Rear Screen Projections 1980-81
Sherman's first colour photographs are self-portraits photographed in front of a screen on which are projected slides of outdoor and indoor scenes, which curator Amada Cruz thinks are more reminiscent of television than films, in contrast to her previous series. These are made in the studio, rather than "on location" and, although they may allude to the practice in film making in which moving images play behind the actors in a studio, to suggest locale, the rear screen projection never seems as "authentic," leaving the viewer with the feeling that something is amiss or "untrue" about the photograph.

Centerfolds or Horizontals 1981 - In 1981, Sherman was asked to create a portfolio of images for an issue of the art magazine Artforum. She attempted to produce a series of works that referred to horizontal centerfolds in pornographic magazines. The series was rejected and the artist criticized for reaffirming sexist stereotypes, showing young women, with their gaze averted, looking vulnerable and seen from a vantage point above the prone woman.

Fairy Tales 1985 - In this series, Sherman moves toward surreality, using vivid color, costumes, prostheses, wigs and props to create paradoxically humorous and disturbing images. Commissioned by Vanity Fair as a series based on fairy tales, these photographs, like the Untitled Film Stills, are not based on real fairy tales, but intend to evoke narratives from this genre.
In 1992, however, she did create a series for a publisher to illustrate "Fitcher's Bird", one of Grimm's fairy tales. In "Fitcher's Bird" a sorcerer carries off the eldest of three daughters. He tells her that she may enter all of the rooms of the house with the exception of one, which can be opened only by the smallest of keys. This room she must avoid on pain of death. The sorcerer further entrusts the girl with an egg, which she is always to carry with her.
Cindy Sherman has always been interested in fairy tales of sorts: film stills, fashion photos, and many of the other genres she has culled from create a visual mythology responsible for a cultural construction of the feminine. In "Fitcher's Bird", she continues this exploration, using Grimm's tale to reveal how such myths create and support paradigms against which the lives of women are measured. The story, only slightly modified from Grimm's version, is about the sadistic sorcerer named Fitcher who uses his powers to capture young girls. His magic works like the logic of fairy tales themselves, for we are told that "the spell would only be broken by a woman, who proved to be obedient to his will and agreed to marry him, because, of course, then no spell would be needed." Fitcher brutally murders those who fail this initiation into subservience. But when one woman discovers the rules of Fitcher's game, she feigns passivity and outsmarts the wizard, saving her sisters and eventually destroying him. (1994, Spalding)
In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales help children manage contradictory feelings that would otherwise overwhelm them.
For example, typical fairy-tale splitting of the mother into a good (usually dead) mother and a wicked stepmother serves the child well. It enables the child to preserve an image of an internal all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, and also permits anger at the bad stepmother without guilt about one's angry thoughts or endangering the goodwill of the true mother.
"Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspect of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity."

Disasters 1986-89 - Employing the theatrical devices and hallucinatory imagery of the Fairy Tales, Sherman undertakes to perform the body as abject, excessive and in revolt. Cruz states that these images reveal the other side of human experience "and resist the far more common pictures of the cultivated and socialized body that we encounter daily in the media."

History Portraits 1989-90 - The thirty-five works in this series began as a commission in 1988 from Artes Magnus to create works in porcelain for the French firm Limoges, who used the original eighteenth-century molds for Madame de Pompadour's designs to produce items such as a soup tureen with decals on them that contained images of Sherman in period dress. (See p. 11 in the exhibition catalogue for a photo of one of these products.) Other works in the series celebrated characters from the French Revolution and were produced for an exhibition at Chantal Crousel Gallery in Paris during the French bicentennial. In all these works, as in the Untitled Film Stills, Sherman is not reproducing specific historical pictures for the most part, but rather playing with the tropes of historical portraiture, often parodying them, especially in the case of the often awkward depictions of female anatomy of Old Master paintings. One exception is Untitled #224 which is based on Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus (1593-94).

Sex Pictures 1992 - This series, which, for the most part, uses mannequins and body parts from medical catalogues as the "models," incorporates Sherman's investigations into the nature of pornography, inspired by a number of art world occurrences. Among these were the controversy over the works of artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andreas Serrano, ignited by the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States and a series of photographs by Jeff Koons, featuring himself and his wife, porn queen Cicciolina, in various explicit sex poses.
As Cruz writes: "Typically, pornography portrays sex as anonymous, and in this series, Sherman depicts pornography as ridiculous. The clinical aspect of the mannequins and the shocking violations of their plastic parts result in gruesomely hilarious pictures to which we cannot help but relate because they appear so familiar. Fortunately or unfortunately, these images are successful at disturbing, and even offending, members of the public who tend to overlook their humourous aspects, imagining that the pictures were created to offend, rather than to explore the nature of our offended response."

Horror and Surrealist Pictures 1994-6 - Many of the works in this series focus on the visage, using mannequin parts, masks, face paint, double exposures and special lighting effects. These works apparently related to Sherman's 1997 film Office Killer in which a magazine editor, Dorine, accidentally kills an office worker, leading to further crimes. Murdered victims are brought back to her house where she sets up a tableau with them, creating her ideal office.
"A dark side of the desires addressed in this play of artifice haunts another theme, of 'the uncanny'. In his article of the same name, Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as a terror which leads back to something once familiar to us, that has somehow been made strange. He includes the effect of dolls and automatons in this category, due to confusion they raise between what is alive and what is inanimate. The tousled doll discarded on a trash heap of burned out technological wreckage in Cindy Sherman's elaborately staged photograph personifies this notion perfectly: consisting of Sherman's own head eerily juxtaposed with a doll's body, this filthy, pathetic figure reveals strangely human vulnerabilities as a mucous bubble hangs out from its nose." http://www.arts.ilstu.edu/cfa/galleries/dollhouse/sherman.html