In Search of Darkness Part III: The Final Journey Into '80s Horror

I think out of the three in this series, In Search of Darkness part III is definitely my favourite.

If you were alive during the 80's and watched horror movies you can't help but be delighted by this installment.

It brings back so many memories of straight to VHS horror films that you may have forgotten about.

It has you definitely wanting to watch them again.

The people giving their insights are fun and insightful.

It is a very long watch, over 4 hours, however broken up into sessions, you do find yourself having to make you say enough for now and turn it off.

It definitely has the binge quality to it.

I would highly recommend this documentary.

There have been a few horror documentaries around, however I have personally found the In Search of Darkness series to be the best.

With three movies at about 4hrs each, you're either infatuated and elated with this or you're turning it off after an hour.

Some call it a clipshow. Others call it a masterpiece. I call it quits.

I put money into the first and spent 3 days watching it. It was something new and I kept going out of support.

The second was worse. Each one seems to feature one actor to specifically come back to and it was Alex Winters. It got old quick and I turned it off after an hour and a half.

The third is a little better, but I couldn't see any reason to keep watching after an hour.

I'm a big horror fan and I already heard most of this information over the years through other documentaries, interviews, and special features. If you're a massive fan, you may enjoy this. For me, I don't think I'd ever finish it. It's just not interesting enough for its length.

With a running time of nearly SIX hours in length, I thought I'd be tuning out pretty quickly. I didn't.

Full disclosure, I havent seen the first two movies, which I understand might be almost as long as this one.

But anyway, I really liked the documentary. There were lots of 80's movies I had never heard of. And seeing some scenes and commentary from the ones I HAD seen or heard of was great.

It's a very well made and edited compilation that will keep your interest for the full epic length of this movie.

It's a must see for anyone who likes grind house flicks or just horror flicks in general.!!!

This is the conclusion to the In Search of Darkness document series. What makes this one even more interesting to me is that they delve into more of the straight to video and lesser talked about titles. This is the longest one in the group and had the most titles of the three with works I've not seen. There was even a good amount that I had never heard of, which made me smile.

What we get here is a combination of introducing a year, then running through a group of titles from it along with vignettes in between for more insight. We hear from the likes of David Dastmalchian, John Carpenter, Kathleen Wilhoite, Adrienne Barbeau, Robert Englund, Dee Wallace, Cassandra Peterson, Caroline Munro, Caroline Williams and Linnea Quigley. We have a combination of people in these movies, talking about their experiences as well as how these movies shaped actors who are working today. I'm also leaving out a bunch of others who shared as well.

Then coupling this, we have critical voices in the genre. This includes Diana Prince, A. J. Danna, Xanthe Pajarillo, Jed Shepherd, Phil Nobile Jr., Heather Wixson and Cecil Trachenburg. Again, I'm leaving out a bunch to avoid listing so many here as well. It is interesting since I've read things or listen to these voices to get their perspective gives you a different perspective than your own. This combination makes this a great documentary in my opinion.

What also helps is that this is well-made. The clips used are edited perfectly to convey what is being said and give examples. The selection is great since I'm adding a lot of new titles to my ever-growing list of movies to watch. Just the knowledge that is shared here is worth watching this. This is a great ending to a wonderful documentary series. I'd recommend it to all horror fans from newbies to experts.

My Rating: 8 out of 10.

I immensely enjoyed the first two versions of in search of darkness. They covered great 80s horror movies. Mostly main stream. The second one went into a little bit more of the B-movie category which I love.

But this third edition. Covers very poor 80s movies. Even most of the directors and writers admitted they weren't good movies. Yet this almost 5 hour documentary is dedicated to these below average 80s horror movies.

It did get quite political at times. Which was almost reflecting, the politics of 2023 for some reason.

And there was a lot of the foreign movies which was interesting yet they still didn't show the best foreign 80s horror movies. So I found myself fast forwarding quite a lot. I was amused to see great films like death ship, or the troma movies. But when you have the creators bashing their own movies. It makes you wonder did they run out of 80s horror movies that were decent?

Because the first two documentaries there was still dozens left in my opinion, they could've put into the third movie.

I guess this was just their way of showing we can make a documentary about below average movies for some reason. And it did get a little bit too forcibly political over and over.