Angie and Chantale over at CinemaObsessed.com were kind enough to invite me to write a guest post for the site. I decided to wax lyrical about my love of the films I saw growing up – notably those late 80s movies that started appearing on UK television in the early 1990s. You can see my little article right here!

Two classics from the 1980s for you in Midnight Double Feature #3. Teen angst and bad behaviour go just that little bit further in Michael Lehmann’s “Heathers” and Mark L. Lester’s “Class of 1984”. Both films look at teenager life in a way that would make John Hughes cower behind the sofa. Cynical, dark, unsentimental, at times funny, at other times quite frightening, these two films paint an alternative picture of growing up.

“An American Werewolf In London” is the film that I remember most distinctly as a child. It’s partly because I knew I wasn’t allowed to watch it, partly because it scared me so much. It’s only later in life that I fully appreciate the frightening influence it had on me – the reason I slept with the light on for weeks afterwards – was because it was so good. It is the cinema of attractions, the spectacle. An immediate and direct injection of emotion, be it humour, fear, anger, happiness. John Landis was a master at toying with his audience’s primal emotions. But, with classic Hollywood narrative as his blueprint, he could also tell a great story.

The ‘coming of age’ movie is a bit ambiguous. There’s a tendency to link the sub-genre to films about kids, so Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars seemingly came of age too late in life. It appears there’s a timeframe on the coming of age movie that sits somewhere between childhood and adulthood before, as protagonists grow into their twenties, the film fuses itself with other sub-genres like the yuppie-in-peril or social problem movie …

I vaguely remember my introduction to the horror film. My cousin was visiting, the curtains had been drawn on a sunny afternoon, and John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London had been placed in the VCR. I was seven years old. As I lay in bed for days after all I could see were those green hills shrouded in the black cloak of night, and the warning: ‘Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors,’ delivered in that Yorkshire twang. Brian Glover’s short, controlled outburst – probably his unusual form of goodbye – ‘Beware the moon, lads.’