The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

The prolonged murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Marie Likens in 1965 remains the most gruesome crime committed in the state of Indiana and one of the most inhumane cases of fatal child abuse in American history. And yet, it's a story that's not nearly discussed enough. In the 60 years since the crime was committed, there have only been two cinematic adaptations: both were released in 2007, one ( An American Crime ) is an official made-for-TV dramatization, the other ( The Girl Next Door ) a largely fictionalized horror film.  Worst of all, despite two sets of excellent performances from the actresses playing the victim and villainess, both are terrible motion pictures in their own ways. Perhaps the subject matter—a teenage girl is brutalized incrementally over the course of three months until her body finally gives way—is too harrowing, inhumane, and graphic to translate into a legitimately compelling film without straying into the hideous realm of exploitation.  While we await a d...

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later concluded with an action as seemingly irreversible as it was undeniably gratifying. 20 years after Michael Myers escaped from Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium, where he had been confined since the age of six for the brutal murder of his teenage sister, and instigated a homecoming massacre in Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night in 1978, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who was revealed to be his long-lost baby sister, finally brought her homicidal older brother's reign of unmotivated terror to an end with one swift swing of a fire axe, literally cutting the head off of her lifelong monster.  It was a fitting conclusion to the Halloween franchise as a whole and Laurie's arc in particular. No longer could this faceless force of destruction plague her nightmares, and no longer could hack filmmakers milk Michael Myers' mythology to churn out another uninspired and unnecessary sequel to further complicate what was initially a blissfu...

50 years ago, director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen adapted the first published novel by Stephen King—a 1974 coming-of-age odyssey with a supernatural horror twist named after its eponymous antihero, Carrie —into what would become, fittingly enough, only the first-ever adaptation of a Stephen King novel . Boasting a pair of career-defining and Oscar-nominated performances from Sissy Spacek as Carrie White and Piper Laurie as her Bible-thumping, abusive mother, Margaret, the result, although slightly diminished by a campy undertone, remains the definitive interpretation of King's story that set the template for every bullied high school revenge film that followed in its wake.  Since then, there have been two added cinematic adaptations: a made-for-TV remake in 2002 written by Bryan Fuller and directed by David Carson, and a big-budget theatrical remake in 2013 co-written by original author Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and directed by Kimberly P...