The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

Sam Raimi's feature directorial debut, The Evil Dead , is widely considered a classic in the horror genre. On Rotten Tomatoes, it boasts an approval rating of 85% from the critics, with an average rating of 7.8/10, and, not that this matters to me because the RT audience are the biggest bunch of idiots on the cinematic planet, that percentage is nearly matched by an audience score of 84%. Therefore, on both sides of the movie-going aisle, The Evil Dead is a success. While it brings me a degree of joy to shave against the grain of popular opinion, it mostly brings disappointment to say that, of all the critically acclaimed horror classics I've currently seen,  The Evil Dead is hands down the worst and most nearly insufferable piece of tripe, a phantasmagoria of gore, decapitations, and bodily decompositions. It has the unrestrained feel of a young, inexperienced filmmaker who just got prematurely released from his film school, purchased a camera, gathered a few friends in a chea...

In Brian De Palma and Lawrence D. Cohen's 1976 supernatural horror film, Carrie , an adaptation of the first novel published by Stephen King, there's a pivotal moment in which Carrie White, the titular telekinetic protagonist, finally asserts herself to her fanatical mother, Margaret, and reveals her knowledge that her father, Ralph, despite Margaret's assertion that the Devil infiltrated his body and "carried him off," abandoned them for another woman. Who is this other woman that Ralph ran away with, and did he impregnate her with another telekinetic offspring? Both of those questions are answered in The Rage: Carrie 2  by screenwriter Rafael Moreu, who uses that single line of exposition from De Palma's bullied-revenge classic as the jumping-off point for a belated sequel that lacks the astonishingly animated atmosphere, campy sense of humor, suspenseful buildup, and colorful characters that made its predecessor alternately entertaining, tragic, and passion...

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...

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...