At Anorak: The Five Most Underrated Slasher Films of the 1980s

My new article at Anorak gazes at the 1980s, and the era of the slasher film (or as some call it, the slasher glut...).

Here's a snippet of "The 5 Most Underrated Slasher Films of the 1980s:"

FOLLOWING the incredible box-office and critical success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the slasher film quickly became the go-to-format for up-and-coming horror filmmakers in the 1980s.  These films had titles like Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and My Bloody Valentine (1981), and most of them concerned bloody massacres on holidays.

Although critics denigrated these slasher films as “dead teenager movies” or “knife-kill” films and slammed their apparent sense of misogyny, and formulaic story lines, the slasher craze of the epoch actually produced a number of great and memorable horror films.

 In the thick of things, however, critics weren’t necessarily able to distinguish the good slasher films from the bad ones, and so below is a list of five slasher films that, on retrospect, are much better and much more artistic than their reputations indicate:"