2: Inside

French actress Béatrice Dalle scares me. Of all of the slasher film serial killers, she plays the most terrifying one, the nameless antagonist of Inside. She breaks into an extremely pregnant women's house and tries to steal her unborn baby. The whole time, she is freaking out worse than the protagonist is. Her drive is insane, she wants to steal the baby for reasons that are completely unfathomable to anyone else but her. She is convincingly unstable and constantly unnerving.

The main character of Inside is Sara Scarangelo (Alyson Paradis), the aforementioned pregnant women. She is still mourning the death of her husband, and she isn't ready to take care of a baby on her own. That is basically the entirety of her character. She is the perfect helpless victim. While there isn't a whole lot to her character, Alyson Paradis plays her quite well.

There are basically no other character's in the film. People keep going into the house to wish the mother well, and they keep getting murdered. For the most part, they are your standard slasher fare. Nothing too remarkable here. They all die incredibly brutal ways.

One of the first things people here about Inside is how gory the film is, but that isn't quite accurate. The film is gory, yes, but not as much as a film like Cabin Fever or Hostel. The reason the film feels so much worse is how the director, Julien Maury, handles the gore. He gives each injury a lot of weight, so even scenes that aren't that gory feel like the nastiest thing you have ever seen. Part of it is the way he shoots it, part of it is that we actually care about the protagonist.

From a story perspective, the film is completely unremarkable. The main character spends about two-thirds of the film's running time locked in her bathroom, and the villain spends most of the time trying to break through the door. People come in, people die. Rinse and repeat. It is the basic slasher setup done insanely well. People who enjoy horror movies with strong narratives need not apply.

No, Inside really only does one thing well: terrifying the audience. For horror movies, that is one of the trickiest things to pull off, and probably the most important. Between Beatrice Dalle's absolutely insane performance and the way the killings are handled, the film does a great job of creating a sense of fear. There is not a single moment where you feel safe, even when our hero breaks out of the bathroom and starts kicking ass. It doesn't have the same vibe as the final girl showdown does in other slasher's: there is a real sense of desperation, made all the more striking when you realize that the final girl's in other slasher's are fighting seven foot tall hockey mask wearing immortals, and Sara is fighting Beatrice Dalle, a women barely as tall as her.

This film is probably the scariest film of the decade.