Expanded from Phil Hardy, ed, with Tom Milne, Kim Newman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine, Paul Willemen. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1995 (with some stragglers from previous lists, especially Indian films). The authors' assessment in this chapter is brief, discussing the misguided labeling of "video nasties" in Britain and controversies over violence being largely uninformed. The sheer number of titles released in this period is likely the result of the home video market as well as all the low-budget copycats of Halloween (and the copies of a copy like Friday the 13th). The open-ended genre of horror paved the way for many sequels and franchises during this period. The authors consider the best horror films of the period to have been marketed as mainstream or nearly so (quirky) rather than as genre films: The Keep, The Company of Wolves, Blue Velvet, Manhunter, Dead Ringers, Beetlejuice, and Heathers--"oddities from positions of power."
