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While the ’80s is often remembered as an era of absurd fashion, distinct music, and more esoteric lingo than any one generation should ever have, it is also host to what some consider to be a gilded age of horror movies. Drenched in gratuitous gore and featuring iconic characters such as Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, Jason Voorhees, Chucky, a colony full of Aliens, and Ash Williams, these movies are seeing either a revival or adaptation in recent films of our generation. John Carpenter, director, screenwriter and composer, whose works include Halloween (1978), and The Thing (1982) spoke with IGN.com on the remake of his 1980 film The Fog which premiered in 2005.

“If everyone else is making remakes and they want to pay me money to make a remake of an old movie of mine, why not?” said Carpenter. “The trend of the releasing material that has been quality tested with the shrills of fearful is much easier to accomplish with the images of the killers so greatly engraved into our heads. I personally don’t trust dolls or gardening anymore.”

Movies such as Prom Night (2008), which is being covered on television owes its origin to the 1980 slasher of the same name where a masked killer mutilates prom guests while seeking a single girl who shares a common past with him. Director Nelson McCormick laughs on the premise of the movie being not entirely as bizarre as real prom stories. “This one girl wanted this guy to ask her to the prom so she created a crime scene around his house with tape and the outline of her victim. And left a note I’m dying to go to the prom with you” told McCormick in an interview with Horror.com.

Other more recent films such as Scream (1996) and its two sequels are denominations of the slasher genre that Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) help make notorious. Both of these movies were later compiled into a bout over reining teen killer in Freddy vs. Jason (2003) and the singular and off forgotten Jason X (2002) that wound up mixing Friday the 13th and Robocop (1987) quite successfully and tragically.

Movies of the ’80s ran off with the intricate, introspective and personally nightmarish situations heralded by late ’70s movies such as Dawn of the Dead (1978), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) which both have modern day remakes, and made colorful nightmares out of them. Not all movies are revamps of originals however as such works as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) are engineering a new style of torture and grit and new avenues for borrowed ideas are reaching the orient as movies such as The Grudge (2004) and The Ring (2002) become staples of contemporary horror.

Still however, the obscurity of a flesh fabricated book of sorcery that would eventually take Bruce Campbell to fight an army of undead in medieval times, or killer clowns encapsulating their victims in cotton candy are so captivating that there is no possible way to recreate without heavy adaptation.

The only way to best describe this is the looming project of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) which is currently in the process of being written and brought back to the silver screen and nothing says ’80s style like manic giant killer vegetables, sorry, fruits.

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