A cruel dispatch from the less traversed regions of the burgeoning late ‘80s video industry, Evil Dead Trap anticipates the much more famous Japanese horror explosion of the late 1990s and early ‘00s that cast such a frigid, despairing shadow on the international horror scene. Following the likes of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Evil Dead Trap is a brutal and deeply disturbed portrait of modern urban ennui that turns a videotape – nominally a flourishing frontier of futuristic possibility – into a rumination of the darker side of technological democratization. In director Toshiharu Ikeda’s film, industrial modification and media transfiguration become conduits for a world on the edge of something fundamentally other than whatever it might have been before. In its disturbing force and multi-media experimentation, it sometimes plays like the grimy, unholy B-side to the Japanese sequences of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, framing modernity as something almost alien to itself.

Evil Dead Trap wastes no time winding and rewinding us. After a series of dismembered close-ups of bodies typing, watching, and bruising shot on video tape, the film cuts to a long cinematic shot of TV station employee Nami (Miyuki Ono) walking through the bowels of her office building to a backroom in search of a monitor and VCR to watch a recently arrived video cassette, to discover what alternative view of the world hides within its tape. The sudden shift – from a montage of cut-up incisions to a winding image of connective tissue – not only generates a frictive charge but directly engages the transition from one medium to another. By sheer force of its insatiable need to search for new technological life, to propel modernity, the cinematic detective slowly inevitably approaches the destructive monster of videotape which may doom it but which it simply cannot avoid.

Lady Snowblood, the mirthless title of director Toshiya Fujita’s savagely beautiful film, suggests a woman with ice in her veins. In an opening, pre-title sequence of uncomfortable intimacy and grimy immediacy, Fujita clarifies the implications of this title for the life of a woman who is destined, pre-birth, to carry on a vendetta her mother did not complete. In a sober and ethereal pre-title sequence, we watch the mother give birth and hold her baby accountable to avenge the violence inflicted upon her. Obviously disturbed by the demand she is bestowing on her child, she shudders with fright at the life she is asking her to live through.

The film’s evocative epithet also implies a kind of cosmic cast, a person whose very soul is connected to – either kindled via or entrapped by – the very matter of the world around her. The film’s introduction occurs in a cloistered prison room with wooden slats offering a spectral view of the wintry outside world, which Fujita shoots as a forbidding, ghostly wave of snow falling to the ground. The snow doesn’t so much invade the frame, taking over the promise of a spring that will soon return, as bond with the frame itself, becoming the very canvas upon which the film takes place. This woman who takes the snow as her name will be an omnipresent specter gliding through life, a one-sided quest for vengeance as a perpetual winter haunting the men who destroyed her opportunity for another world. One oneiric image features her dying mother’s profile in front of a prison window, the snowy light shining through on her body suggesting her life force literally seeping out of her, both into her daughter and into the world. Despite technically growing up, we are meant to understand her as essentially stillborn, the replacement of a potentially agentive person with the corporeal puppet of a transhistorical, predetermined, unavoidable craving for revenge.

Pursued is a Western noir where panoramic prospects are limned by opaque shadows, where even the idea of a landscape being available for a person to fasten their own future gives way to the gaping maw of the past ready to seek vengeance upon your every attempt.  The preeminent Old Hollywood cinematographer James Wong Howe shoots the natural scenery of Gallup, New Mexico not with a hopeful Western’s sense of uncluttered expanse and possibility but, rather, a cloistered helplessness. A gloomy chiaroscuro contours the film’s moral perspective, figuring a shadowy backdrop for the story of a man beset from youth by histories far beyond his own abilities. Less overtly, the claustrophobic, closing-in-on-you texture of the visuals reveal a post-WWII nation whose abiding myths of natural possibility and individual capability were increasingly revealed to be lies. Pursued offers no blinding frontier of sublime possibility, only a dense effusion of subterfuge. Its characters are governed by forces they cannot even envision, subject to decades-long debts they cannot even name.

Writer-Director Tom Holland never went very far. His somewhat stunted career is partially the result of his plunge into the dark depths of the Stephen King miniseries mirror-universe (including taking the dreaded “King miniseries” to new lows with the truly abysmal The Langoliers). But even his successes are compromised in various forms, and none of them distinctly insist on his role in developing them. His screenplay for Psycho II was directed by Richard Franklin, and that sequel was as much a calling card for returning star Anthony Perkins, whose androgynous and nervously gentle form never quite found a home in Hollywood. 1988’s Child’s Play, thoughtfully directed with a classical eye for perspective and absence by Holland, would soon become the brainchild of franchise mastermind Don Mancini, who eventually took the killer doll to new heights of meta-ironic deconstruction and (beautiful) lows of self-debasement,  transforming the franchise into a labor of diabolical love. Tom Holland, a comparatively straight shooter who seemed mostly content with craft rather than art, never stood a chance.

Which isn’t to say that Fright Night is ready and willing to salvage a would-be auteur by rediscovering a particularly idiosyncratic text birthed into the world by a heroically singular voice. Fright Night is, in fact, a thoroughly, proudly old-fashioned picture, a piece of quality machine work, both as a matter of content and a principle of form. Its interests are salvaging and remounting a tradition, not personalizing a voice. The film’s pitch was to to see whether an old-time horror film could, as it were, survive in an era of the slasher craze. This has an ever-so slight patina of meta-textual self-referentiality, but Fright Night mostly plays it straight. It isn’t as dexterous in its tonal mischief as Evil Dead II nor as frisky in its manipulation of the body as Re-Animator. If it doesn’t reach the fiendishly playful heights of either of those films, it never really seems interested in them in the first place.

Night of the Demons was released near the end of the 1980s, after the Hollywood horror boon had already worked itself out and then reworked itself to death. In the back-half of the decade, the slasher films became both more banal and more outré. Sometimes this simply meant films flailing around, trying whatever they could think of, to get attention. Sometimes it meant that the films were genuinely chasing unclarifiable interests and stray sensations toward unexpectedly exploratory truths. Sometimes the difference could be impossible to discern.

Case in point: 1988’s Night of the Demons, a ghoulishly opaque slasher that is, on one hand, exceedingly debased, necessarily brutal, and grossly misogynist, investing fully in the baser elements of the genre. On the other, Night of the Demons joins films like Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Slumber Party Massacre II in being not only a supernatural slasher but a surpassingly strange one, a film whose limitations double as an exploration of the genre’s own failure. Night of the Demons depicts a genre so routinized and ossified that it was both flatlining and collapsing in on itself. The film figures the Reagan decade as a literal haunted house locked in a perpetual cycle of recurrence, tormented by unseen, tenuously acknowledged forces from the past. This is a film whose failures are not a matter of the film exploding out, but imploding inward on itself.

While Paul Verhoeven would strike Hollywood pay-dirt with 1987’s famously acid-spewing actioneer Robocop, his first English language production is in every sense an even more bilious distillation of the director’s blackhearted cinematic glee. This 1985 medieval anti-adventure is a film in which two of the would-be swooners in a nominal love triangle have their romantic “meet-cute” while two painstakingly-detailed, putrescent rotting corpses hang like Christmas tree ornaments on either side of them. The two living participants in the impromptu foursome are presently debating the merits of the mystical “mandrake root” the woman has found beneath the corpses, supposedly gifted with the power to ensure love at first sight for the two who eat from the flesh of the root. The man, who doesn’t even believe her, responds that the root’s powers are the result of the corpses dripping semen on the ground as they hang, a vicious circle where unceasing, unnecessary murder literally seeps into a would-be love that can only be taunted. I can think of no purer distillation of Verhoeven’s worldview.

One can hardly be surprised, then, that 1985’s Flesh + Blood failed at the box office. This is a downright dastardly production, a necrotic fable with Nietzschean disdain for notions of Medieval honor and an ironist’s smug, knowing detachment from the conventions of chivalry and triumph underpinning the mid-‘80s sword-and-sorcery film revival. Those films, so thick on the ground during the Reagan years, launder their noxious visions of self-centered masculinity and brutal, Aryan individualism in chimerical but hidebound frameworks of honor and duty. Flesh + Blood cuts those ideas straight to the bone. It assumes, both as a matter of course and philosophical first principle, that people are fickle, that love is transactional, that the bonds of brotherhood are suffused with brutal layers of power and potential for perversion, and that the only way to survive the world of the Middle Ages – and perhaps every moment that’s come after – is with a cruel conniver’s wit. In its cheekily mocking mood, this is a wickedly self-debasing anticipation of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride from two years later. Verhoeven’s film looks on the backward-looking romanticism of the 1980s with impish, curdled disdain.