With Halloween just one day away, a new ranking has named The Exorcist the greatest horror movie of all time, beating classics such as Psycho, Rosemary's Baby and Halloween.
The list spans the golden age of Seventies horror, surreal Eighties classics and Nineties slashers, picking the ten films considered to have done the genre best.
From Body Horror to Found Footage
At number ten is The Fly (1986), starring Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg's classic. Based on a short story by George Langelaan, it follows a scientist who builds a teleportation machine and accidentally enters it with a fly, leading to a gruelling transformation into a human-fly hybrid and one of the finest examples of body horror.
Ninth is The Blair Witch Project (1999), which made $248m from a $600,000 budget and launched a generation of found footage films. It follows friends who go into a wood to make a documentary about a witch and become caught in a supernatural web of paranoia and jump-scares.
Polanski, Carpenter and the Slasher Era
Eighth is Rosemary's Baby (1968), in which Mia Farrow plays a New York housewife convinced by shady outsiders that her newborn is the son of the devil. Seventh is John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), which introduced killer Michael Myers, who escapes a mental hospital to terrorise Haddonfield. Carpenter's use of POV footage puts the audience in the killer's shoes.
Sixth is Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a sequel to the 1931 film that expands Mary Shelley's novel, with Boris Karloff's monster performance widely regarded as one of the great horror portrayals. Fifth is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which spawned sequels including 1994's The Next Generation, starring then-unknown actors Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger.
Kubrick, Hitchcock and the Top Pick
Fourth is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), featuring Jack Nicholson's transformation from family man to axe-wielding murderer, with unsettling moments including creepy twins and the infamous Room 237. Third is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), with Anthony Perkins as motel owner Norman Bates, a violent shower sequence and a spine-tingling score.
Second is Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, whose stretching arms and phone-tongue scene are among the most surreal in horror.
Topping the list is William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), which scared a generation on release and still packs a punch five decades later. The film tells of a young girl, Regan, possessed by the devil, touching on themes including religion, purity, fear of strangers and motherhood.
