1980s: Horror Series and Splatter Comedies

Almost any successful 1980s horror film received sequels. For example, 1982's Poltergeist (directed by Tobe Hooper), dealing with a family who live in a house that unknown to them is on the site of a former cemetery, thereby causing evil forces to kidnap their youngest daughter, was followed by two sequels and a television series.

The endless sequels to Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven's supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were the popular face of horror films in the 1980s, a trend reviled by most critics. Nevertheless, original horror films continued to appear sporadically: Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987) and Tom Holland's Child's Play (1988) were both critically praised, although their success again launched multiple inferior sequels. 

"In the '80s, horror got really friendly," Zombie recalled. "Freddy Krueger started out as a horrible, child-molesting murderer, but by the end of the '80s, every kid wanted to dress up as him for Halloween."

As the cinema box office returns for serious, gory modern horror began to dwindle (as exemplified by John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), it began to find a new audience in the growing home video market, although the new generation of films was much less sombre in tone.

Motel Hell (1980) and Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (1982) were the first 1980s films that utilized the dark conventions of the previous decade while campily mocking them (zombie films like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead had contained black comedy and satire, but were too dark and moody to be funny).

Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead, and Lloyd Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger (all 1985), soon followed. In Evil Dead II (1987), Sam Raimi's explicitly slapstick sequel to the relatively sober film The Evil Dead (1981), the laughs were often generated by the gore, defining the archetypal splatter comedy. New Zealand director Peter Jackson followed in Raimi's footsteps with the ultra-gory micro-budget feature Bad Taste (1987).

Horror films continued to cause controversy: in the UK, the growth in home video led to growing public awareness of horror films of the types described above, and concern about the ease of availability of such material to children. Many films were dubbed "video nasties" and banned. In the USA, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a very controversial film from 1984, failed at theatres and was eventually withdrawn from distribution due to its subject matter: a killer Santa Claus.

The 1980's saw a flourishing of the Fantasy genre which appeal both adults and kids without shoking the moral and values. Best movies in teh period are Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, Poltergeist, The Dark Crystal, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doon, Legend, Highlander, Labyrinth, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, The Princess Bride, Willow, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.