Abhishek Pandeyar
The Saw franchise is a legend when it comes to slasher movies. For the uninitiated, slasher movies are the ones full of uncensored violence, unrated scenes, and a lot of blood and gore. Saw and Hostel brought with it a strong revival of the genre. With a mind-boggling and suspense-ridden plot, it is a film which will leave you with awe and nightmares at the same time. This film and others of the same genre are famous for showing the dark side of the human existence and how people behave in extreme situations.
For the fans of the franchise, here’s the list of movies similar to Saw and Hostel that are our recommendations. Watch these at your own risk. Weak-hearted have been warned. You can stream some of these movies like Saw on Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu.
12. The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Mountains are everybody’s dream-spots for traveling. They are picturesque, exquisite, and full of beautiful trees and shrubbery. These hills, however, are barren and full of secrets. Welcome to the New Mexico desert, where taking a shortcut can lead you to a gruesome death. Bob Carter and his family are traveling from Cleveland, Ohio to San Diego, California when an innocent mistake ends up being their last mistake. After taking the short hilly route, they quickly realize that they are not alone in the desolate hills. A couple of mutants (well more like weird faced weirdos) called Pluto, Lizard, and Ruby kill the members of the family one by one in more and more heinous ways. Will they survive or will the Hills triumph?
Best Scene: One of the mutants rips the heart of a corpse and eats it.
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11. The Last House On The Left (2009)
Emma (Monica Potter), John Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn), and their daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) are on vacation. Much to the delight of Mari who is a swimmer, the family is spending their holidays at their lake house. A teenager as Mari is, she goes into the town with her friend Paige, to have some fun. There they meet a teenage boy Justin, who Paige thinks is cute. He invites them to drink and smoke with him, without any evil intentions. It turns out Justin’s father Krug is a fugitive at large from the police with two more accomplices. When Mari comes to know about this, Krug refuses to let them go. After an altercation Paige is stabbed and killed by them, leaving Mari to die of her wounds. Mari being a champion swimmer manages to get home to her parents. In the meantime, due to a storm, the gang of four ends up in the same house as Mari’s family. When Mari’s parents get to know what happened to their daughter, they murder the four of them in the most gruesome way possible.
Best scene: A rapist’s head bursting in a microwave oven. Yup, a microwave oven.
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10. The Hills Run Red (2009)
You shouldn’t go looking out for trouble because sometimes you find it. Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink) is a young filmmaker who wants his name to be resounded through the halls of time. His girlfriend Serena (Janet Montgomery) is a simple college girl who is confused between her boyfriend and his friend Lalo who cares for her. Tyler unaware of what is happening around him is obsessed with an Indie movie called ‘The Hills Run Red’ and its villain Babyface who kills everyone with the same knife he used to carve his face. Bent on finding the real actor who played Babyface, Tyler finds out the director’s daughter Alexa (Sophie Monk) and pleads her to take him to the spot where the movie was made. Tyler and Serena, however, don’t know that the movie is not a work of fiction and Babyface is entirely real. What’s more, Alexa is leading them not to their artistic destination but their death. Everyone is killed by the masked killer leaving only Serena for ‘breeding’ purposes; to make more Babyfaces. A tale of bone-chilling horror and disturbing scenes.
Best Scene: A small boy peels off the skin of his face with a carving knife.
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9. Eden Lake (2008)
This is why you should never travel alone with your girlfriend. The entire world tries to cross your path when you are in the mood. Steve (Michael Fassbender) and her girlfriend Jenny (Kelly Reilly) are visiting a remote lake in the English countryside in hopes of having some romantic time by themselves. Jenny is fed up with teaching nursery class kids, and Steve from the hectic city life. But as with a typical slasher film, the trip to paradise quickly turns into their worst nightmare. Some delinquent teenagers disturb them while sunbathing on the beach and let loose many lewd comments to which Steve reacts violently. Not ones to back out, the kids infest the couple’s food at night with worms, throw away their clothes, and steal their car keys. When Steve threatens to expose them to the police, the mischievous pranks turn into widescale torture. Steve is captured and bound by the crazy children with barbed wire. Jenny remains on the loose but for how long? Can she remain safe from the kids in their own territory and save her love at the same time? Or will she die a horrendous death?
Best Scene: Michael Fassbender tied up with barbed wire and tortured. ‘Nuff said.
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8. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
While passing through Texas en route to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert (quite ambitious for people who are about to die) and with a trunk full of marijuana, Erin (Jessica Beil) and her four friends are having the time of their life. A long drive through the desert with friends and no one to fear. What more could one wish for? Apparently a lot. On the way, the group picks up a hitchhiker who shoots herself in the mouth after mumbling some vague statements. When they get to the police station to report the incident, strange things start happening. Erin’s boyfriend disappears suddenly, and when they search for him, they end up face to face with a disfigured chainsaw-wielding monster called Leatherface. Thomas Hewitt aka Leatherface and his family are a couple of freaks who treat murder as a sport. After Erin and his friends escape from the family’s home, then begins an old-fashioned Texas-style chase off with the chainsaw buzzing, bones shattering, and arteries spluttering in Leatherface’s wake.
Best Scene: A man hung from a meat hook and mutilated with a chainsaw.
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7. Wild Tales (2014)
Six stories, all different. If you like intricate plotlines, it’s your type. If not, utter nonsense. Wild Tales is a movie which goes out of the norm and demonstrates how people behave in extreme situations. People have a persona that they don in everyday life. However, when life pushes them back in a corner, the true personality comes out. The six stories tell us those deadly sides of a human soul. A man flies a plane full of people who despised him in his life, straight into the ground. Driving through the desert a lousy insult spirals into a fight to death for two egotistic drivers. A woman sees the man responsible for her father’s death enter her restaurant and plans to poison him. Unconventional questions with unorthodox answers. Though not a typical slasher movie like Saw, this one is bound to play games with your mind just like the Jigsaw Killer.
Best Scene: Corpses of two enemies burned in a car blast, intertwined like lovers.
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6. I Spit On Your Grave (2010)
The best revenge story I have ever seen. Not just the first movie but every installment in the series. New York City novelist Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) has rented a cabin in the woods, to write her bestseller amidst beautiful meadows and much-needed peace. Sadly in a forest, you don’t have to worry about animals only. You have to deal with humans too, every once in a while. Jennifer’s encounter with three goons ends up in her disrespecting one of them. They decide to teach her a lesson and capture her; repeatedly assaulting and raping her. After the ordeal, she jumps into a river, and the perpetrators leave, thinking her dead. However, she turns out to be alive and stalking her rapists. One by one she not only kills every one of them but also assaults them in ways that might be difficult for even the craziest of us to imagine.
Best Scene: Shotgun buried in a guy’s ass, fired at another’s mouth.
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5. A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)
What if the person who wants to kill you comes in your dreams? What if alongwith saving yourself from a knife-wielding psychopath you also have to avoid sleep at any cost? Stay awake and stay alive is the motto of this movie. Meet Freddie Krueger, a child molester who used to abuse small children in the school where he was a janitor. When the children’s parents got to know about this, he was burned alive in his home. But Freddie has returned, and this time he will not let go any of them. All grown up these children don’t even remember who he is and why is he killing each one of them. A classic combination of horror and slasher elements, this film has various spine-chilling scenes and an Edward Scissorhands’ doppelganger with a hideous face. Be aware and awake because if you sleep, you will die.
Best Scene: Metal claws buried deep into a girl’s eyes.
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4. Turistas (2006)
Starring the beauties Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett, Turistas is a harrowing story of organ smuggling based out of Brazil. A group of young backpackers is roaming the countryside of Brazil in search of thrill and ecstasy. What they find instead are some roofies. A night of partying lands them up in a ditch, with all of their money and documents stolen. Then they meet a guy who promises to help them and leads them to a house in the woods. Little do our protagonists know (they don’t sound intelligent do they) that it is the headquarters of a ruthless gang who specializes in organ extraction and smuggling. One by one they are killed by the formidable doctor until only a few remain.
Best Scene: Postmortem performed on an alive woman.
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3. Friday The 13th (2009)
Friday the 13th is considered to be a very unlucky date in the western civilization. When you watch this movie, you are forced to think that the myth is rightfully placed. On such a fateful night, a group of friends out for a fun weekend are about to have the same realization. Legend has it that around three decades ago in Camp Crystal Lake, a woman went berserk and killed a bunch of campers who were responsible for the death of her son Jason Voorhees. Present day 2009, Trent (Travis Van Winkle) and his friends have arrived to stay at his parents’ cabin near Crystal Lake. It’s either bad timing or their rotten luck that Jason has returned from the dead at the same time. The ruthless killer with the hockey mask starts impaling and maiming the happy campers one by one. Will the city dwellers survive in the wilderness with an unstoppable killing machine on their trail? The revival of a classic by Marcus Nispel, and a sight for sore eyes.
Best scene: A man’s skull split open with a machete.
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2. Wrong Turn (2003)
‘Do not go gentle into that thicket of bushes, for one wrong turn can cost you your life.’ A legend when it comes to horror and slasher thrillers, Wrong Turn is basically about three cannibals who have made it their life goal to kill every person who sets foot in their territory. In a remote forest of West Virginia, a handful of college students take a wrong turn on the road and end up stranded amidst seemingly endless woods and three mindless freaks. Dwelling in the same forest are Sawtooth, Three-finger, and One Eye; three disfigured hillbillies who enjoy killing people for sport and then eating them. Nobody will escape, for the merciless claw of death will let no one go. If you’re a fan of the genre and liked Saw, this movie is sure to whet your appetite.
Best Scene: The three cannibals dismembering a girl’s body and eating it’s parts.
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1. Hostel (2005)
‘Hostel’ is undoubtedly one of the movies teenagers can’t wait to final watch, when they leave for college. One of the most famous slasher films, it has an overabundance of unrated, extremely graphic, and violent scenes. Do you like blood and gore? You got it. You want sexy and nude girls in suggestive positions? You’re in the right place. Do you like to watch people die in the most painful and cringe-worthy ways? Why didn’t you say so?
Backpacking hostels are a delicacy of Slovakia and the surrounding European countries. What they are also famous for -in this movie- is trapping young and innocent tourists in a honeytrap of beautiful and apparently desperate girls. Too desperate if you think about it. Amidst this sexual frenzy are our protagonists Paxton and Josh. In lieu of providing cute partners who can make their vacation memorable, the boys are drugged and taken to the true Hostel; the Hostel of pain. There they are sold off to the highest bidder. The wealthiest of the wealthy are allowed to resort to any length to bring their sick and taboo dreams to life. People are burned, sawed, smoldered, cut, fried, baked, and what not. You might actually be surprised with the ways people are slowly and painfully killed in this series. Fans of Saw get ready to have your mind blown. Strictly Non-Family, NC-17, and psychotic type.
Best Scene: A man burning a girl’s eyeball off with a flamethrower.
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