The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

The opening sequence of Creep 2 , a sequel to Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass' found-footage psychological horror hit that lives on Netflix, plays like the opening of your standard horror sequel, suggesting a rehash that treats its predecessor like an understood iconic phenomenon. A young Indian man named Dave (Karan Soni) is alone in his home one night when he receives a mysterious package in the mail from a recent stalker. Clearly, Dave is assuming the role of Aaron Franklin, Brice's ill-fated protagonist from the inaugural Creep . Having become the latest unsuspecting target of prolific serial killer Josef (Duplass), Dave opens the package, which, unbeknownst to him, is equipped with a camera hidden inside a stuffed baby wolf. Straight out of the gate, Brice and Duplass, both resuming their capacities from their original creation (Brice as director, co-writer, and co-cinematographer, Duplass as co-writer), load this cold open with clever callbacks for fans, transporting us r...

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...

The last time that the late, great Rob Reiner directed an adaptation of a novel written by Stephen King, it was of one of his rare ventures outside of the horror genre, his typical domain, the 1982 coming-of-age adventure drama, The Body , adapted for the screen and renamed as Stand by Me . With that adaptation, which, at the time of its release, King himself referred to as the greatest adaptation of any of his writings to date, wiping tears of admiration from his eyes and enveloping Reiner in an appreciative embrace, Reiner proved himself as a filmmaker who understood the essence of King's stories, taking a simple narrative about a quartet of preteen male best friends venturing into the woods to locate the corpse of a recently killed 12-year-old boy and enriching it with loads of heavy, real-world subtext, fully dimensional characterizations, uninhibited performances, and subtly shifting tonality. To put it simply, King had discovered the ideal cinematic storyteller to bring his m...