From 1970 to 1979, some wonderfully atmospheric horror classics found their way into the memories and nightmares of many viewers. What follows are some that fit that bill yet haven’t received as much love as they deserve. So, naturally, none of the heavy hitters like Don’t Look Now, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jaws, Carrie, The Omen, The Hills Have Eyes, Suspiria, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, Alien, The Amityville Horror, or When a Stranger Calls. Furthermore, we avoided so-bad-they’re-good treasures here. For instance, Trog, Frogs, Grizzly, Sssssss, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, and Piranha. That said, TV movies were fair game.
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Have you seen any of the following ’70s spooky flicks? Let’s find out if you’re interested in checking any of them out.
7) Home for the Holidays
For the most part, Home for the Holidays is a tame and pretty standard slasher. It aired on television, after all, they could show but so much. But like Black Christmas from two years later it does a very good job of building tension and making the killer feel dangerous without showing any blood and gore.
At just an hour and 14 minutes, Home for the Holidays won’t take much of your time, and it’s worth a watch. At the very least it’s a pop culture novelty, considering it features Sally Field in the lead role and Arrested Development‘s Jessica Walter in a substantial secondary role.
6) It’s Alive
While it was followed by two increasingly outlandish sequels, Larry Cohen’s original It’s Alive is actually a pretty straightforward monster movie slash exploitation of expectant parents’ anxieties. We follow Frank and Lenore Davis, whose attempt to give their son a sibling becomes disastrous when, instead of a healthy baby, Lenore gives birth to a toothed mutant.
It’s Alive‘s birthing scene, where the mutant slaughters the doctors and nurses as soon as it’s born, is pretty great, and it was memorable enough to end up in Bravo’s The 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Admittedly, the rest of the movie isn’t quite as jarring, but it does feature the mutant baby killing a milkman and a convincingly desperate lead performance by John P. Ryan. Not to mention, Rick Baker designed the baby, which is pretty creepy to this day, even if there is definitely a cheese factor involved. But it’s a Larry Cohen (The Stuff, Q: The Winged Serpent) film, so you have to expect some ricotta.
5) Eyes of Laura Mars
Even with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back‘s Irvin Kershner at the helm, John Carpenter as one of its screenwriters, and a cast that includes Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Child’s Play‘s Brad Dourif, and the late, great Raúl Juliá, Eyes of Laura Mars has mostly been forgotten to time. However, it did well when released in 1978, the same year as Carpenter’s Halloween.
The film, which is rightly considered by many critics to be an American take on the Italian giallo film, follows a well-respected New York City fashion photographer whose works feature realistic stylized violence. But now a killer is in NYC with an ice pick and not only does Laura start seeing the murders through his eyes, but she comes to realize that those killed have some relation to her, as well. Will she identify the killer before she faces his pick?
4) The Crazies
Even though it received an excellent remake in 2010, The Crazies isn’t quite as well-known outside horror loving circles as it should be. Like with his Living Dead movies, George A. Romero showed himself to be someone who merges almost unbearable tension with razor-sharp commentary on society’s flaws.
The narrative takes place in Evans City, Pennsylvania, which has had its water supply tainted by a virus code-named “Trixie,” which turns people into mentally unwell, homicidal versions of their former selves. It’s a look at a world where the government, when faced with a crisis, dispenses of things such as concern for human rights. It’s up to the viewer to decide just how far off that is from the reality in which we find ourselves.
Stream The Crazies on Shudder.
3) Eaten Alive
A cult classic that could be remade provided the tone were lightened a bit, Eaten Alive was Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and it possesses much of that film’s backwoods raw realism. It’s very much a companion piece to Leatherface’s debut and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.
The plot concerns a hotel owner who ends up killing half of the people who need a room to rent. And, once he’s done with them, he feeds them to the hungry crocodile that resides in the hotel’s backyard swamp. Eaten Alive reteams Hooper with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Marilyn Burns and features a memorable appearance by Robert Englund, who would start his tenure as Freddy Krueger eight years later.
Stream Eaten Alive for free with ads on Tubi.
2) God Told Me To
Another B-level Larry Cohen movie, God Told Me To is essentially a more straightforward version of Bill Paxton’s Frailty, from 2001. The French Connection‘s Tony Lo Bianco plays NYPD Lieutenant Peter J. Nicholas, a devout Catholic who arrives on the scene of a mass shooting, finds the gunman, and is told that “God told” him to do it. Worse yet, there are other mass murders committed by unrelated people all of whom give the same excuse as the first man.
As it turns out, they are all indeed being told to do this, but it’s by a psychic man with a strange origin, not God. Spoilers will be avoided as to that man’s origin but suffice to say it’s bizarre and ties into Lt. Nicholas. Given the subject matter, Gold Told Me To is not a movie for everyone these days, and that’s even before it takes some big swings in the third act. But it does manage to make its NYC setting feel claustrophobic in spite of its massive nature, not unlike how Dirty Harry made San Francisco feel much the same. There’s also a pop culture factor here, as the late Andy Kaufman (Taxi) plays one of the assassins controlled by the psychic.
Stream God Told Me To on Prime Video.
1) Trilogy of Terror
Starring Karen Black, who was in the similarly underrated ’70s horror movie Burnt Offerings, Trilogy of Terror has to be the scariest TV movie of the decade. It’s genuinely surprising it got on ABC back in the day.
Trilogy of Terror is an anthology film with three adaptations based on the works of I Am Legend‘s Richard Matheson. Black is the lead in all three segments, though she plays different characters in each one (and two separate characters in the middle story). “Julie” follows her as English teacher Julie Eldridge who is duped into sexual escapades with one of her students, but it may very well be her who is holding the cards the whole time. “Millicent and Therese” has Black playing a pair of twins, one of whom believes the other is evil and purchases a voodoo doll to kill her. The third, and by far most iconic story, “Amelia,” features Black as the title character, who gets in a fight to the death with a sentient Zuni fetish doll. Granted, there are things in each of the three stories that wouldn’t fly today, the racially charged appearance of the Zuni fetish doll being one of them, but it’s still a jarring anthology film with three solid twists and phenomenal work by the ever-underrated Black.
Stream Trilogy of Terror on FlixFling.
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