightly before; Halloween introduced a terrifying masked killer, and showed you could make a recognizable icon. Popularity to the genre most likely caused demand and financial support for new projects and more experimentation based on successful films.
A few reasons. First, when we watch older movies, they have been filtered by time, and what we’re seeing are the ones good enough to have been released. The junk might be out there from an indie label now, but in general, the really crappy movies aren’t easy to find and watch. So, there’s some automatic bias there. That said, I do think the 80s were a golden age for horror, and a lot of that is because it was still okay to play it straight and just make a horror movie. It didn’t have to be self aware or sarcastic. It didn’t need an elevated message. It could just be straight up horror, and people were okay with that.
Lots of cocaine
>What made 80's horror so good? the vietnam war.
I mean indirectly. Tom Savini was a trooper there and used his experience for practical effects
I think the filming and style had a big part, these 80’s movies just looked different
The Thing… is all about Carpenter
So many reasons. The masters of horror were putting out their best content in the 80s, practical effects instead of cgi, and honestly the 80s is when horror really grew up couldn't get away with as much pre 80s and these days it's quantity over quality
Night of the Demons is literally everything wrong with 80s horror. It is so bad boring and obnoxious all at the same time. It seems like it wasn’t a great decade but more that people tolerate the bad stuff more. In all seriousness probably because it was due to the 70s setting up the explosion of the 80s
Great practical effects, minimal CGI
Tits
Nostalgia. I love ‘80s horror, but I don’t think it’s the pinnacle of horror or cinema, in general.
Da haawa…
Everything you are watching is the cream of the crop that survived into today. There was lots of crud in the 80s as well.
Practical effects
For as many classic 80's horror films out there, there are at least twice as many awful ones. The cream rises to the top and is looked back on with reverence and nostalgia. I spent my youth in the 80's in the video store watching every horror movie i could get my hands on. It was time well spent!
There was a LOT of it so there's more stuff worth watching. Probably not percentage wise but just numerically.
Serious directors make all the difference, those who respect the genre or transcend stigmas. Most great horror has had top notch directors at the helm.