High Tension

Two students drive to a remote farmhouse to study, a killer in a filthy truck arrives, and the next hour is one of the most relentless stalk-and-slaughter runs of the decade, with gore by Giannetto De Rossi, the man who built the eye-splinter in Fulci's Zombie. Then Alexandre Aja springs a third-act reveal that roughly half the audience calls a cheat and the other half defends to the death. It is the film that put the New French Extremity on export shelves and sent Aja straight to the Hills Have Eyes remake. Watch the first hour with the lights off. Argue about the last twenty on the way home.