The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

In mid-1980, the slasher subgenre was in full swing, and it came equipped with a handful of motifs: each new entry featured a silent serial killer whose identity was shielded by a mask, they wielded a bladed weapon, targeted their victims over the course of a holiday, and did so typically at a party at which an abundance of sexually active, hard-drinking teenagers gathered at once like moths drawn to light. The movie that popularized these tropes, minus the party aspect, was John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween in 1978, in which a 21-year-old mental patient escapes from an asylum to which he was committed at the age of six for the murder of his older sister on Halloween night and returns to his hometown on the 15th anniversary to stalk and murder a group of teenage babysitters. Two years later, writer Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham adopted the most integral ingredients of Halloween 's critical and commercial success while upping the ante for Friday the 13th vi...

In 1993, two film students at the University of Central Florida, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, after realizing they shared a mutual preference for documentaries exploring paranormal phenomena over traditional horror films, conspired to produce their own horror film that combined the styles of both. They developed a 35-page screenplay while leaving dialogue to be improvised, placing a casting call advertisement in Backstage requesting actors with strong improvisational abilities. The end result was The Blair Witch Project , a supernatural horror phenomenon that utilized the most basic of ingredients -- a trio of young unknown actors and the classically nightmarish setting of a forest -- to tell a terrifying story about the fear of becoming lost in the woods and hunted by an invisible but implacable force of otherworldly evil.   With the complete absence of special effects or even a glimpse of the titular witch, Myrick and Sanchez relied exclusively on the evocative power of nat...