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This Underrated Late 2000s Slasher Film Is a Hidden Gem in the American Horror Genre

August 10, 2025

When it comes to slasher horror, the genre is full of cult classic hits like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween, and Terrifier, to name a few. These flicks are movies full of blood, mayhem, guts, a group of characters getting killed off one by one, and in most cases, the reveal of the heinous killer terrorizing a small town. While there are horror movies that reign supreme, there are more than a few that have gone largely unnoticed, like 2009’s Sorority Row.

The movie, directed by Stewart Hendler, is a loose remake of the 1983 cult movie The House on Sorority Rowthat flew under the radar due to its release time when audiences weren’t looking for a teen-oriented slasher. It has everything the genre is known for: a group of teens, a killer with secrets, and more than enough blood. Sorority Row may have flopped among critics when it was released, but it is a worthy horror meant to be watched when needing a quick thrill.

What Is ‘Sorority Row’ About?

The modern slasher movie focuses on a group of sorority sisters at Theta Pi who become entangled in a deadly secret. After a cruel prank on a cheating boyfriend goes horribly wrong, the sisters accidentally cause the death of one of their own, Megan (Audrina Partridge). Fearing the consequences of their actions, they decide to cover up the murder, get rid of her body, and all possible evidence linking them to what happened that night. They vow to take the secret to their graves.

Sorority Row then takes us on a time jump to eight months later—the remaining girls are ready to graduate when they start receiving threatening messages and are stalked by a hooded killer wielding a deadly tire iron modified with blades. The killer seems to know exactly what they did as well as the secret they’ve all been hiding. As the sisters are picked off one by one, paranoia and mistrust begin to pull the group apart. The movie creates a sense of intense horror as audiences are caught up in wondering who the killer is and why this individual is seeking revenge.

‘Sorority Row’ Released at the Wrong Time to Gain a Following

Image via Summit Entertainment

Watching Sorority Row now would make anyone wonder why it didn’t do well when it was released, seeing that it only has a 25% score from Rotten Tomatoes. By all accounts, the movie has everything a fan would look for in the slasher genre. The reality is that Sorority Row was released at the wrong time. By 2009, the horror landscape was shifting away from the traditional teen slashers, and audiences were looking for more intense and heavy subgenres tagged “torture porn.” Movies like Saw and Hostel were doing incredibly well, and found footage movies like Paranormal Activitycaptured more interest.

Audiences craved grittier, more visceral horror experiences that would lead to terrifying nightmares and flashbacks every time they tried to close their eyes. Sorority Row is instead more glossy and stylized, and has the trope-heavy structure of a teen slasher. As a result, the movie feels out of sync with what was trending in the horror genre at the time, despite it having solid kills, slick visuals, and a strong cast. Another reason Sorority Row flopped when it was released is that it arrived over a decade after the Scream-fueled craze. By the early 2000s, the slasher genre had simply had its time and fizzled out. Teen horror cooled off, and audiences were less interested in college-aged characters making bad decisions that would lead them to getting brutally killed in a revenge plot.

The entire premise of Sorority Row is exactly what the horror genre wasn’t looking for at the time. It had the final girl equivalent to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) that people didn’t feel like watching. A quick Google search of horror movies released during 2009 leads to movies like The Human Centipede, The Collector, Drag Me To Hell, Orphan, and The Haunting in Connecticut. While Sorority Row isn’t at the top of everyone’s watch list as the best horror movie out there, it’s still a good watch when needing a cliché, bloody, teen slasher that knows how to party.

‘Sorority Row’ Is a Decent Slasher Horror With Good Thrills, Kills, and Cast

The 2009 movie isn’t a golden ticket winner, but it delivers everything audiences want when needing a slasher movie that isn’t hard to follow and delivers on blood, suspense, stylish kills, and a group of morally questionable characters who are fun to watch fall apart. Sorority Row does the job of leaning into the tropes of the genre well enough to make it an enjoyable watch without it feeling lazy. It’s chaotic, campy, and criminally underappreciated, while being equal parts brutal and bitchy, with kills that are nasty and a script that knows exactly how unserious it is.

The methods of murder are impressive and brutal enough to earn a few head nods of appreciation. There’s nothing like watching the hooded killer shove a wine bottle down one of the victim’s throats in one of the movie’s most inventive kills. Sorority Row doesn’t just have the violence that lands, but the creativity behind it, where audiences say, “Oh! That was brutal.” Layer that with the usual collegiate chaos of booze-soaked parties, messy relationships, and more drama than The Bachelor;Sorority Row is a bloody, brainy B-movie. There are college clichés like a drug-addicted character who has mindless sex for fun, the uptight overachiever hoping to marry into wealth, and the token bimbo whose GPA is basically a shrug. But that’s part of the fun; the movie is self-aware, savage, and stylishly stupid in the right ways.

Alongside the murder thrills of Sorority Row, the movie has a standout cast worth mentioning. It included familiar faces from the late 2000s teen/young adult scene that brought needed attitude, glamour, and scream queen potential. Briana Evigan (Step Up 2: The Street) leads the movie as Cassidy, giving her role as the Final Girl needed groundability and a likable performance amid the slasher chaos. But the real gem among the cast is Leah Pipe, the ruthless and effortlessly nasty Queen Bee, who delivers her lines with perfect chill and wit that become undeniably quotable. Dressed in heels and pearls, she hijacks the movie not as the final girl, but as the type of character you really don’t want to piss off. Her role in Sorority Row cements the movie in the horror genre and has everyone thinking, “Wait, that was actually pretty good.”

Sorority Row has everything a decent and watchable slasher movie needs from creative kills, a “who is it” killer storyline, a well-rounded cast of known actors, and enough gore to sometimes have to look away, but it was simply a victim of bad timing and a release date that didn’t do it any favors in the horror genre at the time.