Editorials
30 Years Later: A 1987 Theatrical Retrospective
2017 marks the 30th anniversary for a lot of horror classics. Box office juggernauts like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Predator, or The Lost Boys still elicit just as much fan enthusiasm now as they did back then. Others may not have accrued the box office numbers, but instead acquired a fervent cult following on home video. Whether big or small, each horror film released theatrically on this list has left an imprint on the genre in some way. 1987 marked a year of iconic villains, amazing franchise sequels, surprising anthologies, a major shift in how we viewed vampire films, and, of course, glorious practical effects. In order of theatrical release, these horror films are worth celebrating their major anniversary milestone.
The Stepfather
The major component missing from the 2009 remake was the key that made the 1987 film so chilling; Terry O’Quinn as the titular character. Not only did O’Quinn’s performance earn critical accolades and award nominations, but it gave lead actress Jill Schoelen nightmares for a week after filming the final act. Based on the true story of John List, the dark subject matter snowballs into pure nightmare fuel with O’Quinn’s creepy take on the character. So creepy, that you won’t even notice there’s not much gore. The Stepfather first scared audiences 30 years ago in theaters, on January 23rd.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Released in theaters on February 27, this seminal sequel remains one of the best sequels today. The film was the highest grossing film for the studio that year, and 24th highest grossing film of 1987. Not too shabby. Its 30th anniversary just passed, and in commemoration, Trace nailed exactly why this sequel is so great.
Angel Heart
Do noir films get any darker than Satan? Writer/director Alan Parker explores the noir detective film by way of Satanic occult, keeping the horror scares to a minimum while focusing on the creepy journey of Harry Angel, played by Mickey Rourke. It’s an effective tactic that builds to a twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan proud. Atmospheric, well-acted, and full of graphic violence. Robert DeNiro is prone to overacting in his role as Louis Cyphre, though the scene that sees him eating a hard-boiled egg may change the way you think about them forever. This occult detective horror film is now 30 years old as of March 6.
Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn
A sequel so iconic that it’s been known to replace memories of the original film, at least in terms of tone. Increasing the special effects and injecting slapstick gore makes for the rare sequel that arguably surpasses its predecessor. Even hard to please critic Roger Ebert gave this sequel a favorable review, largely due to the satire. March 13 marks the date that changed how we saw Ashley J. Williams forever. Audiences still can’t get enough; merchandise is still in hot demand. Even a board game based on the movie is currently available for pre-order. I totally want it, too.
Creepshow 2
Written by George A. Romero, this anthology sequel isn’t nearly as beloved as its predecessor, but it’s still a worthy sequel nonetheless. With Tom Savini playing The Creep in the wraparound, the number of Stephen King based segments dropped from five to three due to budgetary constraints. Old Chief Wood’nhead and The Hitch-Hiker have their detractors, but The Raft proves strong enough to hold up the film on its own. The gruesome deaths by the lake blob makes this sequel long-lasting in memory, even 30 years later as of May 1st.
The Gate
This PG-13 horror film still holds up as one of the best horror films geared toward a younger audience; serving as a perfect gateway for those looking to introduce their children to the genre. Starring Stephen Dorff in his first film role ever, the plot sees two 12-year old boys battling miniature demons that have emerged from a hole in the backyard. It’s a fun concept lead by very likeable child actors, but the real star of the film is the fantastic special FX. Play your metal records backwards in commemoration of this film’s anniversary on May 15th.
The Predator
The highest grossing genre film of the year belonged to an Arnold Schwarzenegger starring sci-fi action flick that saw his character facing off against an elite hunter with a moral code from outer space. Upon initial theatrical release on June 12th, critics weren’t so kind though they’ve long since changed their tune. Spawning sequels, crossover films, comics, novels, and games, perhaps it’s only fitting that the franchise is about to come full circle just over thirty years later. Shane Black, who portrayed the geeky Hawkins in the original, is set to release a sequel that he wrote and directed next year. Whether good or bad, it won’t matter; we’ll always have the original, quotable lines, vicious kills, and all.
Blood Diner
This wacky horror comedy is full of camp and heart, following a plot that sees two brothers collecting body parts to resurrect ancient goddess Shitaar. I should probably mention that these two brothers are screwballs and rely on the guidance of their smarter uncle, a talking brain in a jar. Originally conceived as a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast, it was revamped as a standalone B-horror prior to production. Jackie Kong’s movie is so over the top is humor and gore that it’s hard not to love, and Shitaar’s revival doesn’t disappoint. Given a limited theatrical release on July 10th, count yourself lucky if you caught this one on the big screen.
The Lost Boys
Released in the thick of summer on July 31st, this horror comedy shifted the perception of what a vampire movie could be. In short; fun. The original screenplay was conceived more as a Goonies type of vampire movie featuring cub scouts, but we can thank Joel Schumacher for refusing to sign on unless he could change the characters to teenagers. It worked. The group of vampires lead by Kiefer Sutherland’s David may not have been scary, but boy were they cool. The success of this film rests largely on the talented cast, right down to the saxophone guy.
The Monster Squad
Stan Winston creature effects, a classic monsters team up, the discovery that The Wolfman’s gots nards, and kids who love monsters, what’s not to love? I’ve long outgrown the demographic this horror-comedy is aimed toward, and I still want membership to the club. Upon the film’s August 14th release, initial success was lacking. But, like most genre films, it found a huge following on home video. Rewatch for Jonathan Gries take on The Wolfman that feels in line with Universal’s original, and Tom Noonan’s performance as Frankenstein’s monster will break your heart. Bogus!
From a Whisper to a Scream
Also known as The Offspring, this horror anthology marked the last horror film role for Vincent Price. Well, unless you could screwball horror-comedy Dead Heat. Price plays a town historian who relays tales of horror to a visiting reporter. It’s a deliberately paced anthology comprised of four segments all spanning various time periods within the same town. Price also reportedly hated the film, and perhaps its depraved subject matter is to blame. Necrophilia, mutant babies, gory FX, and more keeps this anthology worth revisiting. Its 30th anniversary coincides with its September 4th theatrical release.
The Curse
Directed by actor David Keith, this joint Italian/American production adapted H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”. Produced by Ovidio G. Assonitis (Beyond the Door) and Lucio Fulci (The Beyond), the film centers around young Wil Wheaton’s character, and also stars his real life sister Amy in one of her only acting credits. While the acting is terrible, and the plot is full of inconsistencies, there’s a lot of gross out effects once the meteorite crash lands on the farm. Mutated farm folk, puss-filled chicken eye sockets, and liquefying corpses almost makes up for the cheesy acting. Originally released in theaters on September 11 under the title The Farm, it was changed to its current, more memorable title upon home video release.
Hellraiser
Based on Clive Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart”, the studios felt that title was more appropriate for a romance than a horror film. So Barker offered to name the film “Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave.” Luckily, the title didn’t stick, though it did give indication of the trouble Barker would have with MPAA censorship prior to its September 18th theatrical release. The rest, though, is horror history. Iconic Cenobites, hellish puzzle boxes, and a long-running franchise that’s threatened to reboot for years has made the last 30 years fly by for this favorite.
Near Dark
The recent loss of Bill Paxton is devastating, but perhaps the silver lining is that this underrated flick will find a larger audience. Not the first beloved vampire film released this year, but the first to forego a light-hearted sense of humor for a more visceral approach. Katheryn Bigelow’s take on a vampire story went straight for the jugular. While there are numerous great performances, Bill Paxton once again steals the show. As John Squires rightly pointed out, Bill Paxton’s character introduction is the stuff of legend. Though it turns 30 on October 2, this one is worth celebrating now.
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2
Originally written and filmed as The Haunting of Hamilton High, Samuel-Goldwyn Company purchased the film and marketed it instead as a sequel to 1980 slasher Prom Night. It’s a move that likely hurt the film upon its October 16 theatrical release, but personally, it’s what caused me to fall in love with the series for the first time. Written by Ron Oliver, this sort of sequel is a clear love-letter to the genre; each character is named after well-loved genre directors. The vengeful ghost of prom queen Mary Lou Maloney is iconic, and the film is worth revisiting for the weird rocking horse scene alone.
The Hidden
Director Jack Sholder’s sci-fi/horror/action mashup didn’t exactly take the box office by storm when released on October 20th, but it’s a solid film that earned positive critic reviews and has since gone on to amass a cult following. The concept sees an alien parasite hiding in human hosts as it commits a violent crime spree across Los Angeles, transferring hosts often when the body wears out. An alien cop with a personal vendetta must team up with a human detective while in pursuit. The alien cop, also sporting human skin, is played by Kyle MacLachlan, who clearly translated some of his character quirks to FBI Agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks just two years later. Considering that Twin Peaks is getting a revival series later this year, that makes one more reason to revisit this underrated gem.
Prince of Darkness
Released in theaters on October 23, John Carpenter took on a possession/supernatural horror film the way only John Carpenter can; by infusing the supernatural elements with theoretical physics and atomic theory, complete with the trademark synth soundtrack. When a mysterious cylinder full of green liquid is discovered beneath an old church, a research team and a priest must team up to prevent the coming of the Anti-God. The fantastic cast is led by Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong, and includes a fun cameo by Alice Cooper as a street Schizo with a penchant for bugs. Look for weird green liquid possessions, Satanic zombies, and a unique mythology wrapped in a metaphysics bow. Definitely not the Carpenter flick with the most wide stream appeal, but it’s an amazing classic regardless.
What’s your favorite 1987 horror film?
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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