10 Horror Movies Where The American Dream Becomes A Nightmare

10. They Live

A director whose best films feel both remarkably timely and ageless, John Carpenter was at his wry, socially motivated best with 1988’s They Live. Coming out at the tail end of the Reagan-led Me decade, it’s a brash and brilliant sci-fi horror based on a concept that’s simultaneously out there and scarily believable.

The late “Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Nada, an aptly named drifter who comes to peak-consumerist Los Angeles in search of work. He finds a job in construction, but more importantly than that, he discovers a pair of sunglasses that show the world in its true form. Donning the spooky shades, the subliminal messages of modern society are made explicit, with billboards and signs demanding that we spend, reproduce, conform.

It’s a brilliantly brash film, with the march of consumerism and empty spending depicted, probably accurately, as a primal force that can’t be messed with. There’s a grand alien conspiracy forcing each of us to think only of material matters - and the humans who know about it are pretty much fine with that.