Top 10 Scary Movies

10. RING (1998) This modern tale of an "urban legend" doesn't contain a drop of blood and barely any violence yet it manages to create an atmosphere of total dread and intensity and mounting terror. The idea of a "cursed videotape" might well be laughable, but Hideo Nakata's treatment and the great acting and script turn this from a potential laughest into the creepiest film for ages. The music, as in most of the best horror films, does a fantastic job in heightening the mood of terror. Never before have drones and screeches sounded so eerie! Then there is the classic scene that comes as the climax of the film - pure, unrelenting and mesmerizing horror. A scene that instantly rates as among the strongest and most memorablly nightmarish ever. Horror that gets the hairs on the back of one's neck bristling in fear - a rare treat!

9. Psycho (1960) - The "Mother" of modern horror. A superlative, utterly compelling shocker, superbly acted, directed and scored. It has certainly lost some of its power to shock over the years as it has become established as an internationally recognized icon and one of the most parodied and "borrowed" sources for stuff like TV commercials and other movies. Yet, it remains THE class act among horror movies and has, like the other horror classics to stand up to a million repeat viewings. Each new viewing brings forward something new to admire and focus on, such is the depth of Hitchcock's masterpiece shocker. Laced with cyanide black humour and another of Saul Bass's fabulous title sequence's which stand a world apart, still. Bernard Herrmann's score is undoubtedly the most influential one in movie composing history - there can be little argument on that topic. His genius elevated this film to its incredible heights and it is in his shadow that Pino Donnaggio developed into a wonderful, let's face it, clone of Herrmann in all those De Palma homage's to Hitch.

8. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - Left me shell shocked for several days. The first death scene is so absolutely shocking and presented with such cold starkness that it's almost too real to be bearable. 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.

7. Halloween (1978) - 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. What a huge masterpiece.

6. The Exorcist (1973)- So much has been said and written about this movie that we hardly feel that our two bits will make the slightest difference, YET, we are among the few people that actually find the opening sequence as brilliantly effective and crucial to setting the tone for what is to follow. This is a marvelous horror film - one that could have ended up being laughable had it been treated differently. Though there were reports of modern audiences laughing during recent screenings in Britain where the film had been ridiculously banned as a "video nasty" for several years - one also laughs when nervous or tense. The film is a quarter of a century old yet still has the power to scare, an achievement in itself considering all the horrors of this century are not in monsters and creatures that suck blood and devour human flesh. There is far too much real, tangible horror around us in our everyday lives for us to feel threatened any longer by a Dracula, a Frankenstein or indeed Satan. The Exorcist is, by a whisker the most frightening experience that we have enjoyed in a cinema.

5. The Shining (1980)- Stephen King's imagination combined with Stanley Kubrick's filmmaking to create The Shining, the story of a writer, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson, in one of his most memorable performances). Torrance takes a job as a winter caretaker at a huge, remote resort, along with his waifish wife and their psychic son, who has the ability to sense the dead (a gift called "the shining"). Isolated from the world for a winter and trying to finish a novel, Torrance is slowly driven insane by the hotel's resident evil spirits, who urge him to kill his family.

4. JAWS (1972) Like THE EXORCIST, this movie so terrified audiences that there were people by the thousands (in letters to newspapers and on talk radio shows) who refused to get more than knee deep in the ocean ever again (it didn't help matters when shortly after these declarations, some people in Florida were attacked by sharks in knee deep water!). My father was a body surfing fiend until he saw this movie. He never swam in the ocean again. This Horror / Scary movie is a tribute to Steven Speilberg, who made this film at the very height of his hunger as a film maker. He has made many other good movies in his career, but none so breathtaking as JAWS.

This movie, in fact, was so damn scary and influential, that it spawned an entire industry of shark hunters - men fighting their fears by killing sharks. In various interviews, they had all seen Jaws and admitted that it had an effect on them (whether this was for real or just an excuse, who knows?). In the late 1970s and on throughout the 1980s, shark hunting became such an epidemic that the authhor of JAWS, Peter Benchley, went on record as saying that he was sorry he ever wrote the book. Peter spent the rest of his days volunteering, working, and supporting various shark preservation efforts world wide.

3. Frailty (2002)-Frailty is a spectacularly creepy gothic thriller that tells the story of an East Texas serial killer who calls himself the Hand of God. An FBI agent, desperate for information, listens when a young man named Fenton comes in offering a suspect. Fenton believes he knows who the killer is: his brother Adam. Fenton tells of their strange childhood, beginning when their father (Bill Paxton) had a religious vision one night. God told him he must kill people--well, not people but demons that look like ordinary people. He is given a list of names and two tools to do the job, including a double-edged axe. Faced with an assured and threatening father and nowhere to go, the boys reluctantly help carry out a murder. The film works because of a sharp script and Paxton's engrossing performance as the demon-driven father, hitting exactly the right balance between earnestness and psychosis. Frailty shows that everyday horrors can sometimes be the worst.

2. Seven (1995)- Few films divide viewers as much as this one. What seems to separate them is their particular view of justice. Because narrative films are traditionally morality tales where good wins over evil (usually with "good" blowing away "evil" and walking away free of both guilt and responsibility), this film's resistance to walk down this path of film fantasy is understandably upsetting. But that's part of its power of disturb. Ultimately it pleads for a society that embraces passivism, for without it, we are doomed to repeat the cycle of brutality mankind continues to inflict on its own kind.

1. IT(1990)-A series of murders prompts Mike Hanlon to suspect that the supernatural menace that he and a group of friends battled as children has returned. He begins to call his friends to remind them of the oath they swore: if It returned again, they would come back to Derry to do battle again. This is my favorite scary movie, still scares me to this day. Watch it, you will love it, if you like to be SCARED.