Best Horror Movies of the ’80s, according to Vulture

Ever sit down to write out a list of the best horror movies of all time? How about if you just picked movies after 1980’s The Shining? Tough job, but the Vulture blog set out to accomplish that task for this Halloween week. Their results? Mixed. (For starters, I never considered Blue Velvet a horror movie.)

Here are the ’80s selections made by Vulture (along with a quote from each entry). Click here to see the full list and find out which movies came out on top.

24. POLTERGEIST (1982): “What happens when the early eighties Spielberg aesthetic — the playful, orchestral John Williams score, the lovingly hectic portrait of suburbia, the ennobled vision of childhood — meets the deranged vision of Texas Chain Saw Massacre auteur Tobe Hooper? Well, Poltergeist happens”

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987): “Terry O’Quinn is “Jerry Blake” in this sly, Hitchcockian slasher movie about a man (based on New Jersey dad John List) who longs so deeply for a perfect nuclear family that he’ll wipe the slate clean (i.e., massacre his wife and kids) when he reaches his (low) threshold for disorder.”

20. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984): “Oddly, the first time I saw Wes Craven’s classic horror movie I was nowhere near as enthused about the grotty ghoul (Robert Englund) as by the terrifyingly brilliant conceit: that children couldn’t wake up from bad dreams, that they could literally kill you.”

14. DAY OF THE DEAD (1985): “Today it seems far more interesting than the crowd-pleasing splatterfest Dawn of the Dead.”

10. VIDEODROME (1983): “It’s quite possibly the gnarliest movie on this list, part dystopian video age manifesto, part nightmarish gross-out mindf—.”

9. EVIL DEAD 2 (1987): “Extreme gore and slapstick, never more gleefully orchestrated than by former Boy Scout and Three Stooges fan Sam Raimi.”

8. JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING (1982): “It’s the horror movie equivalent of a complete mental breakdown.”

7. RE-ANIMATOR (1985): “Every scene has a comic charge—and with a payoff that’s always more splattery than you expect.”

6. BLUE VELVET (1986): “Was this the first indication we got from David Lynch that all was not well in his conception of small-town America?”

4. THE FLY (1986): “What was billed as a hi-tech remake of a 1950s creature feature becomes, in this director’s exacting hands, a chamber drama about desire, consumption, science, disgust, sex, and death.”