When you think about the horror films of the late ‘70s and ‘80s, you’ll instinctively think about some of the greatest genre films ever made. The ‘80s alone gave us Poltergeist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Fog, among countless others. The decade was perhaps the most widely celebrated era of horror filmmaking, piggybacking off the wild influence of films that came before to ultimately define what the next 40 years of horror would look like.
Looking at those films collectively, a pattern emerges. The slasher boom reached its pinnacle in the ‘80s, but even outside of traditional slashers, so many works centered on a fear of the neighborhood, the family, and the tight-knit community being corrupted. With the spectacle surrounding serial murderers in the ‘80s, as well as the media’s sensationalistic emphasis on violent urban crime, there was an idea that the small town was a refuge from the chaos of it all — and the horror genre made it a personal mission to shatter this sense of comfort. Countless movies tackled the idea directly, but one near-masterpiece exposed the monstrousness lurking at the heart of America’s quaint ghost towns, only to be all but forgotten by time.
