If horror films reflect the anxieties of a culture, then it makes perfect sense that so many nefarious characters have emerged from the darkness in recent months, in films such as "The Last House on the Left,” "Drag Me to Hell," "Jennifer's Body" and "Halloween II."

The sci-fi-horror hybrid “Pandorum” keeps its audience in the dark — literally and figuratively — far too long to be of much use besides as a patience-trying exercise in reference spotting.

What would happen if all the hungry zombies, screaming people and meaty chunks were all taken out of a zombie movie?

It's hard to know where – and with whom – to begin when assessing the depraved, worthless piece of filth that is “Orphan,” a high-gloss horror show about a well-meaning couple who bring home a 9-year-old girl to join their family, only to discover, way too late, that she's a homicidal psychopath.

Do you hate loan officers? Or do you secretly curse them together with the voices in your head every time you think nobody can hear you?

A highly original experiment by Mitchel Lichtenstein, "Teeth" is inspired by a Japanese cult movie by the same topic, titled "Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy," though filmed into an entirely different setting and atmosphere.

Vengeance porn meets the torture flick in "The Last House on the Left," a new version of Wes Craven's vile 1972 cult horror movie that itself was a rank vulgarization of Ingmar Bergman's 1960 Oscar-winner "The Virgin Spring."

The Haunting in Connecticut is part of the dreary tradition of "real-life" haunted house movies such as "The Amityville Horror," instead of the livelier one of make-believe, such as "The Innocents" or "The Haunting," or the more recent "The Orphanage."

Based on a grim story by up-and-coming Taiwanese director Kevin Ko (柯孟融), “Invitation Only” (絕命派對) has been hailed in local media as Taiwan's first ever slasher film —a sub-genre of the horror repertoire typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of young victims in a graphically violent manner.

Michael Bay is destroying horror films by exhuming the genre's standard-bearers, stripping them of genuine terror and conceptual earnest, refusing to either re-create faithfully or reimagine boldly, and upping the irony until the original concept stands rigid like a taxidermied grizzly, its teeth bared and glistening but its presence inanimate, unthreatening and, most of all, sad.