Research: The History of Horror Films:A Journey Through Time (1980)

The Thing(1982)


Little-seen on its release but now hailed as a classic, John Carpenter's masterpiece is actually a remake. He took the Howard Hawks' 1951 sci-fi thriller (based on a short story by pulp author John W Campbell calledWho Goes There?) The Thing From Another World and turned it into a gorefest that has never been equalled. Retrospectively, The Thing has proved itself to be one of the most important horror movies of the 1980s, despite not being a box office success at the time. It is now seen by many as visionary, from a technical (the special effects far outstripped anything previously seen and certain scenes are horrifying to watch even today, nearly three decades on), and from a philosophical perspective. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers it offers a discourse on what it is that makes us human, by examining what happens when our humanity is engulfed by alien biology.


The Shining(1980)


The Book

Stephen King's 1977 bestselling novel is a spin on the traditional haunted house story. When King and his wife, Tabitha, paid a late-season visit to The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, they found themselves the only guests in residence as the staff packed everything up for the winter. King was spooked by the silent, empty corridors, and, after a nightmare featuring his son running screaming through the hotel, came up with the bones of his novel.






The Movie

Stanley Kubrick's movie is substantially different to the book. Rather than being about a family, it's about a location. The Overlook, as imagined by Kubrick, is a series of nightmare-inducing spaces that simultaneously cause claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Kubrick eschews the supernatural explanation that the hotel is an evil entity which manifests via a spectral corpse in the bathtub or topiary creatures that come to life. Instead he suggests it's an extreme case of sick building syndrome: something rotten in the architecture and the carpet designs burrows into Jack's brain and sends him over the edge.





Child's Play(1988)

Another serial killer with a smart mouth and a not-so-snappy way of dressing appeared in 1988, launching another successful franchise. Child's Play(1988) introduced horror audiences to Chucky, who, as well as drawing on the long tradition of malevolent dolls on page and screen, provided an interesting nexus between the monster children of the 1970s and the serial killers of the 1990s. The self-aware irony pre-empted the tone of the post-modern Wes Craven movies of the1990s.





Nine...Ten Never Sleep Again:A Nightmare on Elm Street(1984)

Wes Craven, the former college professor responsible for two of the darkest and most deranged movies of the 1970s (Last House on The Left and The Hills Have Eyes) unveiled a brash, commercial franchise in 1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monster, a hideously scarred Freddy (named after a kid who bullied Wes Craven at school) Krueger represents a successful blend of humour and horror, a deranged killer who doesn't lurk silently behind a hockey mask but menaces in full view, spitting one-liners as he sharpens his trademark glove.