10 Horror Films That Will Make You Nostalgic For The 1980s
1. The Funhouse
When a sleazy carnival arrives in their town, four teenagers decide to spend the night in the funhouse and immediately regret their choice when they witness the murder of a prostitute by a lumbering brute who wears a Frankenstein mask. Without giving too much away, there’s a reason why he has to pay for sex and when the group discover his secret, it leads to a game and cat and mouse in the deserted carnival.
Funhouse may not be as fondly remembered as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s still one of Tobe Hooper’s best films, and he uses the bigger budget to give the movie a garish, unsettling look, that influenced Rob Zombie on House Of 1000 Corpses. Home to such “attractions” as a mutated foetus in a jar and Daisy May The Two Headed Cow, this is the kind of place that would make Zombie’s characters feel at home so it’s apt that the same studio funded (and later dropped) his movie.
The funhouse is also home to such eccentric characters as Marko The Magnificent (William Finley), who appears to murder a member of the audience (“Is there a doctor in the house?”) before revealing that it’s all a gag. There’s also Madame Zena (Sylvia Miles), a potty mouthed fortune teller who tells our heroine, “A tall dark stranger will enter and change your life.” Which of course she does…