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Cult classics from the 1980s set new standards in horror, blending genres and introducing influential ideas. Films like Cat People and Gothic may not be mainstream, but they deserve recognition for their impact. The 1980s gave us underrated gems like The Return of the Living Dead, Christine, and From Beyond that deserve more credit.

The 1980s were a fantastic time for horror movies and were full of cult classics that just didn't get enough credit. While acclaimed horror movies like The Shining or massive franchises like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street have dominated the conversation around 1980s horror, its important to shine a light on all the other great movies out there. The best cult classics were beloved by horror enthusiasts but sadly didnt have as much resonance for a mainstream audience and have been lying idle, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Many cult classics never got...

Forget the ‘famous book’ doldrums — this exciting seagoing drama will take your head off. Criminally unseen and unheralded, Allied Artists’ classic is an impressive feat by director-co-screenwriter and star Peter Ustinov. It introduced Terence Stamp and provided Robert Ryan with a deserved career highlight.

Billy Budd

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1962 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date January 3, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Robert Ryan, Peter Ustinov, Melvyn Douglas, Paul Rogers, John Neville, David McCallum, Ronald Lewis, Robert Brown, John Meillon, Niall MacGinnis, Terence Stamp.

Cinematography: Robert Krasker

Film Editor: Jack Harris

Original Music: Antony Hopkins

Written by Peter Ustinov, DeWitt Bodeen from the play by Louis O. Coxe, Robert H. Chapman from the novel Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville

Produced by A. Ronald Lubin, Peter Ustinov

Directed by Peter Ustinov

Talk about a book that works like gangbusters… When Warners’ first DVD came out in 2007 I found out...

Next to Universal, few studios have had such a big impact on horror than Rko Radio Pictures. Started in 1927, Rko was the first studio founded to make exclusively sound films, a then-brand-new invention that served as a major draw for the studio. Rko’s life was relatively short (it was killed just 30 years after forming), but during their time, they put out a seriously impressive number of classics, including Top Hat, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Informer, and most notably, Citizen Kane.

Of course, Rko didn’t shy away from horror. While their output wasn’t nearly as prolific as, say, Universal’s, it was still quite impressive, boasting some of the most formative and important horror films of old Hollywood. Rko saw the release of a few all-time classics, including I Walked With a Zombie, The Thing From Another World, King Kong, and the topic of today’s Crypt,...

Fourth of July movies: A few recommended titles that should help you temporarily escape current global madness Two thousand and seventeen has been a weirder-than-usual year on the already pretty weird Planet Earth. Unsurprisingly, this Fourth of July, the day the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, has been an unusual one as well. Instead of fireworks, (at least some) people's attention has been turned to missiles – more specifically, a carefully timed North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile test indicating that Kim Jong-un could theoretically gain (or could already have?) the capacity to strike North America with nuclear weapons. Then there were right-wing trolls & history-deficient Twitter users berating National Public Radio for tweeting the Declaration of Independence, 140 characters at a time. Besides, a few days ago the current U.S. president retweeted a video of himself body-slamming and choking a representation of CNN – courtesy of a gif originally created by a far-right Internet...

Turner Classic Movies continues with its Gay Hollywood presentations tonight and tomorrow morning, June 8–9. Seven movies will be shown about, featuring, directed, or produced by the following: Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Farley Granger, John Dall, Edmund Goulding, W. Somerset Maughan, Clifton Webb, Montgomery Clift, Raymond Burr, Charles Walters, DeWitt Bodeen, and Harriet Parsons. (One assumes that it's a mere coincidence that gay rumor subjects Cary Grant and Tyrone Power are also featured.) Night and Day (1946), which could also be considered part of TCM's homage to birthday girl Alexis Smith, who would have turned 96 today, is a Cole Porter biopic starring Cary Grant as a posh, heterosexualized version of Porter. As the warning goes, any similaries to real-life people and/or events found in Night and Day are a mere coincidence. The same goes for Words and Music (1948), a highly fictionalized version of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical partnership.

This kitty needs no introduction: Simone Simon is the purring-sweet immigrant with a dark atavistic secret. It's Val Lewton's debut smash hit. The real hero is director Jacques Tourneur, who conveys a feeling of real life being lived that won over audiences of 1942 and drew them into his web of fantasy. Cat People Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 833 1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 73 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 20, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph, Jack Holt, Elizabeth Russell, Theresa Harris. Cinematography Nicholas Musuraca Art Direction Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller Film Editor Mark Robson Original Music Roy Webb Written by De Witt Bodeen Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Val Lewton never had to be 'discovered,' actually. Life magazine awarded him his own photo layout and the critics praised him as the maker of a new brand of psychologically based horror films.

Special Mention: Dead Ringers

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider

Canada, 1988

Genre: Thriller / Drama

Dead Ringers is one of David Cronenberg’s masterpieces, and Jeremy Irons gives the most highly accomplished performance of his entire career – times two. This is the story of Beverly and Elliot Mantle (both played by Irons), identical twins who, since birth, have been inseparable. Together, they work as gynecologists in their own clinic, and literally share everything between them, including the women they work and sleep with. Jealousy comes between the two when Beverly falls in love with a new patient and decides he no longer wants to share his lady friend with Elliot. The twins, who have always existed together as one, have trouble adapting and soon turn against one another. Unlike the director’s previous films, the biological horror in Dead Ringers is entirely conveyed through the psychological...

Val Lewton’s third horror film, The Leopard Man (1943) initially seemed promising. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi, it had more pedigree than Lewton’s previous movies. He reunited his previous team: director Jacques Tourneur, writer Ardel Wray, even Dynamite, the black leopard from Cat People. Forced again to film on the Rko lot, he sent Wray to photograph Santa Fe, New Mexico and crafted meticulous sets around her snapshots. Despite this attention to detail, The Leopard Man is one of Lewton’s weakest efforts.

The plot is simple enough. Nightclub entertainers James (Dennis O’Keefe) and Kiki (Jean Brooks) arrive in Santa Fe with a leopard in tow; Kiki’s rival Clo-Clo (Margo) scares the cat, which escapes into the city. The leopard kills a Mexican girl, sending the city into a panic. Several other women die, but James grows convinced that the leopard isn’t behind them.

Val Lewton, Russian émigré turned horror master, was a reporter, pulp novelist and MGM publicity writer before moving into film. He spent the 1930s as David O. Selznick’s story editor, directing second unit work on A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and script doctoring Gone With the Wind (1939), warning Selznick it would be “the mistake of his life.” While not Hollywood’s most prescient man, Lewton’s professionalism earned Selznick’s respect, and their collaboration led to Rko offering Lewton a producing job in 1942.

Rko was reeling from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, an expensive flop forcing a refocus on low budget films. Charles Koerner headed the studio’s B Unit, envisioning a horror series inspired by Universal Studio’s successful franchises. Where Universal culled from established literature (Dracula, Frankenstein), Rko worked from Koerner’s whim: he created a title and left the filmmakers to handle trivia like plot and characters.

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

'Cat People' 1942 actress Simone Simon Remembered: Starred in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic (photo: Simone Simon in 'Cat People') Pert, pouty, pretty Simone Simon is best remembered for her starring roles in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie Cat People (1942) and in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938). Long before Brigitte Bardot, Mamie Van Doren, Ann-Margret, and (for a few years) Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm in a film career that spanned a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both sides of the Atlantic – at times, with fatal results. During that period, Simon was featured in nearly 40 movies in France, Italy, Germany, Britain, and Hollywood. Besides Jean Renoir, in her native country she worked for the likes of Jacqueline Audry...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. I am including documentaries, short films and mini series, only as special mentions – along with a few features that can qualify as horror, but barely do.

Come Back Tonight To See My List Of The 200 Best!

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Special Mention:

Wait until Dark

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Robert Carrington

USA, 1967

Directed by Terence Young,...

It has long been a known fact that Hollywood’s well of ideas has run dry. The box office success of countless retreads, remakes, reboots and updates (whatever you want to label them) only serves to condemn the movie-going public as accomplices in this crime of imagination. Yet for every rule there is an exception and, while some would be reluctant to admit it, Hollywood has indeed produced some remakes worthy of their original’s legacy. This list counts down the top five horror remakes that achieved the impossible: they did not suck…

5. Dark Water (2005)

Directed by Walter Salles

Written by Rafael Yglesias

American filmmakers are obsessed with remaking foreign films in their own image (it’s like they’re afraid we’ll fall asleep from having to actually read subtitles). In the case of Japanese Horror Cinema the American versions tend to eschew the quiet tense dread that is...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

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Special Mention:

American Psycho

Directed by Mary Harrron

Written by Mary Harron

2000, USA

Bret Easton Ellis’s dark and violent satire of America in the 1980s was brought to the big screen by director Mary Harron. Initially slapped with the MPAA’s kiss of death (an Nc-17 rating), American Psycho was later re-edited and reduced to a more commercially dependable “R”. Perhaps the film works best as a slick satire about misogyny,...