Top 10 Slasher Movies of All Time (Will TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE make the cut?!?)

As soon as my parents loosened the reigns on my movie watching and stopped censoring everything I rented I immediately started watching as many slasher movies as I could get my hands on.  Many weekends I would go to the local video store and rent entire series and devour them all in one sitting. I'm pretty sure I knocked out all the FRIDAY THE 13TH films in a weekend.  Unfortunately it happened to be a weekend when I was alone on our farm....and we lived by a lake.  Things got real.

10) SAW II - The best "twist" in any of the SAW movies.  Becker's receptionist was in on it the whole time.  Shocking.

9) FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 7 - Kane Hodder puts on the Jason suit for the first time and fights a Carrie wannabe.  Sleeping bag kill is a classic.  Plus, Ghost Dad kills Jason at the end.

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8) BRIDE OF CHUCKY -  Chucky was never scary.  Thankfully Ronny Yu realized this and decided to make him funny.  Jennifer Tilly is great as "The Bride."  Shockingly, BRIDE OF CHUCKY beat BELOVED at the box office in its opening weekend.  I love America.

9) HALLOWEEN IV: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS - I am not a huge fan of the HALLOWEEN series.  The first film is essentially a ripoff of BLACK CHRISTMAS...and it's kind of boring.  The 4th film actually fixes most of the problems I have with the first movie: its gorier, the story is tighter, Donald Pleasence is crazier, and the ending is darker.  Unfortunately, PART 5 acts as if everything interesting that happened in PART 4 never occurred and the series never recovered.

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7) THE HILLS HAVE EYES (REMAKE) - The polar opposite of the original.  Wes Craven theorized that if we fight back against the monsters that we become the monsters.  Post 9-11 the message becomes a pro-American gore fest where revenge is the answer and we are expected to fight back against those who have taken our families from us.  In a piece of none-to-subtle symbolism, the American flag is even used as a weapon by the liberal son-in-law to defend his family from marauding mutants.  Shockingly the director, Alexandre Aja, is French.  Wow.

6) HIGH TENSION - Another film by Alexandre Aja. The man knows his stuff.  This is an amazing abduction/slasher movie with a twist.  The twist, which I won't spoil, is great...but unfortunately the reveal is handled clumsily and makes everything much more confusing than it needed to be.

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5) THE DEVIL'S REJECTS - HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES was a party movie.  THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is the movie you put on when you want everyone to leave the party.  A bleak exercise in seeing how far Rob Zombie could push an audience into the dark recesses of depravity.  I will always love this movie because it took everything I had felt about the Firefly clan after watching H01C and turned it on its head.  I have never examined my psychological reactions to a film more often than after I first watched this movie, and that has always impressed me.

4) HATCHET - Fun.  Gory.  Unrelenting.  The best 80's slasher movie to be filmed in the new millennium.  Any movie that creates the Gas Powered Belt Sander so it can be used in a kill is pretty cool in my book.

3)  MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D - Screw AVATAR.  The reason digital 3D was created was so I could see Tom Atkins jaw fly into the audience.  Case closed.

2) THE STRANGERS - Claustrophobic and intimate, this barely classifies as a "slasher" because there are really only two victims.  However, the sense of dread is palpable from the opening shots, and the Hitchcockian moments where the audience realizes the killer is already in the house are examples of the purest form of horror film making.

1) TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE - I don't need to say anything that hasn't already been said.  A movie this big could only happen in Texas.