The Best Horror Movie of 1988: The Vanishing
This post is part of Paste’s Century of Terror project, a countdown of the 100 best horror films of the last 100 years, culminating on Halloween. You can see the full list in the master document, which will collect each year’s individual film entry as it is posted.
The Year
1988 is a year with an extremely wide variety of solid horror fare, but perhaps fewer unquestionably great films. The Vanishing anchors our #1 pick here and benefits from the fact that it is totally unlike the rest of the field, much of which is relying on declining slasher franchises and their goofy progeny. Like the rest of the decade, the films here are very uniformly “fun,” but they’re not often all that profound.
One film that stands out in a positive way for this year is Tim Burton’s light-hearted but simultaneously macabre Beetlejuice, which managed to present a wholly unique spin on the bureaucratic afterlife unlike anything audiences had seen before. Perfectly cast from top to bottom, whether it’s a particularly dorky Alec Baldwin, the wide-eyed, “strange and unusual” Winona Ryder or a delightfully deluded Catherine O’Hara, the film thrives on its performances and a memorable, bouncy score from Danny Elfman. But really, when all is said and done, it’s Michael Keaton’s movie. His “ghost with the most” is one of the single best, most deranged performances of the 1980s, regardless of genre. He commits himself with total, reckless abandon to selling the sleazy weirdness of Betelgeuse, and in doing so he creates one of the era’s most instantly iconic and quotable characters. It’s one of those cases where it’s hard to even imagine someone else attempting to play the role.
Also pertinent to the 1988 discussion is John Carpenter’s once cult, now beloved They Live, which one might make an argument is much more of a science fiction social satire than it is a true “horror” film, per se—but given the Carpenter connection, it becomes easier to include. Certainly, the idea of a society with alien overlords living among us is one that can work in a horror setting, but few horror films include a hilariously over-the-top, six-minute fight scene between two of the protagonists over whether one of them will put on a pair of sunglasses. Like Carpenter’s own Big Trouble in Little China, the jokes here are often poking fun at the comical excess of the era.
Outside these top few contenders, the rest of the year is dominated by films that feel very “1980s” indeed, whether that’s slasher sequels with diminishing returns, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 or Phantasm 2—although we’ll put in a good word for Halloween 4 as still underrated by many fans to this day—or more unique, low-budget goofball fare, such as Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage or the Chiodo’s Killer Klowns From Outer Space. You also have what we’ll argue is the best overall Jason Voorhees design in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, as the undead Jason comes up against a psychic young woman, like Friday vs. Carrie. These flicks tended to cultivate a certain air of seediness that made them perennial rerun material in the early era of premium movie TV networks, and this, along with the boom in home video rentals, is what accounts for the cult status of so many similar films in this decade. As the decade draws to a close, we’ll see the slasher genre finally running out of steam in terms of the prominence of its releases, as the horror genre begins to experience a bit of a contraction.
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