You’re a horror fan, and you’re starting to feel like you’ve seen it all. You’ve grown tired of such pedestrian debates as “’Halloween 3′ is underrated” and “’Prince of Darkness’ is John Carpenter’s best movie!” You’re looking to really sink your teeth into horror’s greatest decade, the 1980s, and uncover all those sweet sweet underappreciated gems that most people have never heard of. Because what else are you going to do? It’s not like you have a job or anything.
We’ve compiled a list of the 30 most underrated slasher films and ranked them by how likely watching them will make all of your problems go away. Just kidding! Only you can do that, and you won’t, and that’s why you’re here. Anyway, let’s count ’em down!
30. Hell Night (1981)
Out of all Linda Blair’s post “The Exorcist” movies, “Hell Night” is certainly… uhm, one of them. Four college pledges spend the night in an infamous house of horrors, unaware that it is the home of a maniac who picks them off one by one. It’s nothing groundbreaking and a little uneven, but if this one is on your radar, congratulations, you probably have no marketable skills.
29. The Mutilator (1984)
Years after a boy accidentally shoots his mother attempting to clean his father’s gun, the dad has a meltdown and seeks revenge against the boy and all his friends. Yes, it’s insane that this movie is bookended by the upbeat sitcom opening-esque song “Fall Break,” it’s a bonkers choice that does not match the tone of the film at all, but you really need to stop talking about it at job interviews.
28. Offerings (1989)
This movie has long been criticized as a shameless “Halloween” rip-off, but you yourself have long been criticized as an unemployable train wreck who just can’t get their shit together. The truth hurts is what I’m saying.
27. Moonstalker (1989)
It’s standard slasher fair but its unique snowy setting will give you something to talk about while dodging questions like “So how’s the job search coming?”
26. Slaughter High (1986)
A bullied high school nerd gets revenge on his abusers by staging a fake reunion and locking them in the school where he picks them off one by one. It’s no “Halloween,” or even “Halloween 5,” but what else were you gonna do today?
25. Death Spa (1988)
We all know the spa is supposed to be a place of health and relaxation, but what if, instead of that, they MURDERED you?! That’s the premise, and it’s more than you deserve. And hey, Ken Foree is in it! You know who he is because you haven’t had a job since before the pandemic.
24. Just Before Dawn (1981)
This is your classic young people in the woods being murdered formula with a fun twist totally worth blowing off that job fair for.
23. The Final Terror (1983)
The title is a little misleading. At no point do any of the characters get hit with overdraft fees and an eviction notice on the same day. Can YOU survive? Seriously, can you?
22. Curtains (1983)
6 women, each auditioning for the same film role at a mansion, are targeted by a deranged killer, but hey, at least they’re trying to find work. What have you done all day?
21. Nightmare Beach (1988)
A slasher villain who rides a motorcycle?! Oh shit, guess checking for entry-level job postings on Craigslist will have to wait, this demands your attention!
20. The House On Sorority Row (1982)
Of all the college sorority-based horror movies of the ’80s you can watch in the middle of the day instead of attempting to improve your life in any way shape or form, this is one you maybe haven’t done that with yet.
19. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)
Sure, the Friday the 13th franchise is far from underrated, but this one has always been the black sheep of the franchise and frankly, we think it’s about due for a “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” type resurgence. It was unfairly maligned upon its release because it doesn’t feature Jason, focusing instead on a copycat killer, but it’s a perfect time capsule of peak ’80s sleaziness, and championing dumb opinions is the closest thing to a job you have.
18. The Initiation (1984)
Another sorority pledge gone wrong horror movie. Man, a lot of these horror movies take place at college. Probably best you don’t finish school.
17. April Fool’s Day (1986)
A competent, well-executed by-the-book slasher with a fun twist that will leave you, well, pretty much the same unemployable mess, but you’ll have seen this movie!
16. The Burning (1981)
While largely underseen, this slasher inspired by the legend of Cropsy has long enjoyed cult-classic status among horror aficionados. If you haven’t already seen it, face it, you have time to watch an ’80s slasher where you see Jason Alexander’s big ol’ butt, and while that might not be an ideal mode of life, you should take advantage of the perks.
Cannibal Corpse’s 2014 release, while containing all the fixings that one expects from the Buffalo Boys, sounds like they just “winged” it, with recycled riffs, unimaginative song titles, and relatively tame artwork. But since every band who has been around for 20 plus years is entitled to one album that doesn’t quite hit the mark, we can say with confidence that this one hits with force.
Second to last on our list is Cannibal’s relatively tame outing with “Torture”. While still forceful, it lacks the pzazz of prior releases, and while passable, is noticeably lacking in any torturous elements. But 2012 was supposed to be the end of the world, so maybe the cannibal dudes just felt like having a good time unhinged from the gore and more that made them a household heavy metal name.
Ranking Cannibal Corpse albums is a task of Herculean might and Socratic intellect, and since we at The Hard Times possess only the liquor appetite and strength of Zeus’s arguably favourite son, we choose brute force for this one. Cudgeled together, and roughly stitched together in honor of our Cannibal overlords, these albums contain the cannibal assault, and when smashed together, probably sound good, but we need to clean the blood off our hand from the attempt to merge three CDs together. Plus, we kinda think all the bodies on the cover would look cool sewn together. METAL!
The final album with Pat O’Brien is running red hot with riffs, blood drips, and frets of fire, barbed wire and murder conspired. Like “The Simpsons” and Nostrodamus before them, these godly gashers may have predicted the incendiary future that awaited them following the album’s release.
While Many Bands suffer from Mid Career Murder due to running on fumes and general discord, there was no such event in the Cannibal Corpse timeline, or even multiverse. What was instead delivered, was a delightfully devilish album, as legit as every prior entry, confirming them as the true Overlords of Violence.
Cannibal’s attempt to cash in on the then roving and raving zombie craze of the 2000s, not to be confused with “Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.” The result is something between the shambling corpses of “The Walking Dead” and the ragers of Danny Boyle’s gold standard for zombie movies, “28 Days Later.” And just like that Cannibal Corpse stayed relevant into the 21st century, even if their sound was unchanged from its perfect recipe for carnage.
First album with the adorably brutal teddy bear George “CorpseGrinder” Fisher, after the departure of Cookie Monster impersonator/Future Muppet Chris Barnes. The Band made the conscious, informed and democratic decision to up the ante, tuning their guitars all the way down to B for Brutal (well B flat if you’re a humorless nerd), perfectly setting the stage for later Cannibalism.
Just from the title itself, you just know this album is going to be unimaginably good, especially after guitarist Pat O’Brien took on some violence of his own, just as unimaginable. While he doesn’t appear on this album, professional death metal bad ass Erik Rutan not only enters, but fills the void left by one of the most brutal guitarists outside of Dethklok. URG!
Ol’Dirty Bastard’s favorite Cannibal Corpse since it’s so raw, the debut Cannibal release revealed to the world the delicious recipe for carnage, with their most decipherable lyrics of all time. While the ingredients may have needed some tweaking, the raw delicious nature of the debut gave all who listened a bloodlust for more.
With its one-word title, back to basic production courtesy of future guitarist Erik Rutan, and less elaborate song titles, this album proved that the boys didn’t need elaborate high concept Saw-type torture chambers. Just a good ole machete, some cracked skulls and sadistically creative urge to KILL was all the band will ever need.
A clear attempt at inciting even more violence in the masses, this wretched spawn commemorated 15 years of gore with more. So brutal in fact that Corpsegrinder almost had to change his name to Corpse Combine, and hospital admissions rose 2000% when millions of aspiring guitarists tried and failed to cover “Frantic Disembowelment” (fun fact the band only played it live once). Well, be the change you want to see in the world.
Stripping (no pun intended) away much of the thrash influences of the first album, with more emphasis on chaos, noise and raw (pun most certainly intended) aggression, Butchered helped Cannibal carve their way into the blooming death metal scene, and into our hearts, by way of precision slices and a hard cudgel courtesy of these crusty tunes
Following the decision to swap Roberts, Cannibal Corpse replaced guitarist Bob Rusay with the decidedly more brutal Rob Barrett (his last name is even a gun company), Cannibal re-entered the studio and like a loaded gun, provided us with not just more explosive, but more technical riffs and one of the last great performances from Chis Barnes before he traded carnage for conspiracy theories. Now that’s how you follow up one of the best Death Metal albums of all time!
Possibly the most beloved and dare we say beautiful death metal album of all time? The opening notes of “Hammer Smashed Face” count as legal permission to “open this pit up”, regardless of location. This album even got the band an opportunity to cameo in “Ace Ventura” (which has surprisingly become one of the less problematic elements of this film), proving death metal could be fun for the entire family, lest a lunatic not knowing left from right gets them in his sights.
Not only do we feel nothing drinking Yoo-hoo, we taste almost nothing too. Is this the Mandella Effect? There is no way we could have given a shit about this chocolate drink at any age if it’s tasted this way the whole time.
Does indigestion count as a feeling? If so Lunchables gave us all the feels. It didn’t bring us joy or remind us of a time when the world seemed full of wonder and possibility, but we’re pretty sure we won’t be shitting for a week so hey, that’s something.
You think you can trix me into thinking healthy food is a treat by putting a fucking bunny rabbit on it and loading it with food coloring? Didn’t work then, doesn’t work now.
Sure it’s basically just a dollop of cheez-wiz and some club crackers with a shitty plastic stick for spreading, but these things were a staple of our childhood. We were pretty confident that with one bite we would be whisked away to that feeling of getting home from school, grabbing one from the pantry, and watching Simpsons reruns while Mom cooked dinner. The actual result? Shitty cheese-wiz on a shitty cracker in a cold, shitty world. Next snack.
To be fair we didn’t have high expectations from this one to begin with. Even as a kid, these things were vaguely disappointing when you opened them. 30 years in the freezer at Kraoszers has not done Raphael any favors. His mask and skin have basically faded into the same greyish color. We chipped a tooth on one of the gumball eyes, and we’re still too depressed to do anything about it. Definitely not a #nostalgiawin here.
It’s just a Ring Pop with more steps. Let’s try Ring Pop.
Tastes boring, and way more opulent than anything we feel like we deserve to wear. Next fucking snack.
Turns out it’s gonna take a lot more than three feet of high fructose corn syrup to fill the void we’re feeling. Remember just unspooling one of these and squeezing it into a big glob and just eating that? We did that to the whole box and can’t even feel the appropriate shame, let alone the shade of joy from times gone by.
Come on fruit barrels, take us back to field day in 4th grade when we went up against the teachers in tug of war and Mr. Heisner totally bit it and slipped in the mud and we won and cheered! Nope? Just gonna give us immediate heartburn huh? That’s fair.
We remember there being a tin of these at every family function and had high hopes that a little paper tray or two of these mostly butter, rock sugar-encrusted treats would fill us with a sensation of familial warmth. Other than a slight fascination with the fact that we just ate 3000 calories worth of Royal Dansk Butter Cookies, we feel nothing.
Not sure how these made the list to be honest, we’ve been mindlessly eating cheese balls pretty much non-stop since middle school. Let’s go ahead and see if this particular batch somehow shakes us out of this existential funk. Nope.
They were like Life Savers, only creamier, in case you’re insane. While they were discontinued for years, they re-emerged back in 2021 because it turns out a lot of people are in fact insane. We’re not really nostalgic for Creme Savers and don’t really see the appeal. We were hoping maybe the reason they inspired such a demand was that they secretly contained a bunch of dopamine or something, but no. Just hard, creamy sugar.
Growing up we had this pseudo ice cream cake every time our parents dragged us to dinner at Grandma’s, we think to trick us into looking forward to it. While eating it would certainly help you sit through dated racism and stories about how your town used to be all orange groves, it doesn’t bring us joy.
There was a time when puncturing an ice-cool Capri Sun and sucking the bag flat felt bodacious, tubular, and radical. We can remember the way the refreshing sugar rush made us feel like liquid Terminator X-game people like in the commercials. We would kill to be that susceptible to marketing again.
Narrowly beating out Capri Sun on our list is another nostalgic beverage, Kool-Aid Bursts. We put them a notch above Capri Sun for no particular reason as everything is pretty much the same and life has no meaning.
