A crop of horror films that once filled DVD rental shelves is now officially two decades old, giving audiences a reason to revisit a particularly brutal year for the genre.
Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes trapped the Carter family inside a camper as attackers killed relatives and kidnapped baby Catherine. Aaron Stanford, playing Catherine's father Doug, searches an abandoned nuclear testing village and endures a severe beating from the attacker Pluto while trying to get her back.
Silent Hill sent Rose into a town hiding far worse than a missing child once the siren sounds, with Pyramid Head dragging his massive blade through the streets and blade-wielding nurse monsters crowding a corridor as she tries to escape using only a flashlight.
Director James Wong's Final Destination 3 opened with an amusement park scare before turning its focus to victims like Ashley and Ashlyn, who die burning in tanning beds moments before the film cuts to their coffins. Wendy's photographs, including a red-lit snapshot tied to the tanning salon deaths, foreshadow the carnage throughout.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt steals a murdered lawman's uniform and uses a burned draft card as justification to torture two brothers. The film, a prequel to the 2003 remake, ends bleaker than its predecessor when Leatherface kills Jordana Brewster's character Chrissie even after she manages to get into a car and drive off.
A 2006 Black Christmas remake leaned on its antagonist Billy for backstory, though the film's most memorable detail is its Christmas house decorated with eyeballs strung among the ornaments.
When a Stranger Calls, starring Camilla Belle as babysitter Jill, built dread around a caller who keeps asking whether she's checked on the children in her care, set largely inside a glass-walled house where Jill can't tell who might be watching her.
The Grudge 2, directed by Takashi Shimizu, followed Allison into a haunted house while the curse spread to her neighbors in an apartment building in Chicago. The film also features Kayako emerging from a photograph as a character named Eason develops it in a darkroom.
The Omen remake opened on June 6, 2006, capitalizing on the 6/6/06 date given its Antichrist plot, and stayed close to the original 1976 film and its deaths. Mia Farrow starred as Mrs. Baylock, delivering flowers to Katherine's hospital room before killing her as part of caring for the young Antichrist, Damien — a performance distinct from Billie Whitelaw's take on the same role in the original.
James Gunn's directorial debut, Slither, featured Brenda ballooning into a barn full of alien slugs and Michael Rooker's character Grant growing tentacles while trying to hold his marriage together with wife Starla, played by Elizabeth Banks. The film flopped in theaters but found new fans later, according to IMDB, after Rooker's role as Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy brought viewers back to his earlier collaboration with Gunn.
From South Korea, Bong Joon Ho's The Host, starring Song Kang-ho, drew more than 13 million viewers and became the country's biggest film of 2006, according to IMDB. During a riverside creature attack, Gang-du grabs the wrong child's hand and leaves his own daughter behind, while officials quarantine the Park family and ignore the daughter's calls for help even though she is still alive.
Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
