Born To It

No other generation is as obsessed with horror as the children of the 80s. Go ahead…go look for sites and blogs and magazines and books and today’s horror movies…the people behind them are, almost invariably, products of the 80s.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that the 80s saw the biggest boom the genre would ever know. Why? I have a theory.

If you were a child of the 80s-and I don’t mean born in 1987, but old enough to know what was going on-well, it was a tough time to be a kid. Although the clothes and lingo and music and movies of the time seem fluffy and fun, they were more of a panacea than an accurate representation.

Before the 80s, the idea of children being kidnapped/molested/killed was not really in the consciousness of America. But the Adam Walsh case became so notorious that all of a sudden, being a kid meant you were vulnerable and defenseless and just might die way before you wanted to. Do you remember watching those ‘caution’ films in school? Being taught about Stranger Danger? Being dragged down to some volunteer place by your mom on the weekend to be fingerprinted so they could look for you when the bad man took you? It was the first time that children were taught, firmly and incessantly, to fear. To fear the world, the people they knew and those who lurked in the shadows, to fear their own tiny little bodies that wouldn’t be able to save them. I think that maybe, our wild bravado was a rebellion against the fear we were taught.

We were often angry and bitter and violently reactive, and for a lot of children and teenagers, horror movies were strangely soothing. Transporting ourselves into the dark woods while being chased by an axe-wielding maniac may have seemed like a strange way to have fun, but at least then, we knew what we were fighting against.