The horror cinema of the 1980s was heavily inspired by the slasher template laid out by John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 hit Halloween. Throughout the ‘80s, slashers like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced the genre’s fans to some of the most iconic villains of all time. But a movie’s villain is only as great as the hero they’re trying to take down.
In addition to introducing the world to quintessential slasher Michael Myers, Halloween introduced the world to quintessential “final girl” Laurie Strode – the badass babysitter who outwits Michael at the movie’s climax. The horror films of the ‘80s had plenty of protagonists that audiences could root for, from The Evil Dead’s Ash Williams to The Shining’s Danny Torrance to the maternal reimagination of Ellen Ripley in Aliens.
Dutch (Predator)
While the main attraction of John McTiernan’s thrilling sci-fi actioner Predator is the ruthless titular alien stalker, Arnold Schwarzenegger gives the masked E.T. a run for its money as musclebound mercenary Dutch.
Rumor has it that the character grew out of a Hollywood in-joke that Rocky Balboa had fought everybody on Earth so he’d need to fight an alien in his next movie.
Seth Brundle (The Fly)
One of Jeff Goldblum’s most delightfully eccentric performances – and that’s saying a lot – is in the role of Seth Brundle in The Fly. The movie is a Kafkaesque masterpiece of body horror helmed by the subgenre’s defining pioneer, David Cronenberg.
After stepping into a teleportation machine at the same time as a pesky housefly, Seth gradually transforms into a monster dubbed “Brundlefly.”
Dorothy Vallens (Blue Velvet)
Arguably David Lynch’s finest (and most unsettling) film, Blue Velvet stars Kyle MacLachlan as a suburban everyman who is drawn into the dark side of his blissful Americana after discovering a severed ear.
He makes an emotional connection to this dark underworld through Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer played spectacularly by Isabella Rossellini. Dorothy’s harrowing circumstances make her easy to root for: she’s forced into a life of prostitution by Frank Booth, the sadistic pimp holding her husband and son hostage.
R.J. MacReady (The Thing)
Kurt Russell has played a handful of heroes for director John Carpenter. The Thing’s R.J. MacReady is pitched somewhere between the hard-edged badassery of Escape from New York’s Snake Plissken and the everyman relatability of Big Trouble in Little China’s Jack Burton.
The titular monstrous entity in The Thing is a shapeshifting alien, which presents the perfect claustrophobic horror setup because it means that nobody can trust anybody. The scientists are stranded at a frozen outpost, where the Thing picks them off one by one.
Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare On Elm Street)
Wes Craven revolutionized the slasher genre with some tantalizing supernatural elements in A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which knife-gloved Freddy Krueger stalks teenagers across the dreamscape. Played by Heather Langenkamp, the movie’s “final girl” Nancy Thompson is easy to root for. Nancy isn’t a one-dimensional high schooler archetype; she’s a rounded, likable everywoman, making her the ideal protagonist opposite Freddy, the quintessential boogeyman.
Once Freddy’s threat is established, Nancy’s goal is universally relatable: stay awake. As the days go on, it becomes tougher and tougher for Nancy and her friends to avoid succumbing to their biological need for sleep.
David Kessler (An American Werewolf In London)
John Landis’ quirky comedy-horror gem An American Werewolf in London has a wholly unique take on werewolf lore. After surviving an attack by a werewolf, David Naughton’s David Kessler is haunted by visions of the ghost of his dead friend who was killed in the same attack.
David’s pal tells him that he is now a werewolf himself and that he has to take his own life before the full transformation to save others from suffering the same fate as him. However, David falls in love with his nurse, so he naturally wants to live – and, of course, in the finale, he turns into a werewolf and terrorizes Londoners.
Nada (They Live)
Roddy Piper gave the performance of his career as “Nada,” the homeless drifter who anchors the anti-capitalist satire of John Carpenter’s They Live. Early in the movie, Nada discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the alien invaders that have indoctrinated Americans with a culture of consumerism.
At the movie’s gun-toting climax, Piper delivers one of the coolest action hero one-liners of all time: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
Danny Torrance (The Shining)
Stanley Kubrick’s wildly unfaithful adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller The Shining stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a hotel caretaker driven into a murderous rage by writer’s block, and a young Danny Lloyd as his aptly named son Danny, the target of his wrath.
Blessed with the titular clairvoyant superpower, Danny’s arc in The Shining’s movie adaptation mixes paranormal horrors like ghosts and telepathy with very real terrors like abusive parents.
Ellen Ripley (Aliens)
According to the making-of documentary The Beast Within: The Making of Alien, all the roles in the original Alien movie were written as unisex. The writers left it to the casting team to decide each character’s gender. They cast Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and broke new ground for female action heroes.
When James Cameron helmed the sequel, Aliens, as an all-out action movie, he leaned into Ripley’s femininity more. As she loses her biological daughter, takes Newt under her wing, and challenges the xenomorph queen, Aliens explores Ripley’s maternal instincts. Weaver ended up earning an Oscar nomination for her powerful second performance as Ripley.
Ash Williams (The Evil Dead)
Sam Raimi changed the horror genre forever – and created the cabin-in-the-woods subgenre – with the groundbreaking low-budget effects of The Evil Dead. Bruce Campbell, who has since appeared in just about all of Raimi’s projects, leads the cast as the dim-witted but fiercely heroic Ash Williams.
Although he’s introduced as a typical goofy jock who should die in the first few minutes, Ash later reveals himself to be the best demon slayer out there.