7. Dead and Buried (1981)
If you have never seen Dead and Buried, then just know that its a clever and imaginatively conceived horror movie with its fair share of gruesome sights, and then come back later and read after watching it. Even putting the film on this list is a mild spoiler of sorts, and this collaboration between Raw Meats Gary Sherman and Alien scribes Ronald Shushett and Dan OBannon keeps its numerous secrets very close to the chest. What makes this modest little feature an unsung minor classic of the 80s is how precise the entire production is in regards to capturing a certain unnerving, paranoid tone. The story is surprisingly dense, and its helped along by a crazed opening scene that sees a paparazzo meet a brutal, incendiary end. From there, the movie unspools as an arcane mystery, following Sheriff Gills (James Farentino) and mortician Dobbs (Jack Albertson) as they investigate a series of brutal murders in the sleepy fishing village of Potters Bluff. Dead and Buried never sinks into campiness as similar pics of the era do, and remains relatively thrilling all the way through. This is one of fx artist Stan Winstons early films, and you can see him cutting his creative teeth on visuals that are scary and delightfully insane. Its an interesting and intriguing exploration of the undead mythos, and it finds some queasy notions in the fallow grave soil of the genre. Keep an eye out too, for Fred Krueger himself, Robert Englund, slinking about in Potters Bluff a few years before the dream demon would show up on Elm St.