12. Erin (You’re Next)
While it’s generally agreed that they heyday of the slasher film was in the 1980s, this doesn’t mean there aren’t some good ones in the modern era. You’re Next, released in 2011, was a generally well-reviewed example.
The film begins, like any slasher flick worth its title, with a gory murder. A romantically entangled couple are killed in quick succession by a masker murderer. A nearby family somehow manages to not hear any of the carnage from their vacation home next door.
This particular family is tense and prone to ignoring or belittling one another. It must be especially awkward for the siblings’ significant others, including Erin (Sharni Vinson), the girlfriend of family son Crispian.
Things get much worse than a strained family dinner, however, when one of the boyfriends is suddenly killed by a crossbow bolt shot through a window. Everyone quickly realizes that they can’t call for help, thanks to a signal jammer nearby. One by one, members of the family are killed by masked assailants in various and gruesome ways.
Erin, however, isn’t having any of this “dying” nonsense. She fights back, initially killing one attacker with a meat tenderizer and stabbing another with a screwdriver. She soon learns that one of the sons and his girlfriend hired these attackers to kill the rest of the family and leave them a large inheritance only for them.
Their scheme might have worked if only Erin wasn’t there. See, she was raised on a survivalist compound which, for all of its kooky end-of-the-world rhetoric, taught her how to make one hell of a booby trap. That must be where she also learned all those deadly screwdriver-based skills, too.