40 Awesomely Weird 1980s Horror Movie Trailers
Choice cuts from a choice decade for horror
The definition of a great movie trailer is equally ambiguous as the definition of a great film, and both have changed fluidly over the course of decades. It’s easy to forget that trailers from a few decades past were very stylistically different—which is to say, they weren’t uniformly full of Hans Zimmeresque BRAAAM sounds, or minor key renditions of pop music hits.
Horror trailers of the 1980s are an especially fun, campy time capsule to explore in the modern day. It was the second golden age of the B movie, as cheapo horror flicks shed the naivete of ‘50s giant monsters and haunted houses to embrace a grimy, splatter-soaked aesthetic replete with neon, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. We dug through some murky Internet backwaters to find this eclectic collection of forgotten, cast-off and supremely weird ‘80s horror trailers, with an eye toward obscurity. Don’t look for Friday the 13th here: Today we celebrate the weird, the wild and the absurd.
The following are listed in chronological order, and—it should go without saying—many of these are NSFW.
1. Schizoid, 1980
This particular Psycho rip-off shows admirable restraint by waiting a full six seconds before barging in with a riff on the Psycho shower scene.
2. Motel Hell, 1980
You know, Sandra, I’m beginning to suspect that this mom and pop isn’t entirely on the up-and-up! The corpse garden is overgrown, and there isn’t even a mint on the pillow!
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