The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

Tell me if this sounds like a story you've been told countless times throughout the history of horror: a young, antisocial, emotionally stunted individual (typically a woman) becomes so consumed by their devotion to God and desperation to serve Him on their self-destructive path to personal transformation that their sanity begins to slip and ultimately devolves into pure, delusion-driven madness. However, what if the woman in this particular case were not always like that? That they were once a happy, vibrant, sociable human being like anybody else, hanging out at bars with friends, hooking up with random men who would give them the slightest look of interest. And all it took to transform them into a volatile, complete stranger to their own self was a single instance of trauma in the workplace. A trauma so unforgettable, so unforgivable, so drenched in blood, that they could never dream of being the normal person they once were. Such is the subtly subversive premise unearthed in Ro...

In 1979, Victor Miller, evidently inspired by the critical and commercial success of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's prototypical holiday slasher masterpiece, Halloween  (which grossed $47 million in the United States and an additional $23 million internationally, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time, and as of this writing boasts a 96% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes , with an average quality rating of 8.6/10), cooked up a one-upper: an atmospheric, delightfully suspenseful tale about a group of young would-be camp counselors stranded in the woods and picked off one by one by a mysterious psychopath wielding a hunting knife. For his doozy of a climax, Miller subverted the notion that slasher movie villains must be silent, supernatural, masked, and above all male  by introducing a distinctly human type of monster: a middle-aged woman seeking blind vengeance for the negligent drowning of her 11-year-old son. Unlike Michael Myers and Bub...