Borrowing its concept from 1998’s Ringu, a hit in its native Japan, The Ring follows a journalist (Naomi Watts) investigating a videotape that supposedly kills anyone who watches it. The movie’s narrative is a bit patchy at times, but there are enough genuine scares to keep your teeth clenched. And the malevolently open-ended finale, like

The Ring left its sequel a great setup, but The Ring Two quickly abandon’s the cursed videotape premise of the original – as well as the true original, Japan’s Ringu – in favor of a demonic possession plot. This time the avenging ghost of the tape tracks down the reporter from the first film (Naomi

If you’re going to give Gothika a chance, you’ll have to get over a lot more than Halle Berry in the role of a criminal psychologist who begins to question her own sanity. There’s a lot of silliness here, but also some genuine scares, thanks mostly to the way the movie gets you inside a

This loose remake of the 1953 Vincent Price frightfest features a handful of clueless youths (Chad Michael Murray, Elisha Cuthbert and an extremely bored-looking Paris Hilton) who get stranded in a small town with an old wax museum and a high murder rate. Director Jaume Collet-Serra excels at establishing a consistent mood, so this works

Another chapter in the Chainsaw canon – this one purportedly a remake of the low-budget, 1974 original – this is heavy on gore, torture and dismemberment and light on scares, suspense or even laughs. It’s a macabre mess, though not in the way the filmmakers intend. Once again, a group of kids on the road

This slasher flick, in which four equally vacuous single women are stalked by a crazed killer around Valentine’s Day, begs this question, considering it came out just before that same holiday: Is a movie that only gives itself a shelf life of two weeks really worth 90 minutes of your time?

A gruesome and generic horror movie which denies everything that made The Blair Witch Project 1999’s best film. In catering to those who couldn’t appreciate the daring minimalism of the original – off-screen noises, shaky camera work, long patches of darkness – new director Joe Berlinger offers up a series of horror cliches that would

Pop star Aaliyah reportedly completed all of her scenes before her death in a plane crash, but you wouldn’t know it from the finished film. As the title character, an ancient vampire bent on devouring everyone in sight, she has about 20 minutes of screen time. The rest of this goth-rock take on the vampire