Genre Throwback / Film

Animated Film

• Disney Animated Canon:
  • The Little Mermaid (1989) took most of its inspiration from the classic Disney animated musicals of The Golden Age of Animation. It was so successful, it wound up resurrecting the entire genre and kicking off what came to be known as the Disney Renaissance.
  • The Princess and the Frog did the exact same thing, including being animated in 2D instead of 3D. While Disney's return to 2D didn't stick, the film was enough of a success for the company to style more of its 3D films in the mold and spirit of its Renaissance fairy tale musicals.
• Don Bluth's films were an attempt at bringing back the style of Golden Age Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs during the eighties and nineties. In particular, An American Tail takes a lot of cues from Pinocchio, and The Land Before Time has a lot of influence from both Bambi and the "Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia.
• Up all but announces its 1930s-adventure-serial-ness in the opening sequence.
• ParaNorman is both a throwback to old zombie movies and PG movies before the creation of the PG-13 rating.
• The Road to El Dorado is a throwback to comedy-adventure films of the 1940s, especially the Road to ... series it borrows its name from.
• The Spine of Night: ultra gory, animated Sword and Sorcery from the '70s and '80s made with vigorous use of rotoscoping, such as Fire & Ice, Heavy Metal, and Wizards.

Live-Action Film — Filmmakers

• The production company American High was created to make modern-day versions of the teen comedies of the '80s and '90s like American Pie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the films of John Hughes. At the center of the company is a closed-down high school just outside Syracuse, New York that they bought and refurbished to use as a film studio in order to keep production costs down.
• Larry Blamire is known for these types of films, with each affectionately homaging a different era and genre of horror film:
  • The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra: 1950s B-Movies, complete with black-and-white footage, Bad "Bad Acting", and Special Effects Failure out the wazoo. The sequel is done in the style of '60s color cheapies.
  • Trail of the Screaming Forehead: '60s pulp science-fiction, shot in widescreen (Craniascope!) and garish color.
  • Dark and Stormy Night: Cozy Mystery Gothic Horror comedy movies of the 1930s and '40s, featuring cheesy acting and taking place in a classic Old, Dark House with a killer on the loose.
  • Not a film example, but Blamire is also a writer on the tabletop game They Came From Beneath The Sea!, which is a throwback to '50s monster movies, especially those of the nautical variety.
• Mel Brooks is known for combining this with Affectionate Parody. Blazing Saddles is a surprisingly faithful spoof of Golden Age Westerns, with multiple scenes shot at Vasquez Rock and a theme song by prolific cowboy movie theme song guy Frankie Laine. Young Frankenstein, likewise, is a comedic throwback to the Universal Horror films of the 1930s and '40s, particularly Frankenstein (1931) and its sequels, shot in Deliberate Monochrome and even re-using a few of the old lab props.
• Guillermo del Toro is known to dabble in this.
  • Pacific Rim is a very straightforward throwback to the kaiju films, toku series, and Humongous Mecha anime of the 1950s through the '70s.
  • Crimson Peak: 1940s gothic romance films like Rebecca, Suspicion, and Gaslight. The movie's extremely stylized colour palette is influenced by the Italian horror movies that Mario Bava was making in the '50s and '60s, as well.
  • The Shape of Water is a Genre Blending example, combining '50s monster movies (most overtly Creature from the Black Lagoon) with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Reportedly, del Toro seriously considered filming the whole movie in glorious black and white. There's also a Dream Sequence (which is in black and white) that looks like a scene from one of the glittery movie musicals of the '30s, particularly the Fred-and-Ginger vehicle Follow the Fleet. Finally, the movie also mixes in a bit of '60s spy drama, and a plot structure resembling the Batman in My Basement family films popular during the '80s and '90s.
  • Nightmare Alley (2021) is a Film Noir set in the late '30s and early '40s. It got a rerelease that was Deliberately Monochrome.
• Rian Johnson is clearly a fan of old mystery fiction:
  • Brick, while set in a modern-day (2006) High School, is a throwback to 1930s and '40s Film Noir with a touch of Deconstructive Parody, mapping Teen Drama archetypes to those of old crime movies and having the characters speak in period slang.
  • The Brothers Bloom: Cons and caper movies.
  • Looper: Gritty, character-driven Fantastic Noir stories from the '80s.
  • Knives Out and its sequel Glass Onion: Agatha Christie-style Cozy Mystery stories from the early 20th century, though a lot of the movie's aesthetics and font choices invoke 1970s paperback mystery novels and even Choose Your Own Adventure - many of which were also genre throwbacks to, or reprints of, the earlier mystery stuff. Johnson cited Sleuth and The Last of Sheila as direct inspirations for Knives Out and Glass Onion respectively.
  • Johnson's TV series Poker Face is modeled on '70s mystery shows. See the Live-Action TV heading on the Genre Throwback main page for specifics.
• The works of George Lucas include several well-known examples:
  • The original three Indiana Jones adventures (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade) were based on 1930s pulp adventures, with Those Wacky Nazis or an evil cult as the villains, and supernatural, often Biblical forces. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, meanwhile, was rooted in '50s pulp sci-fi, with the atomic bomb and the Cold War featuring prominently, the Soviets replacing the Nazis, and a plot based around aliens from Another Dimension. The Grand Finale Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, however, was rooted in 60's and 70's action thrillers and Government Conspiracy Thrillers including Spy Fiction such as James Bond (which inspired the creation of the franchise in the first place and shared its cast members in both franchises) and its many imitatorsinvoked during the decades and post war-Nazi conspiracy thrillers such as Marathon Man, The Odessa File and The Boys from Brazil (which featured Wolf Kahler, who played Colonel Dietrich from the first film).
  • Star Wars: 1930s sci-fi serials among other sources, Flash Gordon in particular. (It originated as an attempt to actually revive Flash Gordon, except that Lucas could not buy the rights.) There's also a heavy dose of jidaigeki movies from the '50s and '60s.
  • Red Tails: '40s and '50s war movies. It wasn't directed by Lucas, but he did produce and finance it, and it had been one of his dream projects for years.
  • Radioland Murders: 1930s screwball comedies. Again, Lucas produced but didn't direct.
  • Lucas also produced Tucker: The Man and His Dream by Francis Ford Coppola, a throwback to '40s-'50s advertising, industrial films, and Frank Capra movies.
• Christopher Nolan envisioned The Dark Knight Trilogy as a throwback to '70s blockbuster action films, particularly with its reliance on practical effects and stuntwork, a style of filmmaking that is also apparent in his later films (Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk). To quote his message included with the Blu-Ray compilation of The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  "In retrospect, it can only have been my absolute confidence that a return to the old school '70s blockbusters that I grew up with would be the key to bringing Batman back. ... Few movies had pushed that particular button, and I believed that changes to the craft of filmmaking were to blame. I put together a team of the best technicians in the world to test my theory, and we tested it more and more with each new installment, shamelessly pillaging the stunt and special effects techniques of movies we'd loved in the hope of combining them into something fresh for the audience."
• Billy Ray's movies (Shattered Glass, Breach): '70s political thrillers, particularly All the President's Men.
• The films of Eli Roth: '70s and '80s exploitation films.
  • Hostel helped revive a '70s mondo aesthetic and make it a major component of the Torture Porn boom of the 2000s, especially in how it purported that its depiction of a secret murder society of wealthy sickos was Based on a True Story.
  • The Green Inferno is this to the "cannibal boom" of the '70s and early '80s. It also pays homage to The New World, The Mission, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
  • The House With a Clock in Its Walls, Roth's foray into family adventure films, specifically called back to '80s Amblin Entertainment films that were meant to scare younger audiences. Roth even spoke to Steven Spielberg (one of the film's producers) on the matter, who told him to make it as scary as he could get away with under the PG rating.
  • Thanksgiving (2023) began life as one of the fake trailers attached to the below-mentioned Grindhouse, where it was meant as a parody of the Slasher Movies of the 1970s and '80s. When it finally got turned into an actual movie, it had been sixteen years since the trailer was made, and so the throwback was updated to match: this time, it was an homage to the slasher remakes of the 2000s like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and Friday the 13th (2009), which took the older films and juiced them up with big-name casts (including various contemporary Teen Idols) and slicker production values.
• Quentin Tarantino is also heavily associated with this trope:
  • Jackie Brown: '70s blaxploitation.
  • Kill Bill is part New Old West, part '70s martial arts movies, and part vintage Jidaigeki (samurai cinema).
  • Grindhouse, a co-production with Robert Rodriguez, is a double-feature tribute to not only '70s exploitation flicks, but to the general experience of seeing them in a sleazy theater on the wrong side of town, complete with trashy previews between flicks — a few of which became real movies that are themselves listed on this page. Planet Terror, Rodriguez's half of the production, is a throwback to '70s Zombie Apocalypse films, while Death Proof, Tarantino's half, is a throwback to '70s car chase movies such as Vanishing Point, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and the original Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), with a bit of influence from '70s slasher movies, too.
  • Inglourious Basterds is an exploitation World War II movie In the Style of films like Where Eagles Dare. The most obvious point of inspiration is, of course, The Inglorious Bastards, and two of that film's stars (Bo Svenson and Enzo Castellari) even have cameos in Tarantino's movie.
  • Django Unchained combines two old exploitation styles: blaxploitation and the Spaghetti Western. Its plot is very loosely based on Django, a classic of the latter genre, and it even features a cameo by that film's star, Franco Nero. There's also more than a little of Blazing Saddles in there, another film that combined '70s black American culture with the Western.
  • The Hateful Eight is a throwback to the epic period pieces which dominated the latter years of The Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Oklahoma!, featuring an suitably long runtime of 3 hours, an ensemble cast, an intermission, an overture, and a 70mm Roadshow Theatrical Release.
• While Kevin Williamson is best known as a TV writer and producer, he has also worked as a screenwriter on horror movies, many of which fall into this trope.
  • His most famous films, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, were both throwbacks to '70s and '80s slasher movies. Scream ran closer to a Deconstructive Parody with a heavy dollop of postmodernism thrown in, while I Know was a more serious, less self-referential homage.
  • He also wrote The Faculty, a throwback to '50s Alien Invasion B-movies, in much the same style as Scream.
  • Cursed, which reteamed him with Scream director Wes Craven, was intended as a throwback to '80s werewolf and monster movies, complete with makeup effects by Rick Baker of An American Werewolf in London fame. However, its disastrously Troubled Production meant that much of that was lost.
• The films of Ed Wood, believe it or not. Many people think of his films as the definitive examples of cheap 1950s B-movies; in reality, his films were intended to be the antithesis of those types of films, and were created as throwbacks to science fiction and horror movies from the 1930s. This is even discussed in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, in a scene where Wood and Bela Lugosi bemoan how, in their opinion, horror movies in The '50s had degenerated into "giant insect" films. That said, Wood's best-known movies - Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster - both try to marry the '30s Universal Horror vibe he loved to more contemporary '50s themes, like aliens and the nuclear threat.
• Rob Zombie's films are heavily informed by '70s exploitation films, as is much of his music.
  • The Firefly Trilogy of House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects and 3 from Hell is specifically inspired by redneck-sploitation horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), though The Devil's Rejects turns it on its head and makes them into Villain Protagonists, much in the mode of outlaw movies such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.
  • This was actually one of the main criticisms of his remake of Halloween and its sequel. Among those who didn't like his version of the story, one of the most common complaints concerned his use of '70s exploitation film tropes in a story whose original version was famous for its use of Nothing Is Scarier.
  • He contributed one of the fake trailers for the aforementioned Grindhouse, titled Werewolf Women of the SS, an homage to Nazisploitation films like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.
  • The Haunted World of El Superbeasto was his take on the adult animation of the decade, particularly the films of Ralph Bakshi, combined with the influence of more modern animation like The Ren & Stimpy Show and SpongeBob SquarePants.
  • The Lords of Salem: '70s Religious Horror and witchcraft films.
  • 31 is a more general blend of various '70s splatter film tropes, including a Deadly Game setup, Hillbilly Horrors for many of the psychopaths faced in said game, and a road movie feel for the protagonists (members of a traveling carnival).

Live-Action Film — Genres

• The late 70's, '80s and early '90s saw the Spaghetti Western falling Two Decades Behind and undergoing a critical reappraisal, so many cult movies from this era are High Concept science fiction/fantasy reimaginings of this genre. A few examples are The Road Warrior, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Hard Target, and the characters of Han Solo and Boba Fett in Star Wars.
• In the wake of Scream (1996), a postmodern Deconstructive Parody of the Slasher Movie genre, late '90s horror was dominated by a wave of '80s-style "body count" slasher movies, this time made with serious budgets, credible TV actors, and often a more self-referential tone.
• Independent cinema in the 2010s saw the rise of "post-horror" or "elevated horror", a horror subgenre often characterized by a deliberate avoidance of jump scares and other fixtures of modern horror films in favor of a focus on atmosphere, dread, and high production values. In this, it has often been described as a throwback to the horror films of the '70s.
• In the late '10s, Netflix noticed that the old romantic comedies that it had in its backlog were among their most popular and frequently watched films. As such, starting in 2018 it released a slew of movies designed to throw back to the genre's '90s heyday, led by Set It Up (inspired by the films of Nora Ephron in particular, albeit with more self-aware humor) and an adaptation of Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before (inspired by teen romantic comedies like She's All That). Shannon Purser, who starred in the Netflix rom-com Sierra Burgess is a Loser, noted the throwback appeal, stating that she and her friends didn't have many contemporary romantic films growing up in the early 2010s and would eagerly watch older ones.
• Sci-Fi Horror was one of the iconic genres of 1950s cinema, but by the '60s and '70s it had run its course. However, in the final years of the '70s, the one-two punch of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and Alien repopularized it, and the '80s were full of retro-'50s scifi horror (indeed, the level of nostalgic reverence the '80s had for the '50s was one of the defining forces of that decade, at least in the English-speaking world). This resulted in remakes like The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986), and The Blob (1988), as well as more broadly '50s-inspired movies like The Deadly Spawn, Lifeforce (1985), and even parodies like Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
• The boom of Indonesian martial arts movies in the 2010s and continuing into the 2020s that started with Merantau and kicked into high gear with The Raid Redemption has a lot in common with the Heroic Bloodshed Hong Kong action movies of the '80s and '90s, featuring grandiose, melodramatic plots taking place in violent underworld settings.
• In the late 1950s, Hammer Films made their own versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy (1959), launching a wave of British Gothic Horror films that lasted until the '70s, and included smaller studios like Amicus, Tigon, and British Lion. Not all of these were overt remakes of the Universal Horror movies of the 1930s and '40s, but they were very much modeled on that earlier period, right down to their reliance on a few recurring big-name "horror stars", with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as, effectively, the new equivalents to Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
• Some of these same studios also dabbled in Two-Fisted Tales and other Pulp Magazine-inspired fare, with Amicus producing four Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired movies starring Doug McClure (The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, At The Earths Core, and Warlords Of Atlantis^note The first three of these being straight adaptations of Burroughs' serial novels, while Warlords of Atlantis was more of an affectionate pastiche of his general style) and Hammer's The Lost Continent, One Million Years B.C. (another remake of the earlier One Million B.C.), and The Abominable Snowman.
• The 1950s and '60s wave of Sword and Sandal historical and/or Biblical epics - films like Ben-Hur (1959), The Greatest Story Ever Told, King of Kings, The Robe, The Prodigal, The Ten Commandments (1956), and Cleopatra - were throwbacks to, or even remakes of, the silent-era epics like The Ten Commandments (1923), Ben-Hur (1925), Intolerance, Noah's Ark (1928), and The King of Kings. Note that Cecil B Demille was heavily involved in both waves.
• Something similar happened in Italian cinema, as well. Italy produced a few silent historical epics of their own, most notably Cabiria, about the Punic Wars, and a series of spin-off films all about that movie's Breakout Character, Maciste. In 1958, just as Hollywood's own Sword and Sandal renaissance was beginning, the Italian film industry gave us Hercules (1958), launching the peplum subgenre: Heroic Fantasy movies, typically with vague Greco-Roman settings, and improbably-muscular leading men - including a whole new string of Maciste movies. These lasted until about 1965, when spy movies and the Spaghetti Western took over as the defining forces of Italian genre film. Then they came back again in the 1980s when the Italian film industry took notice of the success of Clash of the Titans (1981) and Conan the Barbarian (1982), launching a new wave of Darker and Edgier peplum movies carries on the broadly-shouldered backs of beefcake actors like Lou Ferrigno and Miles O'Keeffe.

Live-Action Film — Individual Films

• 13 Going on 30 is one to 1980s fantasy Rom Coms in the vein of Big or Mannequin especially in its soundtrack. It's almost like it was a film from 1987 (where the movie is partially set) that was released 17 years late.
• 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake, along with the Affectionate Parody Shaun of the Dead, went a long way towards reviving 1970s Zombie Apocalypse movies.
• A Countess from Hong Kong: Anybody that has seen a Screwball Comedy from the 1930s will notice that the film is a parody of such films, also there's plenty of Chaplin's jokes from the silent era that many of his fans will notice.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a strange example, given its complicated production history. When it was a Stanley Kubrick project, he envisioned the film as a throwback to classic Steven Spielberg/Amblin movies of the '80s. However, after it got stuck in Development Hell, Spielberg himself took up the task of making the film, and he imagined it as a throwback to classic Kubrick films as a tribute to the late director (he died in 1999). The end result was a muddle of the two directors' visions and a divisive finished product.
• Alien takes cues from a lot of old '50s scifi horror movies like Night of the Blood Beast and It! The Terror from Beyond Space and a visual style based on Planet Of The Vampires (1965), with a tone more in line with a Cosmic Horror Story from the '30s. Likewise, Aliens mixed in some Them! influence.
• All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: '80s slashers, much like the below-mentioned Hatchet (which came out the same year), albeit in a less comedic manner.
• American Pie: Raunchy teen sex comedies of the '80s. Its success wound up relaunching the genre in the 2000s as a slew of new films in that style came out.
• Aquaman (2018) is one to Old school adventure films James Wan is a fan of, with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone being two frequent comparisons. The middle stretch of the film is where this influence is most strong felt, with the two bickering heroes going on a globetrotting trip, hunting clues and digging through ancient artifacts while fighting pirates and sea monsters in an attempt to get to an old treasure.
• Damien Leone created Art the Clown, the villain of All Hallows' Eve and the Terrifier films, as a throwback to the "icon" slasher villains of The '80s.
• The Artist: Silent movies of the 1920s.
• At Long Last Love: Movie musicals of the '30s and '40s.
• Attack the Block: '80s monster movies and horror-comedies like Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins, Tremors, and The Goonies, combined with the social commentary of '80s John Carpenter action-horror films like They Live! and Escape from New York.
• Austin Powers: The James Bond parodies of the 1960s, particularly Our Man Flint and Casino Royale (1967).
• Australia: The Golden Age of Hollywood sweeping romantic epics. It is also a throwback the '80 Outback westerns, such as The Man from Snowy River.
• Beetlejuice was a Ghost Breakers homage, only with (slightly) better special effects and the fact that the ghosts were the protagonists.
• Beyond the Black Rainbow: Mind Screw Science Fiction movies of the '80s, like Altered States.
• Blood Junkie is a throwback to 1980s Slasher Movies.
• Blood of the Tribades: The producers of the film specifically modeled it on lesbian vampire movies in the 1970s, but with a more sympathetic portrayal (as they're the good guys).
• Buckaroo Banzai is a Parody Sue version of Doc Savage.
• This is actually a plot point in The Cabin in the Woods. The scenario that the protagonists are thrown into is a Cliché Storm of an '80s Don't Go in the Woods Slasher Movie, which is not lost on the controllers. They long to create a more interesting scenario, but they know that the Ancient Ones (i.e. the people watching the film) demand the same old boilerplate tropes and cliches in their ritual sacrifices (read: horror movies). In addition to being a Deconstructor Fleet for the entire horror genre, the film is a feature-length Take That! at horror fans and filmmakers for their love of genre throwbacks and familiar tropes, arguing that this mentality has produced a stagnant genre that's too reverential towards the past and has forgotten how to innovate (and, more importantly, embrace innovative stories).
• Caligula, thanks to the influence of producer Bob Guccione, was this to the lavish Sword and Sandal epics of The '50s — only now, with all the depraved Roman orgies that they could never dare show in the days of The Hays Code (Guccione was the creator of Penthouse magazine, and The '70s were the era of "porno chic"). Notably, this was not the intention of writer Gore Vidal, who sought to make a straightforward biopic about the notorious Roman emperor; the fights between Vidal, Guccione, and director Tinto Brass over the tone and direction of the film lay at the root of its Troubled Production.
• Catch Me If You Can: Late '50s-early '60s sophisticated thriller and crime movie genre, especially Topkapi, the original Ocean's Eleven, Charade, and many Alfred Hitchcock movies. The title screens are done in the style of Saul Bass and the The Pink Panther movies, and the score by John Williams is an Homage to Henry Mancini.
• The Conjuring, in addition to being a '70s Period Piece, also hearkens back to the Religious Horror and haunted-house movies of that era.
• The Curse of the Jade Scorpion is one to many a Screwball Comedy of the '30s. There are also a lot of nods to '40s Film Noir.
• The George A. Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow was a throwback to '50s EC horror comics and their ilk.
• Da 5 Bloods: Jingoistic action movies of the '80s, along with a frank appraisal of their politics.
• Dark Shadows: '70s Gothic horror (including the show it's based on) and '80s/'90s adult-aimed horror-comedy.
• Death Becomes Her: While mostly a straight up Black Comedy and colorized, the movie has been seen as a throwback to black and white gothic horror films made between the 1930s through the 1950s. Some have even suggested watching the movie in black and white to see what they mean.
• Death Stop Holocaust: 1970s backwoods exploitation horror.
• Dear God No!: 1970s backwoods exploitation horror.
• Disembodied Hitman: This film's tone comes from Exploitation Films of the '70s, specifically those in which murder is done with power tools - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974, The Toolbox Murders, The Driller Killer in particular.
• Doomsday: 1980s dystopian sci-fi.
• Down with Love: Romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s.
• Dredd: Minus it being a comic property, the action scenes are a throwback to gory '80s action movies.
• Drive (2011): '80s crime films.
• The Drownsman: supernatural-themed 1980s slasher films (such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street).
• Eight Legged Freaks: '50s Giant Insect/Monster B-Movies like Tarantula! or Them!.
• Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988): To Roger Corman B-movies of the '50s, '60s and '70s. They even went to Corman's old company, New World Pictures, so they could use footage from some of the movies they had.
• The Expendables: Rated M for Manly action movies from the '80s and early '90s, starring many of the action heroes who made their careers with such films.
• Far and Away: Epic historical melodramas of John Ford and David Lean, particularly The Quiet Man and Ryan's Daughter.
• Far from Heaven: '50s melodrama, particularly the films of Douglas Sirk.
• The first two entries in the Fear Street trilogy are set, respectively, in 1994 and in 1978, and mimic the slasher movies of the day. 1994 is based on the self-aware suburban teen horror movies of the '90s like Scream and The Faculty, while 1978, with its Summer Campy setting, is pretty clearly modeled on the more straightforward slashers of the late '70s and early '80s like Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, and The Burning. Averted by the third movie, Fear Street: 1666, which is more along the lines of then-recent Folk Horror films like Apostle or especially The VVitch - although the final act of 1666, subtitled 1994: Part 2, returns us to the 1990s (and '90s slasher mode) to wrap up the overarching story.
• The Fifth Element: French science-fiction comics of the late '70s and early '80s.
• The Forbidden Kingdom: '60s kung fu and Wuxia films.
• The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head: Disney's own science fiction comedies of the 1960s and '70s.
• Gangster Squad: "Rise-and-Fall of an Evil Is Cool Gangster" flicks along with '40s detective thrillers. Essentially, L.A. Confidential (see below) for the 2010s.
• Ghostbusters is a reimagining of 1940s ghost/haunted house comedies such as The Ghost Breakers and Spook Busters, except it featured actual ghosts and Lovecraftian overtones.
• Gladiator: Sword and Sandal epics.
• Terror of Mechagodzilla seems more like a kaiju film from the 1950s and early 1960s. It has a serious tone, a weighty theme, a lavish city destruction spectacle, a new monster antagonist that looks more like a natural animal, significant scenes of evacuation and human fear, and a well-developed human plot. This contrasts it with the contemporary kaiju films of the late '60s and '70s, which were campy, had fights takes place in barren wilderness rather than cities, featured outlandish monsters, and whose human plots were almost exclusively there to set up the monster fights. This was a conscious choice on the part of producer Tomoyuki Tanaka for artistic and monetary reasons, believing that Godzilla had gotten too wacky and that this was the reason ticket sales were declining. Part of arresting this trend was bringing back Ishiro Honda and Akira Ifukube to direct and score the movie, respectively.
• MonsterVerse:
  • Godzilla (2014) is a throwback to Jaws, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park and many other sci-fi, horror and adventure films from The '70s, The '80s, and The '90s that used Monster Delay, Nothing Is Scarier, and Obscured Special Effects to build suspense and grandeur around their FX-heavy monsters. Gareth Edwards says that this was done as a sort of rebuttal against later FX-heavy blockbusters of the Turn of the Millennium and The New '10s that instead try to show off as many CGI-laden shots as possible without bothering to savor individual scenes.
  • Kong: Skull Island is a throwback to Vietnam War movies from the '70s and '80s, with a soundtrack heavy on Creedence Clearwater Revival and a pointed commentary on that war.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) could easily be viewed as a modern take on classic Showa-era kaiju films in the vein of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster and Destroy All Monsters, being a fantastical, over-the-top monster mash with an increased emphasis on spectacular kaiju battles (so much so that the film was actually criticized for having too much monster action), as well as playing up that era's iconic depiction of Godzilla as a protector of the Earth. These elements were then given the Hollywood treatment with 21st-century special effects techniques beyond anything Toho was capable of during the '60s and '70s, adding a Darker and Edgier tone more in line with Heisei-era kaiju movies, and featuring some major acting talent among its cast. It helps that director Michael Dougherty is a Promoted Fanboy. There's also some parallels with Godzilla vs. Hedorah as the film features some environmentalist themes (this time going with a Climate Change Allegory in place of Hedorah's themes on pollution).
  • Godzilla vs. Kong, perhaps surprisingly, takes some stylistic cues from Two-Fisted Tales and Sword and Sorcery stories, treating Kong himself as a scaled-up Barbarian Hero, battle-axe and all, and having a large chunk of the movie set in the Hollow Earth.
• 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is this to the earlier era of swashbuckling adventure movies of the then-last three decades, including Ray Harryhausen's own The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, released back in the '50s, and the even earlier The Thief of Bagdad (1940), whose influence on this movie is very clear.
• Gutterballs: '80s Slashers... Though you'd be hard pressed to find an eighties slasher as vulgar and gory as it... well, maybe Violent Shit.
• The Hangover is a mundane, vulgar, and gritty one to the Screwball Comedy genre of the 1930s and '40s for it's premise and the tropes the trilogy upholds. The main trio of the Wolf Pack is a down-to-earth Expy of The Three Stooges, while Doug himself can be considered an Expy of Ted Healy, whom the Stooges were lackeys of in the early days. The first film's scene has a Shout-Out to Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby, while the racial stereotype character of Leslie Chow would not look out of place from a film from the '30s and '40s where the racial imperium was the norminvoked. Alan himself mostly thinks he's in one of the era's films when they abide by The Hays Code back then, if his tendency to Gosh Dang It to Heck! is taken to consideration. Todd Phillips' real-life experience that inspired the making of the first film can be considered the closest to a screwball comedy film-like situation in real-life.
• The poster◊ for Hatchet explicitly advertises itself as "Old School American Horror" as opposed to a remake, a sequel, or "based on a Japanese one", combining all manner of '80s Slasher Movie tropes with modern gore effects and an affectionately self-aware attitude.
• The Hatchling is one wears the influence of 1980's kid's adventure films a la E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with bands of friends saving a fantastical baby creature and Amblin's productions on its sleeve, with the short being shot to look like the climax of such a story.
• Harbinger Down: '80s monster movies, specifically the original Thing.
• Headless: '70s Horror, even marketing itself as "the lost slasher of 1978."
• Hereditary also comes across as a throwback to '70s and early '80s horror, with its slow-burn approach, use of tension and revulsion for horror rather than startles or classically scary settings, and themes of demons and of psychological family fracturing.
• Hit And Run: '70s-'80s car chase action-comedies like Smokey and the Bandit.
• Hobo with a Shotgun: Low-budget '80s action movies, of the kind made by The Cannon Group and Troma. It began life as one of the fake trailers attached to Grindhouse (albeit only the Canadian version).
• Hong Kong Godfather: Heroic Bloodshed.
• The Host (2006): All those cheesy Asian monster movies that followed Godzilla, with a bit of Jaws in there too.
• Hot Rod: '80s slapstick underdog comedies.
• The House of the Devil: '70s and early '80s Satanic horror. The movie even mimics the cinematography of that era, favouring - for example - zooms over dolly shots, and ending on a freeze frame. It also features horror actors of that era, like Dee Wallace and especially Tom Noonan, in key roles.
• In Fabric: Stylish and glamorous '70s European horror and giallo films from Dario Argento et al.
• Inception: '90s cyberspace and cyberpunk movies, or the Platonic Cave idea in general.
• Independence Day: '50s Alien Invasion movies and '70s Disaster Movies, only with better special effects. This episode of Really That Good goes into detail on how it drew heavily from the iconography of the genre in order to make the aliens as arch and recognizable as possible.
• It Follows is based on the Sex Signals Death and Ominous Walk tropes of the Slasher Movie genre. The films' debut poster invokes the "80s horror movie" brilliantly.◊
• Jack Reacher: '60s/'70s crime movies, such as Bullitt.
• John Carter: One review claimed that the film "tries to evoke ... a fondly recalled universe of B-movies, pulp novels and boys’ adventure magazines". Ironically, the source material is what most throwbacks are in homage to, in some degree or another.
• John Wick is a throwback to the action films of the '80s and '90s.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service: The Tuxedo and Martini spy flicks of the '60s and '70s.
• Most reviews of Krampus described it as having very retro-'80s sensibilities, most overtly in its use of a holiday setting, and its Adorable Evil Minions pretty unmistakeably invoking Gremlins in particular. While all of this is valid, there's also a lot of influence from even older Christmas movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Scrooge (1951) (the latter of which appears on a TV in Krampus), where characters must be shown frightening visions to help them appreciate Christmas.
• Kung Fury: To '80s action and Kung Fu movies, complete with over-the-top violence, cheesy synthesizer music, and Deliberate VHS Quality.
• L.A. Confidential: Classic Film Noir Hardboiled Detective crime thrillers of the 1940s and '50s.
• La La Land: Classic movie musicals from the 1940s through the '60s. The filmmakers even arranged screenings of such films, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, so the cast and crew could get in that headset.
• Larry Crowne: basically a modern-day interpretation of the works of Frank Capra.
• Lockout: '80s/early '90s sci-fi action flicks, such as The Running Man, and Total Recall (1990), and especially Escape from New York. Notably, writer Luc Besson was successfully sued over the film for having plagiarized Escape from New York, and had to pay half a million dollars to John Carpenter, his co-writer Nick Castle, and rights-holder StudioCanal.
• The Lost City is a throwback and Affectionate Parody to the action-adventure romantic comedies of the 1980s, especially Romancing the Stone, which it shares a near-identical premise to. Romancing The Stone itself was a spoof of older Jungle Opera stories and paperback romance novels.
• The Love Witch: '70s exploitation films/B-movies.
• Machete: '70s blaxploitation, but with Mexicans (Mexploitation?). Another film that began life as a fake trailer from Grindhouse.
• The Magnificent Seven (2016) is a throwback to classic Hollywood westerns, playing many of the familiar tropes unabashedly straight.
• Malignant: Campy horror films of the '70s and '80s, especially Giallo.
• The Man with the Iron Fists: '70s martial arts movies.
• Mars Attacks!: An Affectionate Parody of Zeerusty, Alien Invasion/Monster B-movies made anywhere between the 1950s through the '60s, particularly, films like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Plan 9 from Outer Space as well as classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still and the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds.
• Has become a staple of the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain America: The First Avenger: '40s pulp adventure films.
  • Iron Man 3: Late '80s-Early '90s action films, directed by the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: '70s paranoia-filled political thrillers. This is also the reason The Winter Soldier features Robert Redford, who starred in many of the most notable examples of such films.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: Late '70s and '80s Space Opera B-Movies, like Dark Star, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Battle Beyond the Stars, and The Ice Pirates.
  • Ant-Man: Classic heist films like Ocean's Eleven.
  • Doctor Strange: '70s psychedelic films and music, alongside surreal '90s action movies like Dark City and The Matrix.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming: '80s coming-of-age movies like, among others, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which gets a Shout-Out, only with Spider-Man as the main character.
  • Thor: Ragnarok is a gleefully cheesy neon-disco-deco and hair-metal-fashion love-letter to the gloriously-trashy "space operas with magic swords" cartoons of the 1980s such as Thundercats and SilverHawks; right down to its psychedelic Vangelis inspired synthesizer musical score by '80s musician Mark Mothersbaugh and its He-Man inspired Glam Rock title logo. Thor: Love and Thunder continues this trend.
  • Captain Marvel: '90s sci-fi/action movies like Total Recall (1990) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
  • Werewolf By Night: '30s and '40s Gothic Horror films, particularly those made by Universal Pictures.
• Max Neptune and the Menacing Squid: 1930s sci-fi serials.
• Merrick: I'll Spew On Your Grave: To 1970s exploitation films.
• Midnight Special is a throwback to '80s sci-fi films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
• Midway (2019): War Epics of the 1940s to '70s.
• Minority Report somewhat evokes a "Crapsaccharine Future Fugitive Arc" premise reminiscent of Logan's Run, Soylent Green or maybe even Demolition Man.
• The Mist: Sci-fi horror films of the '50s and '60s - most overtly, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Crawling Eye.
• Monster!: A 1999 film homaging 1950s BMovies. Also a justified example of this trope: the main antagonist is a monster who escaped a 1950s monster movie franchise and by its mere presence forces the conventions of one on the town.
• The Monster Squad is a throwback to the classic Universal Horror films, particularly the ones featuring a Crossover of two or three monsters such as Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman and House of Dracula. The Monster Squad ups the ante by bringing five monsters together, but otherwise stays pretty close to the spirit of the classic films - though it also mixes in more contemporary '80s influences, most overtly The Goonies, Stand by Me, and other kids-go-on-an-adventure movies of the era.
• Moon: 1970s sci-fi B-Movies with an undertone of intellectual thought experiment.
• MouseHunt, while also a Black Comedy, is throwback to classic physical slapstick comedy bits like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello especially since the film is set a kind-of 40s Retro Universe evoking the feel of the era.
• Mrs Henderson Presents: Late '30s Musicals.
• Muck: '80s horror films, down to many cases of Ms. Fanservice and Kane Hodder as the killer.
• The Mummy Trilogy: pulp adventure stories of the '30s and '40s. Although The Mummy (1999) is ostensibly a remake of The Mummy (1932), it borrows more of its flavour from the semi-related The Mummy's Hand and its sequels that ran throughout the 1940s, which had much more of a pulp horror tone than the melodramatic tragedy tone of the 1932 film.
• The original Jim Henson Muppets movies of the '70s and '80s were genre throwbacks:
  • The Muppet Movie: The Road Trip Plot.
  • The Great Muppet Caper: The Caper.
  • The Muppets Take Manhattan: The backstage musical.
  • In turn, The Muppets (2011) and Muppets Most Wanted (2014) were genre throwbacks to the original trilogy. The latter especially takes some cues from Caper.
• Murder Collection V.1: Shockumentaries such as Faces of Death.
• George Romero himself has said the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) film was inspired by the EC horror comics he enjoyed when he was younger.
• Music (2021): Feel-good Inspirationally Disadvantaged movies like Rain Man and Forrest Gump.
• Ninja Assassin: Cheesy Ninja movies of the '80s.
  • Ninja and Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear, both starring Scott Adkins, fill this role too.
• Noah: Biblical epics of the '50s and '60s.
• Nuns on the Run: Ealing comedies of the 1950s.
• Joseph Kosinski's invokedword is that Oblivion (2013) is meant to evoke sci-fi movies of The '70s. What we see wouldn't be (that much) out of place in a Heavy Metal or Mœbius comic.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Swashbuckling pirate films. The genre had previously been killed by Cutthroat Island, by virtue of it being the biggest Box Office Bomb in history at the time.
• The Possession: '70s and early '80s religious and adult-driven horror.
• The Producers (2005): Camp '50s and '60s musical films.
• Psycho Beach Party: '50s psychodramas, '60s beach movies, and '70s slasher movies.
• While The Purge was pretty much a straight home invasion horror movie outside of its gimmick, its sequels, The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year, owes a lot more to the dystopian, satirical action films of The '80s, such as The Running Man and Escape from New York.
• The Rocketeer: 1930s adventure serials.
• Ronin (1998) is essentially a classic '70s era heist film, but made and set in the late '90s.
• Running Scared (2006) is one to the gritty-but-stylish urban crime thrillers of the 1970s and '80s.
• Sex Lives of the Potato Men: Awful British Sex Comedies of the 1970s.
• Silverado: Among the first attempts to revive the Western genre.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: 1930s sci-fi serials. It's pretty much the go-to example of dieselpunk on the internet.
• Sky High (2005): Campy Saturday-Morning Cartoon of the 1980s.
• Slaxx: '80s horror films like The Stuff and They Live! that combined consumerist satire with graphic violence.
• Slither: 1980s creature features, particularly Night of the Creeps, with Shout Outs aplenty (mostly in the names of its characters; something Night Of The Creeps also did).
• Stardust: '80s comedic fantasy films.
• Strange Behavior: Low-budget paranoid horror thrillers of the 1950s, complete with over-the-top villain names and the concept of voices from beyond the grave.
• Super 8: Family adventure films of the late '70s and '80s, particularly those by Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment.
• Titanic (1997): Romantic epics of the '40s and '50s, combined with the more contemporary disaster movies of the '90s.
• Tremors: 1950s/'60s sci-fi horror, only with a more comedic bent. Its desert setting in particular feels like a throwback to things like Them! and Tarantula!.
• Unknown2011: is almost one to the action-thrillers of the '80s-'90s that featured Harrison Ford running away from his pursuers, such as The Fugitive.
• Valentine is essentially an '80s slasher film made in the wake of the success of Scream.
• Venom (2018) is viewed as one to '90s Anti-Hero Darker and Grittier Superhero movies akin to Darkman, The Crow (1994) and maybe even The Mask.
• VFW: Exploitation Films of The '80s.
• Victor/Victoria: Golden Age-era studio musicals.
• The Void: '80s horror, especially the films of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
• Welcome to the Jungle, to the "cannibal boom" sparked by Cannibal Holocaust.
• A War Named Desire: Heroic Bloodshed movies, especially of [1]'s earlier career.
• Wet Hot American Summer, rather blatantly to early 1980s Summer Campy raunchy Sex Comedies paying homage to films like Meatballs, Sleepaway Camp (without the horror), and Indian Summer.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Live-Action/Animation Medium Blending comedies made between the 1920s through the '60s as well as Detective Drama Film Noir.
• The 2012 film adaptation of The Woman in Black: '60s British Gothic Horror. Seeing as how it's being made by the new incarnation of Hammer Film Productions, which specialized in such films back in the day, this isn't exactly surprising.
  • Speaking of Hammer Horror, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) is another send-up/homage to those movies.

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