80s News Today

October 31, 1980. Halloween night. A chill wind was blowing down the eastern seaboard, rattling window panes and making the trick-or-treaters pull their cheap plastic masks just a little tighter. It was a Friday, perfect timing for Hollywood to open its latest cinematic spooky show, a little something called The Awakening . Now, the mummy movie is an old song, isn't it? Boris Karloff, bandages flapping, a real slow-mover, all atmosphere and fog. But there's a primal fear there, something in the marrow of the bone: the idea that death isn't just death. That something can claw its way back across millenia, a dusty, desiccated hand reaching out from the grave. The Awakening, starring the perpetually gruff, perpetually commanding Charlton Heston, tapped into that primal well of fear. Heston, playing an archaeologist named Matthew Corbeck – a name that sounds like it was chipped from granite – unearths the tomb of an Egyptian queen, an ancient terror named Kara. And because this...

Hear that wind? It’s not just the autumn gale rattling your windowpanes; no, that’s the demon breath of memory, stirring the dust from a time when pixels were chunky as a good homemade stew and a monochrome screen held more terrors than a technicolor nightmare. We’re talking about October 1982, a month like any other, sure, with leaves turning the color of old bloodstains and Halloween knocking on the door, hungry for sweets and frights. But something else was stirring that month, a digital chill creeping into homes across America, finding its way into the beating heart of a machine known as the TRS-80. And what was it, this digital ghost? It was a game. Not just any game, mind you, but a sliver of pure, unadulterated fear called Spook House . Released by those clever devils at Adventure International, a name that promised journeys into the unknown, and oh, did it deliver. Spook House was released as part of a double-feature with Toxic Dumpsite —two horrors for the price of one, a doub...

Folks, let me take you back to a chilly autumn evening in 1983, when the wind carried a whisper of something wrong in the air. October 29, to be exact. The kind of night where the shadows stretch a little too long, and the TV screen flickers with something more than static. That was the night Tales from the Darkside slithered into our living rooms, courtesy of some mad genius named George A. Romero and his band of twisted storytellers. Tales from the Darkside wasn’t your mama’s Twilight Zone , though it owed a nod to Rod Serling’s black-and-white morality plays. No, this was something grittier, something that smelled of damp basements and forgotten graves. The pilot was a nasty little number called “Trick or Treat,” written by Romero himself. This one’s about an old miser named Gideon Hackles. A real skinflint. A man who likes to remind everyone just how much they owe him, keeping their debts filed away like trophy heads. Every year, he has a special Halloween game. He hides the IOUs ...

Entry Date: The 10th Month of the 7th Standard Galactic Year After the Battle of Yavin From: Lord Vader, to be disseminated for authorized Imperial eyes only. Subject: Vader Lives! The graffiti seen on walls in inefficiently-run cities across the galaxy is true. I, Darth Vader, live, and command your unreserved allegiance as your Emperor. It has come to my attention that a new installment in the continuing saga of my galactic dominance – what the primitives call "comic books" – has been released. Marvel Star Wars #88, they brand it. October 1984. A trivial date in the grand scheme of the Empire, yet even these paper pamphlets serve a purpose: to remind you of my power.  In our endless task of crushing the Rebellion, moments of true interest are few. Most are a predictable cycle of insurrection, followed by inevitable Imperial retribution. But recently, an event has unfolded that warrants a modicum of attention, if only to recognize the machinations of a truly useful asset. A...

If Dokken wasn't going to make the final leap to super-stardom, they should have stopped here. Stopped on October 27, 1987, the day they released the last of the truly great Dokken albums, Back for the Attack . Dokken fans, the true believers, already knew, and still know today, that Dokken was one of the best bands to emerge from the "hair metal" melange of 1980s Los Angeles. There was no shortage of hair, no shortage of hair spray, but unlike so many other Aqua Net aspirants, there was no shortage of sheer talent in Dokken. But somehow, headliner status continued to elude a band that was so often blowing headliners off the stage as a bridesmaid opening act during the Reagan years. Back for the Attack was designed to finally change that - but improbably, it didn't. Beyond Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen, was there any guitar hero greater than George Lynch in the 1980s? No. Nyet. Nein. Lynch fused virtuosic speed and technique with lines of Van Gogh-esque fluidi...

Today, we cast our collective, slightly bewildered gaze back to the rather unassuming date of October 26, 1984. A day that, like many Fridays, likely began with a quiet sense of impending weekend and ended with...well, something entirely different for those who ventured into a darkened cinema.  Picture, if you will, the Earth in 1984—a planet blissfully unaware that legwarmers were not the pinnacle of fashion and that shoulder pads were staging a hostile takeover of wardrobes everywhere. Into this sartorially confused world strode a film directed by one James Cameron, a man who, if not actually in possession of a time machine, certainly behaved as though he’d borrowed one from a careless acquaintance. The Terminator was not merely a movie; it was a narrative juggernaut, a cybernetic fairy tale wrapped in a leather jacket and armed with a shotgun that didn’t so much fire shells as it did existential dread. Now, films had, for some time, featured what are known as "robots." Th...

It was a Tuesday night in the fall of 1988, the kind where the air hangs heavy with the scent of decaying leaves and the first real bite of winter's teeth. October 25th, to be precise—a date that doesn't scream apocalypse at first glance, but it should. That's when Geraldo Rivera cracked open the nation's living rooms and invited the shadows right in. Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground . Two hours of prime-time terror, beamed straight into 19.8 million homes. The TV flickered like a candle in a crypt, and suddenly, America wasn't just watching the devil—they were feeling his breath on their necks. Geraldo took us by the hand – or maybe by the throat – and dragged us down into what he promised was "Satan's Underground." Two hours, live, no commercials for the first half hour, just pure, unadulterated fear pumped straight into the living rooms of the unsuspecting by NBC. The camera panned over supposed ritual sites, the hushed, urgent tones ...

Alright, buckle up, because we're not talking about your friendly neighborhood web-slinger swinging through a sunny Tuesday in Queens. No, sir. This ain't no brightly lit adventure. This is something else. Something older. Something that crawled out of the deep, dark corners of superstition and voodoo, spiritual truths for many in our world, right into the fantastical pages of a comic book. The year was 1980. The month was October. The air was getting so crisp you could imagine snow was falling fast just over the horizon, and on the spinner racks, amidst the heroics and the villainy, an issue of Amazing Spider-Man landed. Number 209. You picked it up, probably for the usual dose of wall-crawling action, maybe a quip or two from Peter Parker. But inside, between those brightly inked panels, something new, something wrong, was stirring. Her name was Calypso. She didn't announce herself with a grand entrance, no cackling monologue from a rooftop. That's not her style. She...

Let's talk about the creeping dread that arrived on computer screens back in 1985. Not a paperback, not a VHS tape, but something new, something...digital. It was October, and the wind was starting to hum those mournful tunes it likes to play before winter truly sets in. A perfect time, you might say, for a little taste of the infernal. And infernal it was. Because that month, in '85, something slouched onto the IBM PC. Something that wasn't just based on a story; it was a story you could walk through. Or, more accurately, limp through, heart pounding, trying to figure out what hellspawn awaited you in the next room. I'm talking about The Mist. Now, you know The Mist. Or, you should. It was a novella penned by the uber-prolific Stephen King in 1976, but only later published in two of his story collections during the 1980s, Dark Forces, and Skeleton Crew. King evolved The Mist from a simple premise: What if a monster, a really scary one, was loosed on the world while you...

ZAP! POW! The year is 1982, and America’s still nursing its Vietnam hangover—those psychic scars, that national gut-punch, the war nobody wants to talk about but everybody’s still bleeding from. Out of this haze, this fog of guilt and grit, comes a film that doesn’t just walk into theaters but stalks them, silent and lethal, like a jungle cat with a chip on its shoulder. First Blood , released October 22, 1982, isn’t just a movie—it’s a cultural Claymore mine, detonating in the multiplexes, spraying shrapnel of raw nerve and primal rage. And at its center, a man, a myth, a walking wound: John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, the Italian Stallion himself, now transformed into a one-man war machine, a Green Beret gone rogue, a ghost of ‘Nam who’s come home to haunt Small-Town, U.S.A. Oh, the zeitgeist! It hung heavy, thick as Marlboro Red smoke in a backroom poker game. We were still reeling, weren't we? The last helicopters had barely cleared the embassy roof in '75, but th...

The wind, it howled that October in '88, didn't it? A real banshee wail, rattling the windowpanes like a skeleton trying to claw its way out of the earth. And what better soundtrack for the return of a boogeyman? That's right, folks, on October 21st, 1988, Michael Myers, the Shape himself, lumbered back into our lives with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers . It had been years since we'd seen his pale, expressionless mask. Halloween III …well, that was a whole other kettle of fish, wasn’t it? A noble attempt to try something new, but we wanted the man. The pure, unadulterated evil. And God, did they give him back to us. The movie opens like a slow, creaking door to a mausoleum. Michael's been in a coma, wasting away in some forgotten institution, and you just know, you just know he's been biding his time. Sleeping, maybe dreaming of carving pumpkins… or something a little more substantial. He hears about Laurie Strode's daughter, Jamie Lloyd, and that’...

It was a chilly, unremarkable Friday in a thousand places, the kind of autumn day where the sun felt like a pale lie pasted against a high, cold sky. October 20th, 1989. The smell of damp leaves and dying grass was everywhere. And in bookstores across the country, stacked neatly between the celebrity memoirs and the historical romances, a weighty new novel landed with a heavy, disturbing thud: Stephen King's The Dark Half . It was more than just a book release; it was the arrival of a new kind of trouble, dressed up in a dust jacket. The story was familiar, because the best horrors always are. It dealt with a man, Thad Beaumont , a decent, literary writer who had long used a pseudonym—a vulgar, successful bastard named George Stark —to publish his violent, money-making paperbacks. Thad had tried to be done with the alter ego, even giving him a symbolic burial in a magazine exposé. He’d thought the whole sorry business was finished. But things don't stay buried, not in the world...

It is a Saturday in Dallas, Texas, October 19, 1985. And out on Northwest Highway, at the Medallion Center, something new is coming into being, a thing of bright, fluorescent light and the silent, shimmering hope of a quadrillion flickering images captured on magnetic tape. A grand emporium, a veritable Xanadu of cinematic possibility, is throwing open its doors. It isn’t some dusty mom-and-pop video shop, smelling of cheap carpet and overheating projection TVs. No, this is  Blockbuster Video . The very first Blockbuster Video, in fact. The name itself, a potent admixture of Hollywood hyperbole and corporate efficiency, seems to reverberate with the promise of something…bigger. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling hum with an almost blinding intensity, reflecting off rows and rows of gleaming VHS clamshell cases. 8000 of 'em. Each one, a potential adventure, a dose of escapism waiting to be unspooled in the sanctity of one’s own suburban living room. Blockbuster's aisles, wide an...

On this day in 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released. Oh, the NES. A marvel of technology. A digital vortex into pixelated adventures. We thought we knew what it was capable of. We thought we knew the rhythms of its digital heartbeat. Then came Dr. Chaos . It wasn't like Super Mario, all bounce and joy. It wasn't Zelda, all epic quests and legendary swords. No, Dr. Chaos was something else. It was a whispered rumor in the arcade, a shiver down the spine when you read the box description, all dark corners and an unsettling lack of cheer. You picked it up, and it felt heavier than it should, as if the plastic encased not just circuit boards, but a tiny, compressed chunk of something from another dimension. You saw the cover in the video store—a creepy mansion. A batwinged demon. A bandaged mummy. An apparent protagonist dressed to collect truffles in the Black Forest while holding a bloody knife in the middle of a Frankensteinian laboratory scene. It was cool, but ...

Something was off about the ice cream truck that October. All those faded pictures of ice cream sandwiches and Strawberry Shortcake bars looked a little dingy, a little dirty, a little…sinister. The music, a tinny, saccharine jingle, scraped across the bones of your ears like fingernails on a coffin lid. And when you got to the front of the line, the Good Humor man wasn't selling you a treat. He was selling you a pact. He was selling you the Dracula Bar .  It wasn't just another ice cream treat, not by a long shot. Oh, no. This wasn't some smiling, goofy character pop, all bright blues and yellows. The Dracula Bar, it whispered of something older, something hungrier. You’d tear open the crinkly wrapper, the plastic hissing a little, like a tiny gasp of cold air escaping a Transylvanian crypt. And then you’d see it. Ostensibly a black cherry ice bar, the reality of the situation at hand would become apparent slowly and only after it was too late to turn back, much like Jona...

A blast of a synthesizer. A cold, mechanical thump of a drum machine. It is October 16, 1981, and the future has arrived! This event, dear reader, was the release of Dare! , the third album by a curious Sheffield-based collective known as The Human League . Now, to describe Dare! as merely an "album" would be akin to describing a Four Loko Gold as "a bit of a drink." It was not just music; it was a glittering, synthetic, sequined juggernaut of sound that careened through the FM airwaves of the early 1980s like a rogue spaceship piloted by a crew of impeccably-coiffed androids. But few would have predicted this smashing sonic success prior to that day. For it is a well-established fact that The Human League were, for a time, utterly doomed .  The original members, whose music had, until that point, been of the sort one generally plays at parties where the primary goal is to ensure the guests leave as quickly as possible, had departed in a huff. This left the frontman...

The leaves were turning, I recall, a canvas of fire and rust across the land, as the chill winds of October swept through the northern climes. It was a time of lengthening shadows, of hearth-fires being rekindled, and of eyes turning inward, seeking solace or adventure within the confines of one's own domain. And on the fifteenth day of that very month, a curious artifact emerged from the churning currents of innovation, carried upon the waves from distant shores, a new seed sown in the ever-expanding garden of electronic fantasy. The Sega Master System, a sleek, black beast of a console, stood sentinel in many a den and bedchamber, a challenger in a nascent war for the hearts and coin of the burgeoning gaming populace. It was a machine of promise, of vibrant colors and bold sounds, capable of conjuring worlds with a flicker of its digital soul. And into this realm, on that fateful day, came a legend already whispered in the East: Ys: The Vanished Omens. For years, the tales had be...

Alright, listen up, pilgrim. You wanna talk about a real game-changer from back in the 1980s? A machine called Commando rolled into them arcades, and let me tell ya, it separated the men from the boys. Capcom's creation. Released right there in October of '85. It wasn't no fancy-pants, deep-thinking strategy game. No sir. This was pure, unadulterated, shoot-'em-up, grit-your-teeth-and-keep-movin' action, the pure 80s Rambo one-man-army spirit distilled into digital form. You played as Super Joe. One man. Against a legion. Sound like a fair fight? Not to them fellas he was shootin', I reckon. You had your trusty machine gun, blastin' forward, and a handful of grenades for when things got real crowded. And they always got real crowded.  What made it special, beyond the pure adrenaline rush? It was simple, but it was tough. You had to have your wits about you, keep moving, keep firing. No time for lollygagging when the enemy's comin' at ya from all sid...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers , they called it. A title that rolled off the tongue like a curse whispered in the confessional, promising not just revenge, but the primal, inexorable pull of blood calling to blood under the harvest moon. Directed by the Swiss-born visionary Dominique Othenin-Girard—yes, a man from the land of cuckoo clocks and alpine precision, tasked with herding the chaos of a slasher franchise through its twilight years—this film arrived like a jagged line on the EKG of '80s horror, beeping insistently that the Boogeyman was not done with us yet. Picture the scene, if you will, in the heartland of Haddonfield, Illinois—that mythic Everytown, U.S.A., where the picket fences gleam whiter than a televangelist's smile and the maple leaves skitter across lawns like fleeing sinners. It's been a full year since the events of Halloween 4 , that fever-dream resurrection where Michael Myers, the Shape himself, clawed his way back from the abyss to claim...

You're hunkered down in your basement den, the one with the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a screaming face, if you squint just right. The CRT monitor flickers like a candle in a windstorm, casting ghostlight on your hands as you boot up the old IBM PC. The internal 2" speaker beeps, and the disk drive grinds. It's not the future yet—not quite—but Neuromancer makes you believe it is. Based on William Gibson's novel, that razor-edged prophecy from 1984, the game was Interplay's mad stab at turning words into wire. The story hooks you like a fish on a barbed line. You're Case, a washed-up console cowboy, your nervous system's fried from a bad score—betrayal by the only crew you ever trusted. Molly Millions lurks in the shadows, her mirrorshades hiding eyes that could cut glass, and together you're chasing the ghost of an AI named Wintermute.  It's Chiba City first, that neon-drenched sprawl where the street finds its own uses for things. ...

The air's got that crisp bite to it now, doesn't it? The leaves are turning, a hint of woodsmoke is on the breeze, and the days are getting shorter, pulling the shadows longer behind them. It's the kind of season that feels right for a certain kind of story. The kind that makes you pull your collar a little tighter, maybe glance over your shoulder when you're walking home alone. The kind that makes you wonder what really goes bump in the night. And speaking of bumps, creaks, and things that go howl, today's the day. October 11. Just the kind of day that lulls you into forgetting the darkness that comes with October. And oh, boy, did the darkness come to Tarker's Mills, Maine. The story of what stalked Tarker's Mills took celluloid form this day in 1985, with the release of the movie Silver Bullet , based on the 1983 Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf . In Tarker's Mills, a series of brutal murders begins to tear the community apart. At first, the...