It goes without saying that watching horror movies is a deeply personal experience, more so than any other genre. Which means that our choices will probably not be yours. But that's why we have a comment section. Let us know if you think we're just plain out of our gourd or if you agree with our list. One thing is certain, if you're visiting this site you have a love for horror like no one else. So lets see what makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck....

Follow up:

#10 SCREAM

The opening 10 minutes of Scream is a masterful exercise in horror. Sure, they ripped off every moment from other movies, but at least they knew which moments to rip off. Scream was one of those movies I wasn't expecting anything and it gave me so much. I bet I saw that movie when it first came out in theaters 10 times.

There is one moment the film absolutely nails, and this stands out as the scariest moment for me.

After Casey Becker (Drew Berrymore) is mentally and physically tortured, she sees a chance for escape, and the headlight of her parents’ car winding up the long, isolated road. Just a few more seconds and she’ll be saved. Then bam, the killer finishes her off. Just the idea of safety being so close, but not able to reach it, is simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying.



#9 THE SHINNING

There’s nothing scarier than creepy kids and The Shining has three of them. While Danny explores the overlook hotel on his tricycle he bumps into two of the freakiest little girls and they give him a peek at their disturbing murder scene. If your not just a little creeped out by this sequence then you must have ice water in your veins. That's good clean horror folks!



#8 JAWS

If you took the audio out of a horror film, it wouldn’t be that scary anymore. It’s the screams in the opening scene of Jaws that eat away at the audience. You don’t even see the shark, but hearing the victim scream as she’s yanked around the ocean is disturbingly chilling. This movie single handedly hurt the tourism industry at beach resorts. Why this isn't number 1 is mind boggling. Who's writing this list? :-)

#7 THE RING

A slow-burner, this one, and the best example of Japanese-horror that has ever appeared on DVD (or should I say video cassette?). :-)

The majority of the film is only mildly unnerving, with videos full of bizarre images and the iconic image of a water-sodden little girl. So far, so average cliched horror film. But the film's pace and timing slowly builds up to a climatic scene that is the scariest scene in any film ever!

For those who have seen it you know exactly what I am talking about, and even though it was copied in the American remake to some credibility (as well as being parodied in Scary Movie 3) there's no other scene more breathtakingly sinister than the slow, evil crawl of Sadako as she crawls through the TV to claim her victim.



#6 HALLOWEEN

Visually stunning, poetry in motion of a terror ride with nothing much happening, yet the tension is almost unbearable. Perhaps the most imitated movie of the last twenty years or so, it has lost the power to shock because we audiences have become so accustomed to the "rules" of the horror movie genre as cleverly pointed out to us in "Scream". BUT, Halloween was indeed the first, or nearly the first to take the stalker idea to unprecedented, murderous heights. Halloween is THE classic Psycho on the loose horror movie of all time. The gliding visual point of view camera, the tinkling eerie score, the use of shadows and oh that agonizing, stark tension. You love it, I love it we all love the original Halloween. Haters check your badges at the door. Halloween had us all checking under our beds at night looking for the boogeyman.




#5 THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Left me shell shocked for several days after I first saw it. The first death scene is so absolutely shocking and presented with such cold starkness that it's almost too real to be bearable. Almost snuff film like. Followed by such shockers like the girl being slowly let down onto a meat hook which is hooking into the back of her head. She tries desperately to climb off the hook, but to no avail. There was an expectancy of such brutal horror materializing from nowhere in this film that even an open doorway into the darkness of night presents a terrifying prospect. There are elements of black humour here, but obscured by the monstrous horrors on display. It just takes the sound of that grotesque chainsaw sputtering to life to make the hairs on one's neck stand up.

The film is an incredible terror ride, and more incredible for the fact that having watched it and felt as though you have just visited a slaughterhouse, there is hardly a drop of blood shown in the entire movie. Tobe Hooper has created a masterpiece of horror that suggests so much outright violence and mayhem that you can swear that you have seen it, even though you haven't. Indeed the most terrifying aspect of the movie is actually embedded in the name itself, another masterstroke of triggering the mind to all sorts of horror's. A brilliant movie in every sense and one of the greatest horror movies ever IMO.



#4 POLTERGEIST

Released on June 4th 1982, director Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is one of the most uneasy feeling movies of its time.

The story, co-written (and co-produced) by Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg revolves around the Freeling family who is at first amused by, then later tormented by ghosts. The word poltergeist is German for noisy ghost.

The tension is heightened in the film when the Freeling's youngest daughter Carol Anne, played by the late Heather O'Rourke, turns up missing, but where it turns really creepy is when the family can hear her talking through the TV.

Feeling out of options the family brings in a team of paranormal investigators who turn out to be so amazed yet terrified of the events in the home that they call in a little extra guidance from a spiritual medium, named Tangina Barrons played by Zelda Rubinstein.

She helps them get Carol Anne back but in the third and final act of this film we learn something that is hinted at earlier on when Steven Freeling spoke to his boss about moving a cemetery for housing developments, their house sits right on top of a cemetery that was never fully dug up.

That's right! They moved the headstones and left the dead bodies. In a pretty gruesome scene skeletons and caskets float up to the surface in the muddy water of their unfinished swimming pool.

Superstition seems to be attached to this film due to the fact that the final scenes did in fact use real human skeletons. Thats just freaky.



#3 NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

Just listen to that music in the opening scene…brr! It’s a sign of things to come. Okay, it pains me to pick only one scene, but I’ve made the sacrifice.

After Nancy’s best pal Tina is butchered by the unseen Freddy (and dragged across the ceiling, spilling blood everywhere! It’s so cool!) Nancy decides to go to school the next morning to get her mind off it. It’s this scene, with Nancy in English class and the events that unfold beautifully, that deserves its place as #1.

Nancy looks a bit dazed, which is understandable. The sympathetic teacher pats her on the back, and asks some kid to read from Julius Caesar. This is where the brilliance starts. The boy’s voice starts out normal, then lowers into a scratchy whisper as he rasps “…I have bad dreams.”
Wonderfully understated creepiness. This means of course, that Nancy has fallen asleep.

She misses her friend dearly, but cheer up: Tina pays her a visit here! Zipped inside her bloody body bag, Tina whispers Nancy’s name at the classroom door and motions for her friend to follow her. Nancy does, only to see Tina’s body being dragged away by an unseen force, leaving a thick trail of blood behind…

Then there’s a hall monitor, in a suspicious green and red striped sweater…and Nancy meets Freddy up-close and personal for the first time, in the boiler room. Damnit Wes Craven know's how to build suspense. Will the remake live up to the first film? Ahhhhh, no. Haven't seen the film, but no. Enough said.



#2 SALEM'S LOT

Tobe Hooper gets another pick from me. How this was left out of our top 10 vampire movies list is mind boggling to me. (just kidding Joel :-) This fantastic make of Stephen King's novel "Salem's Lot" (1976). This movie is by far the most freakiest and most memorable vampire movie I have ever seen. The three hour movie has gruesome events happening all around the little town of Salem's Lot. The first vampire that shows up in the movie is of course the unforgettable little brother who begins scratching on the window of his older brother.

The movie is not gory or full of the special effects we are all use to today, but the scare factor is definitely in there in mass amounts. If you want that feeling that someone is behind you, turn the lights down, and watch the unbelievable creepy movie "Salem's Lot". If you've never read the book do it now and if you've never seen this movie you aren't a true horror movie fan. :-)

#1 THE EXORCIST

I have to put in the 1973 Academy Award winning film The Exorcist in this for the extreme reaction it got at the time of the release, and sometimes still gets. This movie was rated X in some regions and my mother in law still to this day can't talk about this film without recounting a horrible dream she had that involved a crown of thorns and a crucifix. She literally starts to tear up when she talks about it. That is the effect this movie had on people.

Adapted from the novel by William Petter Blatty (who also wrote the script), and directed by William Friedkin this films tells the shocking story of a woman trying to help for her daughter who appears to be possessed by the devil. In modern times this movie could have easily become a cheesy B flick with studios so eager to cut the first half of the script with Freddy Kruger like gloves because they perceive today's audience to have a short attention span, but the first half of this movie I think is what propelled it. The mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, takes her daughter through various doctors and tests to find out what is wrong with her. There are scenes of her spitting at a nurse as she goes for a checkup, a painful scene of her undergoing a brain scan, and of course the scene where she attacks a psychiatrist. All these things lead the exports to tell her to send her daughter to the nuthouse because they can't find anything wrong with her.

When her outbursts grow more violent leading her mother to suspect her of the death of a friend, she turns to a catholic priest, played by Max von Sydow. This film's final act took the longest to shoot. They had made the set into a refrigerator dropping the temperature until the actors could see their own breath in the air. Then they brought in a magician to create the now famous seen where daughter Reagan (played by Linda Blair) rises up into the air. They also spent a ton of time on SFX makeup, props, and contraptions to make Reagan's body do all sorts of unnatural things.

Why is the Excorcist #1? Because Satan is f'ing scary people!