Overview

VHS Video Horror Stories: An Anthropology of the Paranormal in 1980's Cinema is not a nostalgic tour of retro scares-it is a cultural autopsy. This book examines how 1980s horror cinema transformed fear into a language capable of expressing social collapse, technological anxiety, and the erosion of certainty. Through haunted homes, possession narratives, doppelgängers, abductions, folk rituals, body horror, and apocalyptic worlds, VHS-era films revealed a deeper truth: fear no longer arrived as spectacle, but as routine. Horror became intimate, domestic, procedural, and disturbingly familiar. Approaching 1980s horror through an anthropological lens, this book explores how videotape, television, and analog media reshaped the experience of terror-turning it into something recorded, replayed, archived, and normalized. These films did not invent new anxieties; they reorganized existing ones around unstable identities, unreliable institutions, fragile bodies, coercive communities, and futures that refused resolution. For readers interested in horror studies, media theory, cultural analysis, and the psychology of fear, this book offers a rigorous and unsettling exploration of why the monsters of the VHS era never truly disappeared-and why we are still living inside the anxieties they captured on tape.

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