Released in 1981, the same year as Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, Wolfen seems to have been overshadowed by those two other lupine-horror classics. Which is a shame, because it is no way a lesser film, and in a just world it would be widely acknowledged as one of the great New York horror films. Ostensibly a police procedural infused with supernatural horror, it stars Albert Finney as a very hungover detective investigating the brutal murder of a real-estate scion and his wife in Battery Park by an attacker who may not be human. By the time it ends, the film draws a line from the Dutch colonization of New York and the displacement of Native Americans to the destruction of the South Bronx in the 1970s. On a technical level, it contains several dazzling and highly stylized sequences shown from the wolfen’s POV as they stalk their prey across the city, presented in solarized Steadicam shots. Director Michael Wadleigh, whose only previous directing credit was the documentary Woodstock, sadly never made another film after this.

An alien has arrived in LA with the ability to withstand bullets and move from person to person, taking over their bodies, and all it wants to do is rob banks, steal Ferraris, and listen to alternative rock. An unrelenting sci-fi/horror/cop-movie mash-up, The Hidden transcends its very obvious influences (an alternate title could be Invasion of the Terminator Snatchers) simply because it is so good at delivering on the promise of its premise. It features a memorable performance from the singular Kyle MacLachlan, seen here in only his third film role (and first non–David Lynch film) playing an offbeat FBI agent years before his iconic turn as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. It also features, to my mind, the first instance of Chekhov’s flamethrower.

The Australians make a strong showing in this series—and that’s to be expected, since perhaps no other national government’s film agency supported the production of genre films to the degree that the Australian Film Commission did. And while Next of Kin is an excellent slow-burn horror movie that every fan of the genre should watch, I would personally give the edge to Road Games. A lot of people talk about Brian De Palma as the heir to Hitchcock in the ’80s, but not enough people talk about Richard Franklin. With Road Games, he made a film that dares to ask the question: what if Rear Window took place in a truck driving through the outback and starred Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis? It’s simply a taut thriller that moves effortlessly and efficiently, a film made by a confident genre craftsman. Franklin would go on to solidify his Hitchcock bona fides by directing Psycho II, one of the most underrated sequels of the decade.

Over the course of a career that spanned almost thirty years, Donald Cammell made only four features, but every one of them is special. His first and best-known film, Performance (codirected with Nicolas Roeg), radically reconceived the British gangster picture as a counterculture freakout and stands as one of the defining documents of swinging London. In 1987, he made White of the Eye, an American giallo that takes place in the desert. The premise is pure pulp—rich women are being attacked in their homes by a serial killer, and Cathy Moriarty begins to wonder if it could be her husband—but the execution borders on the psychedelic in its approach to editing and sound (the score is written by members of Pink Floyd and 10cc). Sadly, Cammell only made one more feature before his death by suicide, the 1995 erotic thriller Wild Side, a must-see in its uncompromised director’s cut.