With its disturbing images and a few good shocks, The Ring is the kind of frightfest you'll watch to set a chilling mood or spook your susceptible friends,... read more

With its disturbing images and a few good shocks, The Ring is the kind of frightfest you'll watch to set a chilling mood or spook your susceptible friends, but when you try to sort it out, this well-mounted American remake (of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu, based on Koji Suzuki's popular novel) becomes a batch of incoherent parts. The negligible plot follows a Seattle reporter (Naomi Watts) as she investigates the death of her niece, the victim of a mysterious videotape that, according to urban legend, causes the viewer's death seven days later. (Fear Dot Com borrowed the same idea while avoiding this film's lofty pretensions.) The countdown structure follows the reporter, her son, and her estranged boyfriend into deepening layers of terror--all quite effective until the movie attempts to explain itself. At that you're better off shutting down your brain and letting the creepy visuals take over. --Jeff Shannon (hide)

Director William Friedkin was a hot ticket in Hollywood after the success of The French Connection, and he turned heads (in more ways than one) when he decided... read more

Director William Friedkin was a hot ticket in Hollywood after the success of The French Connection, and he turned heads (in more ways than one) when he decided to make The Exorcist as his follow-up film. Adapted by William Peter Blatty from his controversial bestseller, this shocking 1973 thriller set an intense and often-copied milestone for screen terror with its unflinching depiction of a young girl (Linda Blair) who is possessed by an evil spirit. Jason Miller and Max von Sydow are perfectly cast as the priests who risk their sanity and their lives to administer the rites of demonic exorcism. Ellen Burstyn plays Blair's mother, who can only stand by in horror as her daughter's body is wracked by Satanic disfiguration. One of the most frightening films ever made, The Exorcist was mysteriously plagued by trouble during production, and the years since have not diminished its capacity to disturb even the most stoic viewers. The film is presented in letterbox format on digital video disc, with a remastered soundtrack that's guaranteed to curdle your blood. The 25th-anniversary Special Edition DVD of The Exorcist is packed with bonus features, including a 74-minute documentary titled The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist, which includes interviews with cast and crew, audio commentary by William Friedkin and author William Peter Blatty, a special introduction by Friedkin, theatrical trailers and TV spots, and DVD-exclusive coverage of the film's storyboards and production design. --Jeff Shannon (hide)

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the... read more

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick's movie is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel's labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer, who's settled in for a long winter's hibernation. As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him--all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's fanatical demands for take after take after take.) The Shining is terrifying--but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there--but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide... --Jim Emerson (hide)

Saw opens with a gruesome scenario: Two men are chained to the walls of a grimy bathroom with a bloody corpse lying on the floor between them. Tape... read more

Saw opens with a gruesome scenario: Two men are chained to the walls of a grimy bathroom with a bloody corpse lying on the floor between them. Tape recordings tell them that one of the men has to kill the other, or his wife and child will die. The corpse is holding a gun in one hand, but it's out of reach...but whoever has locked these two up has thoughtfully provided a hacksaw that can't cut through the heavy chain, but might cut through a little flesh and bone. From there, Saw jumps back and forth as the two men slowly unravel how they know each other and that their tormentor is one of those all-knowing, all-capable serial killers (it goes without saying that Saw is hugely influenced by Seven and the movies of Dario Argento), a fellow known as Jigsaw who disguises his voice and lets a creepy puppet (lifted almost directly from the eccentric animations of the Brothers Quay) be his visual representative. But imitation isn't inherently bad; what puts Saw ahead of its horror compatriots is a gleeful enthusiasm that a dozen sequels to Halloween couldn't muster. Saw has problems--it's clumsily overwritten (every detail of what's going on, no matter how visually evident, will be explained by the characters); most of the situations are static and implausible; and though the cast includes talented veterans like Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) and Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon), the acting has the depth of a puddle. The rapid pace and frequently frenzied camerawork keep things in motion and while the philosophical underpinnings of Jigsaw won't challenge Hegel or Schopenhauer, they do offer more food for thought than most contemporary horror. Discriminating fans of the genre who like their gore with a glimmer of an idea will embrace Saw.

The Uncut Edition differs only slightly from the theatrical release; it reinserts a little more gore that was cut to get an R rating and tightens up the editing (the uncut version is actually a teensy bit shorter than the theatrical release). The extras are plentiful (if a bit thin): Two audio commentaries (one by director James Wan, screenwriter/actor Leigh Whannel, and Elwes), one by the producers--thankfully, no one takes themselves too seriously. Also included are a trio of typically self-congratulatory making-of featurettes ("He was amazing to work with" etc.), an animated storyboard of a sequence they couldn't afford to shoot, a DVD-ROM game in which you can construct your own puppet, a couple of self-mocking Easter Eggs, and lots of promotional stuff for Saw II. There's a very curious faux-news show purporting to be an investigation of the "real" Jigsaw, which uses clips from the movie as if they were documentary footage--it's hard to say whether this is a misguided attempt to make the movie seem creepier or a bit of flimsy humor. Most fans will find the regular DVD release satisfactory; this special edition is largely for hardcore enthusiasts. --Bret Fetzer (hide)

At last--a great American movie available on video for the first time in its original aspect ratio. For all the slasher pictures that have ripped off Psycho (and... read more

At last--a great American movie available on video for the first time in its original aspect ratio. For all the slasher pictures that have ripped off Psycho (and particularly its classic set piece, the "shower scene"), nothing has ever matched the impact of the real thing. More than just a first-rate shocker full of thrills and suspense, Psycho is also an engrossing character study in which director Alfred Hitchcock skillfully seduces you into identifying with the main characters--then pulls the rug (or the bathmat) out from under you. Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama's boy proprietor of the Bates Motel; and so is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who makes an impulsive decision and becomes a fugitive from the law, hiding out at Norman's roadside inn for one fateful night. Psycho gets the masterpiece treatment it deserves on DVD, with extras including newsreel footage surrounding the making and release of the movie; an archive of production stills; the special trailer in which Hitchcock (acting as one of the original Universal Studio tour guides) himself leads viewers around the Bates place; credit designer Saul Bass's original "shower scene" story boards; posters and advertising materials for the movie's William Castle-like publicity campaign (No One Will Be Seated After the Feature Begins!); and a 90-minute documentary on the making of the film! What more could any movie fan possibly want? --Jim Emerson (hide)

Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless... read more

Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby sitter is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho. In the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an uncannily frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget, the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more installments: 1981's dismal Halloween II, which picked up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally gripping Halloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after 20 years. --Robert Horton (hide)

The terror begins when the crew of a spaceship investigates a transmission from a desolate planet, and discovers a life form that is perfectly evolved to annihilate mankind.... read more

The terror begins when the crew of a spaceship investigates a transmission from a desolate planet, and discovers a life form that is perfectly evolved to annihilate mankind. One by one, each crew member is slain until only Ripley is left, leading to an explosive conclusion that sets the stage for its stunning sequel, "Aliens." (hide)

When Randy the video geek rattles off the rules of surviving a horror movie in Wes Craven's Scream, he speaks for a generation of filmgoers who are all... read more

When Randy the video geek rattles off the rules of surviving a horror movie in Wes Craven's Scream, he speaks for a generation of filmgoers who are all too aware of slasher movie clichés. Playfully scripted by Kevin Williamson with a self-aware wink and more than a few nods to its grandfathers (from Psycho to Halloween to the Friday the 13th dynasty), Scream skewers teen horror conventions with loving reverence while re-creating them in a modern, movie-savvy context. And so goes the series, which continues the satirical spoofing by tackling (what else?) sequels while sustaining its own self-contained mythology. Catty reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) turns grisly murders into lurid bestsellers, a cult of killer wannabes continues to hunt spunky psycho-survivor Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) for their 15 minutes of fame, and a cheesy movie series (Stab) develops within the movie series.

Scream remains the high point of the series--a fresh take on a genre long since collapsed into routine, but Scream 2 spoofs itself with witty humor ("Why would anyone want to do that? Sequels suck!" opines college film student Randy), and delights with more elaborate set pieces and all-new rules for surviving a horror movie sequel. The endangered veterans of the original film reunite one last time for Scream 3, which plays out on the movie set of Stab 3. (It's a trilogy within a trilogy!) With Williamson gone, replacement screenwriter Ehran Kruger tries to mine the formula one more time. It's a little tired by now, and pale imitations (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer) have further drained the zeitgeist, but the film bubbles with bright humor, and director Craven is stylistically at the top of his game. As a trilogy, it remains both the most consistently entertaining and self-aware horror series ever made. --Sean Axmaker (hide)

Wes Craven's 1984 horror film is a better movie than it is generally credited for being. Forget the tawdry sequels; this highly original, almost surrealist work stars Robert... read more

Wes Craven's 1984 horror film is a better movie than it is generally credited for being. Forget the tawdry sequels; this highly original, almost surrealist work stars Robert Englund as a mutilated monster who kills teenagers during their dreams. Craven, who only directed one Elm Street sequel (Wes Craven's New Nightmare), takes the Hitchcockian step of layering in psychological explanations for the terror and then proving them all irrelevant in the face of mindless evil. The horror in the film is emotionally raw, in contrast to the overimaginative set pieces of most of the sequels that followed; and the final scene is as deeply unsettling as anything Luis Buñuel ever committed to film. --Tom Keogh (hide)

Based on Thomas Harris's novel, this terrifying film by Jonathan Demme really only contains a couple of genuinely shocking moments (one involving an autopsy, the other a prison... read more

Based on Thomas Harris's novel, this terrifying film by Jonathan Demme really only contains a couple of genuinely shocking moments (one involving an autopsy, the other a prison break). The rest of the film is a splatter-free visual and psychological descent into the hell of madness, redeemed astonishingly by an unlikely connection between a monster and a haunted young woman. Anthony Hopkins is extraordinary as the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, virtually entombed in a subterranean prison for the criminally insane. At the behest of the FBI, agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) approaches Lecter, requesting his insights into the identity and methods of a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). In exchange, Lecter demands the right to penetrate Starling's most painful memories, creating a bizarre but palpable intimacy that liberates them both under separate but equally horrific circumstances. Demme, a filmmaker with a uniquely populist vision (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild), also spent his early years making pulp for Roger Corman (Caged Heat), and he hasn't forgotten the significance of tone, atmosphere, and the unsettling nature of a crudely effective close-up. Much of the film, in fact, consists of actors staring straight into the camera (usually from Clarice's point of view), making every bridge between one set of eyes to another seem terribly dangerous. --Tom Keogh (hide)

It's not the scary hit that The Ring was in 2002, but The Grudge makes a similarly convincing case for American remakes of popular Japanese horror films. Barely... read more

It's not the scary hit that The Ring was in 2002, but The Grudge makes a similarly convincing case for American remakes of popular Japanese horror films. Barely a year passed between the release of Takashi Shimizu's creepy ghost story Ju-On: The Grudge and the production of this American remake, set in Tokyo and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in her first post-Buffy horror film. About the only significant difference between the two films is the importing of a mostly-American cast (including Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall and Grace Zabriskie), but The Grudge was reconfigured (by screenwriter Stephen Susco) to allow Shimizu to refine and improve the spookiest highlights of his earlier version, which enjoyed previous incarnations as a short film and two made-for-Japanese-video features. Surprising box-office analysts with a $40 million opening weekend, The Grudge may disappoint hard-core horror fans because it lacks gore and graphic violence, but as a creepy tale about a very haunted house, it's guaranteed to send a few chills up your spine. --Jeff Shannon (hide)

In the vastly overrated 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, author Peter Biskind puts the blame for Hollywood's blockbuster mentality at least partially on Steven Spielberg's box-office success... read more

In the vastly overrated 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, author Peter Biskind puts the blame for Hollywood's blockbuster mentality at least partially on Steven Spielberg's box-office success with this adaptation of Peter Benchley's bestselling novel. But you can't blame Spielberg for making a terrific movie, which Jaws definitely is. The story of a Long Island town whose summer tourist business is suddenly threatened by great-white-shark attacks on humans bypasses the potboiler trappings of Benchley's book and goes straight for the jugular with beautifully crafted, crowd-pleasing sequences of action and suspense supported by a trio of terrific performances by Roy Scheider (as the local sheriff), Richard Dreyfuss (as a shark specialist), and particularly Robert Shaw (as the old fisherman who offers to hunt the shark down). The sequences on Shaw's boat--as the three of them realize that in fact the shark is hunting them--are what entertaining moviemaking is all about. --Marshall Fine (hide)

This sensational, extremely influential, 1974 low-budget horror movie directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, Lifeforce, Salem's Lot), may be notorious for its title, but it's also a damn fine... read more

This sensational, extremely influential, 1974 low-budget horror movie directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, Lifeforce, Salem's Lot), may be notorious for its title, but it's also a damn fine piece of moviemaking. And it's blood-curdling scary, too. Loosely based on the true crimes of Ed Gein (also a partial inspiration for Psycho), the original Jeffrey Dahmer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of teenagers who pick up a hitchhiker and wind up in a backwoods horror chamber where they're held captive, tortured, chopped up, and impaled on meat hooks by a demented cannibalistic family, including a character known as Leatherface who maniacally wields one helluva chainsaw. The movie's powerful sense of dread is heightened by its grainy, semi-documentary style--but it also has a wicked sense of humor (and not that camp, self-referential variety that became so tiresome in subsequent horror films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s). OK, in case you couldn't tell, it's "not for everyone." But as a landmark in the development of the horror/slasher genre, it ranks with Psycho, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. --Jim Emerson (hide)

Five discs gather the first eight movies in the Friday the 13th series, plus a batch of behind-the-scenes featurettes. You can track the rise, fall, and endless resurrections... read more

Five discs gather the first eight movies in the Friday the 13th series, plus a batch of behind-the-scenes featurettes. You can track the rise, fall, and endless resurrections of Jason Voorhees, from the original 1980 film to Jason's self-kidding trip to the Big Apple. Horror fans eat up packages such as this, but there's something odd about the deluxe treatment for a series that spotlighted atrocious acting, pitiful production values, and inane storytelling.

You'll spot a few future "name" actors in various installments: Kevin Bacon is morbidly dispatched in the first one. But in general, the dominant focus is how to kill horny teenagers, most of whom have gathered at Camp Crystal Lake in the misguided belief that the curse of the impossible-to-kill Jason has worn off. The first movie has a certain raw, crummy ability to shock, Part 2 is a dismal retread, and Part 3 actually features interesting use of 3-D, which doesn't translate to its flat DVD version. The fourth is boldly subtitled The Final Chapter, and we all know where that went, but it does have Crispin Glover doing a funky dance. A New Beginning and Jason Lives continue Jason's bad mood, maybe because the hockey mask doesn't fit right. The seventh chapter, The New Blood, stakes Jason against a worthy opponent (Crystal Lake's answer to telekinetic Carrie), but the result is the same. Part 8's subtitle, Jason Takes Manhattan, is wittier than the movie itself, as Jason menaces an unlucky cruise ship of high-schoolers bound for New York--where Mr. J fits right in.

Some of the films come with commentaries from directors or cast members, including heralded Jason performer Kane Hodder. Brief documentaries (ranging from five to 15 minutes) cover separate installments with amusing anecdotes, including interviews with Sean S. Cunningham, Tom Savini, and various actors. In another doc, actors speak of the fraternity of young actors who've been slaughtered by Jason over the years. A deleted-scenes section is skimpy and not very interesting, while the tricks of special-effects gore merit a film to themselves. It's a customer-savvy DVD box, even if the effect of watching a bunch of this stuff together is a little dispiriting. --Robert Horton (hide)