Best Limited-Release/Direct-to-Video Horror Movies of 2008

Perhaps the best micro-budget horror movie of the year ("micro-budget" being a relative term), this violent British effort about a chair that serves as a gateway to a Hellish realm defies conventions with its twisty plot, dark humor and self-aware voiceovers.

Twisted, insane, gory action marks this oddball entry from Japan that feels like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers meets the tea house scene from Kill Bill. It follows the adventures of a schoolgirl who seeks bloody revenge -- with the aid of a machine gun affixed to her amputated arm -- on a gangster whose son killed her brother. Ninjas, chainsaws, flying guillotines, drill bras and death by tempura mark this instant cult classic.

Splinter takes a simple, vintage monster movie mold -- unknown creature, helpless victims trapped in a remote gas station -- and infuses it with a grisly modern edge and an engaging sense of humor.

Alternately sweet and vicious -- yet always hypnotic -- this anti-Twilight adolescent vampire tale about the friendship between a human boy and a vampire girl deservedly won the top prize at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.

Wry British humor marks this kidnap caper-meets-backwoods horror film about hapless kidnappers who take their hostage to a cottage inhabited by a crazed killer.

This Korean remake of the 1999 Japanese film The Black House improves on the original by crafting a more serious-minded thriller about an insurance investigator who suspects that a customer killed his son and made it look like a suicide in order to collect an insurance payout. The investigator uncovers more than he bargained for when he pushes too close to the truth and incurs the suspect's warped wrath.

The best horror-comedy of the year is a wacky misadventure about a "botched" robbery in Russia that strands the robbers (led by Stephen Dorff) and their assortment of zany hostages on a seemingly abandoned floor in an office building. Unfortunately for them, the floor isn't abandoned; it's home to a barbarian-like killer with a penchant for booby traps who would seem more at home in The Hills Have Eyes.

This trippy Spanish thriller delivers the mind-scrambling goods that only time-travel flicks can, as a man jumps into a time machine to escape a masked killer he encounters in the woods near his home. Then the troubles really start...

Unusually restrained for modern French horror, Them still manages to be a terrifying jolt to the senses -- sight, sound and depending on how involved you get while watching it, smell and a bit of taste -- as it tells the simple, The Strangers-like tale of a young married couple who find their new rural home surrounded by a group of unknown assailants late one night.

A tour-de-force of brutality that exemplifies the modern wave of French horror movies, Frontier(s) balances the absurd notion of a Nazi cannibal-run hotel with harrowing action and gruesome effects that anchor the film without making it as arduous a viewing experience as most so-called "torture porn."