A Century of Dark Imagination - He Knows when You've Been Bad 1980-1989
Reagan says it’s morning in
This is the decade when movies change, the era of Spielberg and Lucas, with primitive CGI and Dolby sound to alter reality and rumble the audience’s eardrums. Movies that once would have been children’s fare are suddenly mainstream blockbusters for grown-ups.
The best-selling authors in 
All the weirdness of the 70s creeps like red ivy up the walls of respectable bijous, and the young wizards grow in their craft even as old masters wander into the theater of dark magic. Kubrick makes The Shining. Ken Russell directs Gothic.
Among the best of the decade, Cronenberg’s Videodrome,
Argento’s Inferno and Tenebrae, Carpenter’s The Thing for its Boschian visions,
the first Nightmare on
It is the age of slashers and the “final girl” is its queen.
New guy Sam Raimi makes The Evil Dead for $375,000 and Stuart Gordon brings Lovecraft to the screen as no one had ever imagined in Re-Animator.
The video cassette, born in the mid-70s and ubiquitous in the 80s, transforms the experience of watching movies, opening a world of rediscovered classics, obscure wonders, and foreign delights.
By the end of the decade, the wave of horror mania that
started in the 70s is starting to look a little tired, the hockey mask
yellowing and the bloody cleaver beginning to rust.
Although many fine films are made in the decade, imagination is waning, buried beneath roman numerals and flat sequels.
Slash is becoming hack.
Angela's Pick - Poltergeist (1982)
When it came to the 80’s I was torn between several movies
to pick as a highlight for the decade.
Dressed to Kill gave Angie Dickenson an orgasm to die for, American
Werewolf in London made hairy chests and bumming around Europe the height of
chic, and Chucky made dolls much more than Child’s Play. Drake will touch on one of my very favorite
horror films from the decade, but when it came time to pick my favorite, I had
to go with Poltergeist.
Written by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, the film follows unerringly, the trials of the Freelings – a typical 80s family with one house (the restless spirits came with the built in dishwasher), three kids, and sucky cable TV. Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams brilliantly play the ex-hippie, pot-smoking parents that soon learn their “dream” home has more inside the walls than high-end insulation.
In classic horror film style, the story starts innocently enough, and even when Diane, the open-minded mother, discovers something otherworldly about the house, she is excited –yet scientific – in her explorations of the strange phenomenon that manifests itself in the kitchen. But soon, the excitement turns to terror when the restless spirits abduct the youngest child, Caroline.
What follows are the family’s attempts to retrieve the young girl from the horrific ectoplasmic planes disguised as ceilings and one seeping wound of a closet. Enlisting Beatrice Straight in a dynamite performance as Dr. Lesh, a parapsychologist and unwitting surrogate mom to Diane, the mysteries of the house are soon revealed in a wirlwind of paranormalcy and a wicked, bad-ass storm.
This movie has many strong moments where classic horror elements are paid homage, but the last part of the movie, sadly, falls into what I consider modern horror movie cliché. Steven Spielberg doesn’t like unhappy or unjust endings, and Poltergeist is caught in that expectation. And while the ending is weak, the VERY end holds a wonderful splash of horror humor.
Regardless of the weak ending, the movie is a keeper, one I gladly have in my movie collection, and one I highly recommend for viewing during any time of year, but especially now when Halloween is just around the corner.
As a side note, a rumor/urban legend of a curse associated with the Poltergeist franchise exists. Four cast members – including two principles (Dominique Dunne and Heather O’Rourke) died at very early ages (22 and 12 respectively) within years of the movies, and other strange events surround cast, crew and locations. Just another layer to add to the mystique…
Drake's Pick - The Howling (1981)
1981 is the year of the wolf. John Landis makes An American Werewolf in London, and
Michael Wadleigh directsWhitley Streiber’s The
Wolfen, with wolfcams and Megasound.
Then there is The Howling, directed by Joe Dante, co-written by John Sayles, with a stellar cast of aging B-movie stars, Carradine the Elder, Slim Pickens, Patrick Macnee, Dick Miller, and one aging monster magazine editor, Forrest Ackerman, one of the saints of 20th Century geek culture.
Postmodern is not the right term for The Howling. Maybe Postdrive-in. 
Dante’s little masterpiece looks backward and forward and never loses the sense of dark delight that the best monster stories share, humor on the edge between parody and peril, the spookhouse laugh done right. Filled with sight gags and inside jokes, The Howling is one of the first films aimed straight at the Famous Monsters generation, plugged squarely into the same nostalgia socket where Star Wars and Indiana Jones burn.
And the werewolves are dynamite, the first time anyone has done werewolves like this, more wolf than man, enormous and relentless. With a great skid row setting for the scene where our plucky heroine meets Eddie Quist, unflinching gore, the sexiest lady werewolf of all time in Elisabeth Brooks, and the first werewolf sex scene ever, The Howling is one delight after another.
Perfect? No. Dee Wallace’s performance is weak and some of
the dialogue creaks, but there is so much to look at, so much sheer love in
every frame of this movie for the material and the tradition of horror films,
that it is infectious.
The Howling probably isn’t the best horror film of the decade, but I don’t know of any horror film, from any time, that is more fun.
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