10 of the Most Underrated Horror Movies of All Time
6. Curtains (1983)
Given the production woes that faced Curtains, it comes as no surprise that the film is not as well remembered as some of its peers from the 1980s. Reshoots, rewrites, a three year long production as well as the original director detaching his name from the movie altogether – it’s easy to see why this would overshadow the film’s genuine quality.
However, the key word here is quality. Not only is the masked killer chilling (how the killer is not up there with the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees is shocking) and the kills themselves very creative, but the character work throughout is excellent, especially that of the character Jonathan Stryker whom manages to be one of the best love-to-hate-him characters of his time.
Curtains is sure to surprise you.
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7. The House of the Devil (2009)
Although the mass of 80s throwbacks that have surrounded a majority of pop culture over the last few years seem to have slowly come to a stop, that doesn’t mean that they are any less fun than when they first began, and perhaps one of the earliest examples of such is The House of the Devil.
Although released a few years before the likes of ‘Stranger Things’, IT and Ready Player One, The House of the Devil seemed to go almost completely unnoticed, making just over $100,000 of its $900,000 budget before being released on Video On Demand. With both the 80s nostalgia boom and rise of video streaming in the years that followed, it could be argued that The House of the Devil was released in the right place at the wrong time, and could have been incredibly successful had it been released in the 2010s instead.
Influenced by the Satanic Panic of the 80s and strenuously replicating an authentic 80s look, The House of the Devil is an incredibly fun, tense, crowd pleasing movie that transports you straight back to the 1980s.
8. The Final Girls (2015)
Similar to the previous entry on this list, The Final Girls also leans heavily into the 80s nostalgic kick that mainstream media was high on throughout much of the mid-to-late 2010s, the only difference being that The Final Girls seemed to be released at the perfect time yet still failed to perform perhaps as well as it should have done.
The film follows Max, the daughter of Amanda Cartwright – a famous Scream Queen most known for the 1986 slasher film Camp Bloodbath – who, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, is sucked into her mother’s most famous movie alongside her best friends.
The setting of the Camp Bloodbath movie, a brilliant rip-off of camp-slasher flicks like Friday the 13th, makes for an incredible amount of fun and self-referential humour throughout. Alongside this is the brilliant relationship between Max and her mother, adding much needed emotional weight to the film.
The Final Girls is an enjoyable ride that will also make you fall in love with the incredibly catchy “Bette Davis Eyes”.
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