As a kid of the 80s, movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare on Elm Street were horrific to me. The violence and gore, the screams and terror, the blood and guts all felt so viscerally real to me. My older cousins made me watch them, and I wasn’t going to wimp out and let them know how terrified I actually was, but they were feeding me nightmare fuel for years (which is probably what they were hoping for).
This month, my kids wanted to watch “old movies” with me, so I picked some of my favorites from my youth, Goonies for fun and The Exorcist for fear. “How’s the CGI?” they asked me. “There was no CGI,” I said, “Just makeup and sculpture.” My sales pitch didn’t even make it all the way through the trailers. My kids laughed at how “corny” and “fake” these childhood favorites of mine looked, and it made me sad that what was cutting-edge technology at the time looks hokey and dated to a generation that’s used to green screens and movies that are almost entirely made in a mainframe.
The makeup, sculpture, and camera effects of the 80s still excite me! So I love these pictures from behind the scenes of the 1986 cult horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Get nostalgic with me and check out this gallery of classic 80s horror filmmaking:
