1980s Horror films.

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I ask this as someone who is not a fan of the horror genre - 1980s or otherwise.

Yet the enclosed story (LINK) I had located mentions the 1980s as the best decade for the horror genre.

Why the 1980s Is the Best Decade for Horror.
https://www.thefilmagazine.com/why-1980 ... -the-best/

Really?

I'm not a fan but I really liked "Poltergeist" and some others from the 1980s.

As an avid fan of body horror, I can agree with that.

The eighties were before the time of really bad CGI, when animatronics and make up had been used for much better effect. Those were the days of Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and monsters like the Thing. While often badly written and acted, those movies had something special about them that might never be captured on film again.

Poltergeist is the only half-decent 80s horror film that I can think of. My interest in the genre more or less ends in the mid-1970s and coincides with the demise of Hammer films.

'Horror comedy/Comedy horror' - that's one of the issues for me with the genre since the early 1980s. Horror should be horror, full stop, IMO. There's been far too much stuff that's been tongue in cheek, self-referential, too clever for its own good and so on. You can see it in things like the Bond films as well, after Connery was replaced by Moore: the former played it largely straight, whereas the latter seemed continually to be undercutting the story or sending it up. Doesn't he even wink at the camera at the end of one of the films?

The 80's (tail end of 70's thru early 90's) spawned a great number of really popular movies and franchises. Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Hellraiser, Phantasm, scores of movies based on S. King novels, Children of the Corn, Child's Play, Poltergeist, even the campy comedic ones like Re-Animator and Evil Dead had multiple sequels, and helped create the genre of the "dark comedy" that came alive in the 90's, like Death Becomes Her or Idle Hands. Alien helped kick off the idea of sci fi horror, which later gave us things like Event Horizon and Sunshine. People are still afraid of sharks thanks to Jaws. Zombie and undead movies like Creepshow and Lost boys also got sequels, and are still popular to this day, not to mention Lost Boys being early instances of vampires not portrayed in the typical "nosferatu" sense, but also early instances of the "modern" or "cool" vampire that we later get in Interview With a Vampire, Queen of the Damned, Blade, or (ugh) Twilight. The 80's (ish) was also when the first round of remakes was being made, of classics like The Blob, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Last Man on Earth. Not to mention many of those movies started the careers of many great horror and off-color icons such as Robert Englund, Jeremy Combs, Brad Dourif, Bruce Campbell, and more.

It's not so much that 80's horror movies are the best horror movies, as the 80's allowed horror to expand in ways that it hadn't before, and even today we're still riding on a lot of what was pioneered in that decade.

'Blue Velvet'

^ I see your point, but the attempts to integrate the 'horror' and 'comedy' genres just doesn't work for me. I agree that there are a lot of badly made horror films. and I quite enjoy the 'so bad that it's good' aspect of some of them, but contrived 'comedy horror' just leaves me cold, no matter how clever it is.

^ Yup, in principle, though I'm not a fan of the 'cancel culture' (but that maybe belongs to another forum).