Halloween tops slasher films

Scarier than Psycho with its infamous shower murder, and the Exorcist with its head-spinning and projectile vomiting, Halloween has been named the best ever horror film.

The 1978 slasher movie spawned seven sequels, but critics placed the original top of a list of the 20 films most likely to make you hide behind your sofa.

Directed by John Carpenter, Halloween starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a babysitter pursued by masked escaped mental patient Michael Myers. It features little

on-screen blood - instead the chilling musical score builds the tension.

Steve O'Brien, news editor of SFX magazine, which produced the top 20, said: "Halloween works because of its absolute simplicity and the conviction its makers put into it. And it was directed by a man who knew the power of cinema, of editing, of music."

George A Romero's budget zombie film Night Of The Living Dead, filmed in raw documentary style, makes second place, followed by the supernatural classic, The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, who two years later changed tack remarkably with The Sound Of Music.

Real-life serial killer Ed Gein loosely inspired both Hitchcock's Psycho in fourth place, and fifth-placed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The latter is described as "one of the most gut-wrenching and viscerally relentless horror movies ever". Like Halloween, it features little actual gore, relying on the menacing threat of sudden violence to petrify the audience and was banned in Britain for 20 years.

Boris Karloff stars in James Whale's Bride Of Frankenstein in seventh, one place ahead of Ringu, the Japanese story of a cursed video tape which was remade in English last year. Ridley Scott's Alien makes ninth place for its brooding tension and terrifying monsters - including the "chestburster" which emerges from John Hurt's body.

Stanley Kubrick completes the top 10 with The Shining, in which a writer runs amok in a haunted hotel.