20 Greatest Horror Movies Of The 80s

The 1980s was a decade of prolific output for many of the leading horror directors, with some of the best works from the best directors finding its way to movie theaters. John Carpenter was one such director, directing a film for all but two of the years of the decade.

Carpenter's third movie of the decade, The Thing, following on from The Fog and Escape From New York, is arguably the greatest movie of his career and certainly his most visually excessive. Gone is the restraint on gore seen in Halloween, and The Thing pushed SFX gurus Rob Bottin and Stan Winston to their limits as they crafted the shape-shifting alien and the host entities it tries to emulate.

Yet at the same time, The Thing retains the perfect attention to tension Carpenter is renowned for, his slow moving camera-work around the Antarctic research station building intense atmosphere in which fuels the fires of paranoia and gives the effects set pieces an extra kick. It remains one of the most compelling cases for the superiority of practical effects over CGI in cinema history - as a comparison with the disappointing 2011 remake/reboot demonstrates clearly.