The ’80s were bursting at the seams with premium, Grade-A horror movies. The Reagan era ushered in an unprecedented era of horror mascots, thanks to icons like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and “Pinhead.” Meanwhile, maestros of gore John Carpenter and David Cronenberg gifted us with a pair of horror remakes — The Thing and The Fly — so good they completely eclipsed the movies they were based on. With such a wealth of top-notch scary movies, it’s no surprise that some of the decades’ more low-profile horror films slipped through the cracks.
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We’ve put together a list of these hidden horror gems from the MTV decade. Some you may have heard of but avoided based on their reputation, while others were overshadowed by more successful films from the same director. A few might even have had box art that traumatized you as a young child wandering through the video store in search of the latest Disney release.
Whatever the case, allow us to convince you to give these movies the modern-day reevaluation they deserve as we present: the 10 best ’80s horror movies you probably haven’t seen.
1) Night of the Creeps
What do you get when you take zombies, alien parasites, and lines of dialogue like, “The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is, they’re dead,” and throw them into a blender with the guy who made The Monster Squad? The answer is Night of the Creeps, an unsung horror comedy from 1986 starring the decade’s most underrated horror protagonist, Tom Atkins.
Night of the Creeps is a loving homage to the B-horror movies of the ’50s, like The Blob and It Came From Outer Space, that manages to surpass most of its influences. Night of the Creeps has gathered something of a cult following in the nearly 40 years since its initial release. With its perfect mix of goofiness and gore, it’s not hard to see why.
2) Pumpkinhead
When a group of dirtbike-riding teens accidentally kills Lance Henrikson’s son, he begs a witch to conjure the vengeful demon Pumpkinhead to enact violent retribution on those who murdered his boy. Pumpkinhead was the directorial debut of special effects icon Stan Winston, who, after working on such iconic movies as The Terminator and Aliens, finally got a chance to direct his own film.
The titular character is one of Winston’s most original creations, a towering demon whose misshapen cranium only vaguely resembles the squash it was named after. If you’re in the mood for a small-stakes, almost-cozy horror movie with outstanding creature effects, you can’t go wrong with Pumpkinhead.
3) The Fog
Before Stephen King’s The Mist, there was John Carpenter’s The Fog. The 1980 ghost story centers around a mysterious, glowing cloud of fog that envelopes a small coastal town in Northern California. Hiding within the fog is a ship full of revenge-seeking ghost pirates with glowing red eyes and worm-ridden flesh. Despite making a modest profit, the movie is largely forgotten these days, thanks to being sandwiched between two of Carpenter’s best films, Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), a fate it hardly deserves.
While it may not hit the heights of Carpenter’s other ’80s offerings, The Fog, which oozes atmosphere and features a stacked cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hal Holbrook, and — once again — Tom Atkins, deserves more recognition than it gets.
4) Bad Taste
Chances are, you only know Peter Jackson from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit franchises and were unaware of his early horror output. Allow us to obliterate that ignorance completely. Jackson’s debut, Bad Taste, is a micro-budget independent film shot in New Zealand about a group of aliens abducting humans to use as meat in a chain of intergalactic fast food restaurants. As gonzo as it sounds already, no synopsis can do the movie justice.
Bad Taste is full of bonkers scenes cooked up by Jackson at his most deranged. We’re talking exploding sheep, vomit drinking, and a character played by Jackson himself who constantly has to stuff part of his brain back into his head via a hole at the base of his skull. In other words, don’t go into Bad Taste expecting the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
5) Society
If Bad Taste is too tame for your liking, allow us to introduce you to Society. Society’s plot is simple: a teenager discovers that his wealthy family, along with the rest of society’s elites, are inhuman monsters that literally feed on the lower class. How the movie portrays this is anything but.
There is body horror, and then there is Society‘s “shunting,” an indescribable orgy of bodies congealing and melting into one massive, grotesque organism. Despite its disgusting (yet brilliant) makeup effects, Society is worth watching at least once, if only because nothing like the “shunting” exists in any other movie. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, we will leave up to you.
6) The Blob
In a decade featuring some of the most beloved horror remakes of all time — The Thing and The Fly — it’s easy to see how many horror fans can overlook The Blob. While not as high profile as its peers, the Frank Darabont-penned remake of the ’50s B-movie original at least deserves to be part of the same conversation. The Blob revolves around a gelatinous mass that consumes all organic matter it comes across — including humans. Like the above-mentioned films, The Blob trades the cheesiness of its source material for an ’80s excess of grotesque body horror brought to life masterfully with practical effects.
The result is the best fun you’ll ever have watching a human being slowly dissolve inside a Jell-O mold.
7) Prince of Darkness
Prince of Darkness is John Carpenter’s other criminally overlooked ’80s film. The movie has possibly the most unique premise of any in Carpenter’s filmography: a priest asks a quantum physicist and his team to inspect a cylinder of swirling green liquid believed to be Satan. His hope is that the scientists can figure out how to mathematically quantify the ultimate evil so that people won’t think it’s just superstition.
Prince of Darkness makes some bold choices like recontextualizing Jesus Christ as an alien that was sent to Earth 2000 years ago to warn everyone about liquid Satan and presenting Satan’s father as the anti-matter equivalent of God. If you’re in the mood for horror that’s a little more cerebral than “masked man stalks teens and kills them during intercourse,” give this one a watch, you won’t regret it.
8) The Stuff
Imagine if the food industry began selling a sweet, zero-calorie substance that people became so obsessed with, they forsook all other food. Now imagine that substance is an extraterrestrial parasite that replicates itself inside humans until there’s so much it explodes out of them, and you’ve got the plot of 1985’s The Stuff.
The Stuff plays out like a clever satire of corporate greed and late-stage capitalism that feels even more relevant now than when it came out. To quote one of the film’s RoboCop-esque fake commercials, “Enough is never enough of The Stuff.”
9) House
When Roger Cobb inherits his late aunt’s house, strange things begin to happen. Flying garden tools attack him, a dead swordfish taunts him, and the zombified corpse of a soldier he served with in Vietnam kidnaps his son. House takes a cliche, tired concept like the haunted house and gives it a zany makeover. Featuring some really gnarly, monster effects and bolstered by an acclaimed performance from actor William Katt, House is a forgotten horror gem that deserves some love.
With a tagline as brilliant as “Ding, dong, you’re dead,” how can you go wrong?
10) Halloween III: Season of the Witch
If, like many horror fans, you’ve avoided Halloween III: Season of the Witch based on its infamous reputation as one of the worst movies ever made, you’re depriving yourself of a movie that’s a blast from beginning to end. Let’s address the elephant in the room: save for an in-universe television ad, no, Michael Myers does not appear in Halloween III. If, however, you can get past that, you’ll find Season of the Witch quite enjoyable for what it is: a bonkers roller-coaster ride involving pagans, Stonehenge, evil androids, and Halloween masks that transform the wearer’s head into a portal from which snakes, centipedes, and all manner of icky, creepy crawlies emerge.
Yet another Tom Atkins banger — seriously, is there a more underrated horror icon? — Halloween III‘s only crime is calling itself a Halloween movie. Ignore any itch you have to hold that against it, and treat yourself to one of the weirder, scarier movies to come from a major Hollywood Studio in the ’80s.
What’s your favorite ’80s horror movie that no one’s ever seen? Let us know in the comments!
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