Best Slasher Movies

Well folks – this one is hardcore. Martyrs is not for the faint of heart. It’s deeply, deeply disturbing and shocking in a time in film (particularly this genre) where little manages to surprise us. You are either going to love or hate it. There’s no middle ground. I loved it. I loved everything about it, but don’t look to this as a fun little gorefest because it’s anything but fun.

Martyrs is brutal and unrelenting. The true horror of this film is in the way gore and violence is so perfectly blended with horrific psychological terror. You feel so much for Lucie and Anna and you want them to be okay, but in the back of your mind, you know they’re not going to be – and you can’t help but wonder if you’re even going to be okay by the time the movie is done.

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Wolf Creek, somewhat based on the true crime story of The Backpack Murders, consistently shows up on lists of the best slasher movies ever made, so I had to include it here. Not only is it one of the best, it’s one of my personal favorites.

Perhaps one of the things that makes Wolf Creek so effective is the first half of the movie. You really get to know the characters and that’s so rare in a genre where character development usually takes a back seat to gore. Wolf Creek shows us that yes, a movie can be violent and bloody but it’s also possible to make an audience care about who is shedding the blood.

The usual horror/slasher movie cliches are almost non-existent in Wolf Creek and the characters react to what’s happening in very believable and very real ways. It’s almost impossible not to get drawn in to what’s going on. The movie doesn’t get going right away – taking time to really make you feel for the characters while building tension and suspense. The signs are there that things are going to go bad for these poor bastards, but one of the greatest strengths of Wolf Creek is that it doesn’t rush anything.

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Hostel isn’t for everyone. I think that really goes without saying at this point. It got such overwhelmingly negative reviews, but I’m not sure what people were expecting. The movie was brutal – an absolute gory mess, but what else would we expect from Mr. Eli Roth?

There were two major complaints I heard about Hostel – too much sex and too much needless gore. My response to that is simply a question, how could you tell a story that begins in Amsterdam’s infamous red light district and leads our main characters to a factory where rich people pay to torture and kill people without nudity and graphic violence.

I, for one, didn’t find the violence in Hostel the least bit unnecessary. And hey, it’s not like the audience didn’t have a lot of warning. After the first screening, word spread quickly (especially about the eye scene) that this wasn’t a movie for the faint of heart.

Eli Roth has made one hell of a slasher movie with Hostel. It’s engrossing, you feel for characters, and it’s truly terrifying. The cast is great with Jay Hernandez (Quarantine) giving us an especially great performance. There are those that say the premise of rich people paying money to torture and kill people isn’t believable. To those people, I say closing a blind eye to the dark side of humanity doesn’t keep you safe from it. Sure Hostel wasn’t based on a true story, but I can definitely believe it easily could’ve been.

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Before I even begin with why I liked Quarantine, I’d like to say that I fully acknowledge it is more or less a shot for shot remake of Jaume Balagueró’s 2007 Spanish language movie Rec. This is noted in the credits and the original filmmakers are given credit. Rec is also an incredible movie but I did prefer Quarantine. In all honesty, there aren’t many differences, but the deciding factor for me was the final scene. I liked Quarantine’s more, but as I said, Rec is also well worth checking out. Just make sure you’re ready to read subtitles if you don’t speak Spanish.

Okay, on to the movie itself. Quarantine is another movie (like 28 Days and  28 Weeks Later) that is possibly scariest because the plot is so plausible. It isn’t some virus that reanimates corpses into flesh eating zombies. I’ll let you watch the movie to see what exactly happens in this one, but I’ll just say it’s not hard to imagine this coming true.

Quarantine’s cast is incredible – from Jennifer Carpenter who is amazing in the lead role, to Jay Hernandez (who I’m sure you all remember from Hostel 1 and II) to Johnathon Schaech (who makes a surprisingly short role in this film considering how much he was in Prom Night) and finally Manuela Velaso (a crossover from the Rec). Everyone is convincing and believable in their roles.

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See now? This is what happens when you believe in things. You get a bunch of your friends together, bust into an animal testing lab, set some animal free and doom mankind to become rage-filled, homicidal monsters. Way to go.

Well, at least that’s what happens in 28 Days Later. Poor Jim wakes up naked from a coma (which, just let me say, I would be a little concerned if I were him. I’d be asking some serious questions about what the nurses – or doctors – were doing to me while I was out) and find the streets of London eerily empty. Things get much worse for him from there.

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