20 awesome ’80s movies you should totally see before you die

16. Fatal Attraction (1987)

Fatal Attraction continues to serve as a cautionary tale for married men everywhere. There are consequences to our actions, and sometimes those consequences are stalkers.

When Fatal Attraction was released, it was groundbreaking and controversial. A happily married man, Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), with a successful career, a beautiful, loving and supportive wife, Beth (Anne Archer), and a lovely daughter commits adultery.

With his wife out of town, Dan has a weekend long dalliance with a work colleague (Glenn Close). He’s not unhappy, his spouse isn’t a nagging shrew, and he’s not in love with this other woman. He barely knows her.

Close makes her character, Alex Forrest, empathetic to a point, but despite her best efforts to portray the character as her own worst enemy as opposed to a straight-up a villain, creative forces pushed for the opposite.

An independent career woman turning into a psychopath didn’t sit well with Close or feminists such as Susan Faludi who criticized the film in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

As if men aren’t threatened enough by women who reject traditional stereotypes, we get a female character whose life choices devolve into murderous impulses.

Fatal Attraction was a critical and commercial success. The film earned six Academy Award nominations and was the second highest grossing film of 1987.

Alex’s extreme behavior is the origin for the term “bunny boiler” which is defined as “a woman who acts vengefully after having been spurned by her lover.”