The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

While not the first horror film to utilize the documentarian format, The Blair Witch Project is undoubtedly responsible for ushering in the era of the found-footage subgenre. The reason is as simple as the storyline: it's cost-effective to assemble a trio of unknown actors rife with improvisational ability, deposit them in the woods, nature's most organically nightmarish setting, and observe them as they gradually lose their sanity to the paranoia of being hunted by a legendary witch. A decade later, Paranormal Activity reignited horror fans' obsession with found footage, placing a long-term couple in a similar environment. Only instead of the woods, the couple is stripped of their sense of safety in the supposed comfort of their own home, where the natural darkness of the night takes on a sinister ambience as a demonic presence from one of their pasts re-latches itself onto them.  From that point onward, so began a long-running franchise whose first three installments wer...

Mike Flanagan is both one of the most beloved filmmakers working in the horror genre today and the most prolific modern adapter of Stephen King's novels. In terms of the former qualification, he is also the most frustratingly uneven. Here is a man who made Oculus , a marginally above-average haunted-mirror haunter that ultimately cribbed too liberally from Stanley Kubrick's  The Shining . Then three years later, he put a thrillingly cerebral and disability-empowering spin on the home-invasion subgenre with Hush . That same year, he produced a vastly superior prequel to the atrocious Ouija  which nonetheless fell short of being genuinely good . With Gerald's Game , his first Stephen King adaptation, co-written by Jeff Howard, based on the 1992 novel of the same name, Flanagan has concocted his psychological horror masterpiece.  Harrowing, heart-wrenching, contemplative, and ultimately inspiring, Flanagan uses the claustrophobically terrifying, high-concept premise and conf...

After watching the 2002 supernatural horror film, The Ring , writer C. Robert Cargill experienced a nightmare in which he stumbled across a film in his attic depicting the hanging of an entire family. Such a simple, bizarre, personally harmless, and most likely ephemeral vision would serve as the jumping-off point for the setup of the simply titled Sinister , an intimate, self-contained, tensely atmospheric haunted house story that suffers from a stagnant and repetitive narrative, a screenplay dependent on cliches, and muddy lighting, but compensates with a terrifyingly designed antagonist, a slew of nightmarish and grisly visuals, and a deceptively compelling lead performance from Ethan Hawke, whose sheer role commitment grounds the unremarkable supernaturalism around him. Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) is a true crime author whose bestselling debut from 10 years earlier helped put away the perpetrator of a previously unsolved murder following the failure of the police to do so, bestowi...