Dare you see Saw?

Fiendishly inventive and gory as hell, Saw is one of the most alarming films you will ever see. There are times in this movie when you'll want to laugh, scream and cry all at once. It's a mental and emotional rollercoaster ride full of blood and surprises, a bonafide horror classic ideal for anyone with the guts to endure it.

Two men wake up chained to pipes at opposite ends of a dirty bathroom. A dead body lies between them. But who are they? Where are they? And what are they doing there?

Cary Elwes and Danny Glover lead a game cast but it's the movie that's the star, an incredible achievement by first-time director James Wan that will mess with your mind and get your heartbeat racing like Steve McQueen.

Everyone Will Suffer.

Films don't come any creepier than The Ring, a superior American treatment of the celebrated Japanese Ringu, better characterised than the original, with a stronger plot and many more scares.

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski keeps the atmosphere dark and full of dread as the world's scariest videotape makes its way into the world. Watch it and you get a call. A scratchy voice says you'll be dead in seven days. A week later, you're frightened to. But is there any way to avoid the curse? Investigative journalist Naomi Watts is determined to find out...

If the phone rings while you're watching this I guarantee you'll jump out of your seat. In fact, if you really want to give your mates a scare, why not use your mobile to make the phone ring the instant after someone in the movie watches the video?

Before man walked the earth... it slept for centuries.

It is evil. It is real. It is awakening.

Less isn't always more. Sometimes more is more. After all, why settle for demons when you can have zombies too? And why stop there when flesh-eating bugs and psychotic down-and-outs are also available. As for creatures from alternate dimensions, don't get us started.

A motley collection of science, religious and philosophy types join forces to investigate Satan's Second Coming. Surrounded by all manner of beasties in a shadowy old church, they are unnervingly advised to "Pray for death".

A lesser-known but endlessly entertaining horror favourite from master of the art John Carpenter, this is a tense and bloody shocker which will make you scream loudly, laugh nervously and check for white hairs when it's finished.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Jeff Goldblum bugs the hell out of Geena Davis in this thoroughly nasty but compelling tragedy, the horrifying tale of an eccentric scientist who turns, one cell at a time, into a giant, hairy, acid-spewing fly.

Stare with disbelief at the botched baboon teleportation. Struggle to keep your lunch down as our hero peels off his fingernails, then his ears, then the rest...

Director hell out of David Cronenberg, a man obsessed with viscera, avoids the camp of the '50s original by first making us care for Jeff and Geena before dragging them through mutant hell all the way to a climax that will leave you speechless, shaking and a little bit queasy.

If you love being scared, it'll be the night of your life.

Vampire movies are rarely watchable and even fewer are genuinely scary. The silent classic Nosferatu set a standard, it turns out, that few films have been able to reach. This is one of the good ones, though, maybe the best. It's the kind of movie that makes you want to shout "run away" and "look behind you" at the screen.

A late night devotee of cheesy horror flicks is convinced his neighbour's a bloodsucker. Armed with the knowledge of ten thousand bad movies, our hero enlists the questionable aid of a faded big screen vampire killer, pursuing the undead all the way to the house next door.

More than a decade before the Scream trilogy won rave reviews for its self aware, movie literate take on the horror genre, Fright Night was laughing at itself while simultaneously scaring our pants off.

If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming, she won't wake up at all.

The bastard son of a hundred maniacs, Freddy Krueger was indisputably the freakiest anti-hero of 1980s cinema, a child molester burnt to a crisp by angry parents and embraced by a generation of film fans as the killer of their dreams.

Scarred from head-to-toe with blades for fingers and an inexhaustible supply of cheesy one-liners, he returned from the grave to slaughter kids in their nightmares and inspire a merchandising bonanza that included children's dolls, bladed gloves and Halloween masks.

Created by director Wes Craven, who named the character after a school bully, Freddy is seen to best effect in the terrifying first, hilarious third and mind-messing final chapter of his gory saga.

The ultimate experience in grueling terror.

Blood-soaked, off his rocker and ready to rumble, accidental hero Ash is mad at Hell and isn't going to take it any more. First he's attacked by demons in a cabin. Then witches, walking skeletons and even his own left hand. His friends possessed, he has no choice but to chop them up. Then he's thrown back in time to battle the medieval dead, yet still he fights on, a shotgun on his back, a chainsaw on his stump and a joke on his lips.

Banned for years due to the infamous sequence in which a girl is sexually assaulted by a tree, the first movie sets you up for the madness that follows. The strangest, silliest and most enthusiastic horror series of them all, courtesy of director Sam Raimi and actor Bruce Campbell, The Evil Deads will blow your mind.

From the director of Animal House - a different kind of animal.

From the grotty splendour of the Northern Line to the porn palaces of Piccadilly Circus, death stalks London in the snarling, slobbering form of the meanest movie werewolf of them all.

A slick mix of gags and gore from director John Landis, who wrote the movie when he was 19 and shot it a decade later, American Werewolf kicks off with lycanthropic terror on the foggy Yorkshire Moors and builds to a bloody crescendo in the heart of the West End.

Best of all is the ground-breaking transformation sequence in which, instead of falling behind a sofa and emerging covered in fur, actor David Naughton turns slowly and painfully into a wolf before our widening eyes.

They were warned. They are doomed. And on Friday the 13th, nothing will save them.

A gleeful celebration of stalking and slashing horny young teenagers, these blood-soaked horrors served to showcase the talents of the sickest make-up men in the movie business.

A remote summer destination with a grim history, Camp Crystal Lake is where little Jason Vorhees was left, unsupervised, to drown. The first film sees Jason's mother out for revenge, chopping up the fit and sexy. Her climactic decapitation leads to the resurrection of the masked, unstoppable, machete-wielding Jason in movies two to ten.

Cheap, cheerful and featuring a young Kevin Bacon being run through with a spear, the first two movies, at least, are a genuine scream.

In space, no one can hear you scream.

When the time came to shoot the now-famous chest-bursting sequence in which a baby alien pops out of John Hurt's troubled innards, director Ridley Scott neglected to tell his cast exactly what was going to happen. The look of genuine surprise and horror on their faces mirrors those of audiences worldwide who to this day remain freaked out by this remarkably creepy sci fi monster movie.

The crew of deep space cargo ship Nostromo are picked off one at a time by a ferocious alien creature, an unstoppable force with acid for blood and no end of teeth. One of the scariest and most ferocious monster movies ever made, although the sight of Sigourney Weaver in her underpants does help to take the edge off.

When there's no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH!

Robbed of darkness, creepy music and other staples of the horror genre, the dead are forced to menace the living in the brightly lit, saccharine setting of an abandoned shopping mall. Turns out there's dread in the daytime, too. In fact, dragged from the shadows, zombies seem even more terrifying, as mindless and relentless as telemarketers.

With mankind on the verge of collapse due to the zombie plague, a mismatched group of survivors take refuge in a mall swarming with re-animated corpses.

The superior second installment of George Romero's Living Dead series, and most memorable showcase for the entrail-spewing brilliance of make-up effects wizard Tom Savini, Dawn of the Dead is the most realistic, and therefore most horrifying zombie movie you will ever see.

The night HE came home.

Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as the father of the modern Slasher Flick, after unleashing a cross-dressing lunatic on a showering Janet Leigh in his 1960 shocker Psycho. Without director John Carpenter's Halloween, however, the killing might have ended there and then. Instead, as the remorselessly evil Michael Myers hacks the unsuspecting residents of Hadonfield, Illinois into bolognese sauce, wearing, as it happens, a customised William Shatner mask (from The Devil's Rain), every director with a camera and a couple of dollars resolved to freak out audiences in much the same way for the next 25 years.

A creepy, edgy masterpiece, it launched seven sequels of its own, as well as the career of Janet Leigh's daughter, scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis.

Good morning. You are one day closer to the end of the world.

You have been warned.

A kid doesn't have much of a chance in life when his mother's a jackal and his father's the Devil. Unless he wants to rule the earth, that is.

Set to the spine-tingling strains of composer Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning choral soundtrack "Ave Santani" - "Hail Satan" - The Omen kicks off a trilogy devoted to the rise and fall of Damien Thorn, born on the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month, a very bad man and no mistake.

The first and most chilling chapter in the saga sees Damien as a fat-faced little scamp, wreaking mortal havoc without even trying. A distinguished cast is steadily extinguished as each character first learns of Damien's true identity, only to be burnt, hung, impaled or decapitated for their troubles.