TELL TALE (hitting DVD and Blu-ray May 25 from Genius Products/Vivendi Entertainment) is a movie that serves as a metaphor for itself on a couple of levels. It’s about a physical heart that’s transplanted from one body to another; the script transplants Edgar Allan Poe’s 19th-century classic story “The Tell-Tale Heart” into a 21st-century chiller; and the direction by Michael Cuesta, in concert with the performances, transplants an unusual amount of figurative heart into what could have played as B-movie material.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) is one of the bigger shams to appear on the horror scene in recent years. This isn’t a movie, it’s a 93-minute stunt, one that takes a single idea that could have sufficed as the punchline for a 10-minute short and wraps it in a feature’s worth of ineffective genre tropes and clichés.

To answer the most pressing question first: Jackie Earle Haley does succeed in making the Freddy Krueger character his own in the remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The new movie would be nothing without the right man in the razor-fingered role that Robert Englund made famous, and Haley’s characterization, coupled with the filmmakers’ slight change in emphasis regarding the role, is a big part of what this reimagining gets right.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED isn’t really a horror movie, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen so far at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys a good thriller, and being kept on the edge of their seat by the anticipation of plot twists and character revelations, not just violence. (General audiences will be able to see it when it goes into limited theatrical release August 6 from Anchor Bay.)

The idea of an Asian horror film called POSSESSED calls up all sorts of unpromising and generic associations, but the new Korean chiller of that title (currently playing the Tribeca Film Festival) has more to offer than the expected evil-imbued girl with long dark hair. Lee Yong-joo’s directorial debut works some intriguing wrinkles into the expected formula that give it an edge over the many previous features of its ilk.

To call George A. Romero’s latest zombie thriller a horror movie is only half right. Certainly, this sixth entry in his 40-year-old series details what happens when the dead return, armed with a blind instinct to rip the soft parts of the living to shreds—but, as any serious scholar of these pictures knows, none of Romero’s DEAD films are alike.

Let’s face facts: the vacant, cross-eyed stare that lasers out of Charlie Manson mug shots is far more unsettling than any masked stalker or gore effect could ever hope to be. Thus Manson, notorious 1960s hippie prophet, murder-cult leader and Beatles obsessive, has been a reliable go-to bogeyman for many a horror filmmaker.