Stephen King Just Named the Worst Slasher in Movie History

Stephen King may be the master of horror, but he's never had much love for slashers. No masked killers, no final girls, no summer camp bloodbaths in his stories. And now we know why.

In Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, he doesn't hold back:

"I think that some of the people who go and see the hacker movies are also people who would like to go out and do that exact same thing and don't have the guts to do it… Some of them are pretty tabloidish films. They're pretty graphic and they're blunt. There don't seem to be any real twists."

Translation: he finds most slashers cheap, nasty, and disturbingly straightforward. But there's one that stood out as especially awful — even by his standards.

"The worst one I ever saw was The Toolbox Murders," King said. "There's a guy who gets a girl at one point with a nailer… right in the forehead. But there's a part of me that reacts to that and says, 'Oh my god, that's awful. Let's do it again.'"

Released in 1978, The Toolbox Murders was shot on a budget of around $165,000 and ended up grossing just over $1.1 million at the box office — not a hit, but profitable enough to become a cult title among grindhouse fans. It was also briefly banned in the UK during the "Video Nasty" era for its graphic violence.

Directed by Dennis Donnelly, the film is exactly what it sounds like: a killer going around murdering women with the contents of a literal toolbox. Nail gun to the head? Check. Hammer to the face? Obviously. The Toolbox Murders was one of those low-budget gore-fests that claimed to be based on "actual events" but never bothered to prove it.