10 Best Animated Horror Movies
8. Heavy Metal
From the sublime to the gleefully, agreeably ridiculous...
Released in 1981, Heavy Metal is a film best described as your favourite rock album cover come to life, or a distilled injection of everything parents fretted about in the eighties, sex, wanton violence, spooky skeletons, and rock music inclusive.
This animated anthology takes the Twilight Zone Movie approach and features a string of occasionally gory, sometimes scary, always entertaining segments which both act as self-contained stories and intersect at different points. A pair of segments act out wish fulfilment sci-fi fantasies to their gory extremes, whilst the stand-out B-17 and Captain Sternn are two slices of military action horror concerning zombies and mutations which bring the goofy, suspenseful horror elements to the fore.
Like its live-action contemporary Creepshow, brevity is the soul of Heavy Metal's success, and none of these campy, self-consciously over-the-top sequences outstay their welcome thanks to the flick's tight runtime.