by Sumner Strickland | staff writer

As Halloween approaches, be sure to fit these top scary flicks into your holiday schedule.

1. 28 days later

It’s hard to get scared when you see slow zombies, but when they start running, all hell breaks loose. From Danny Boyle, director of “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 hours” this was by far the scariest movie of the last decade for several reasons. One, there was a realistic reason for people being zombies. Second, you actually care about the characters you’re not just waiting for them to get demolished.

2. Nightmare On Elm Street

Well, this is the movie that began the long and painfully awful saga, but the first one is actually scary. To some it might seem like an obvious choice, but it’s really scary when someone starts to kill people inside their dreams.

3. Alien

One of the movies that says, you don’t need to see the monster in order to be terrified. This movie practically gave birth to John Carpenters “The Thing” of 1982, with the same premise, except in Antarctica. But this movie was not only just a horror movie, it was a partial character study of all the passengers on board the ship, making it a classic.

4. The Shining

There is nothing scarier than insanity, and this film is a portrayal of just that. ‘The Shinging’ is based on the Steven King novel and directed by Stanley Kubrick- one of the greatest directors of all time. But, this is his shot at horror and he nails it on every level providing real suspense and real scares.

5. Dawn of the Dead

Zombie movies have poorly imitated the horror captured by George Romero in this classic. Set in a town mall during a zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors band together to fight off the zombies. There is some scary stuff in there for the time and even for today.

6. The Evil Dead

This is the Sam Raimi that no one knows. Before he did all the Spiderman movies, he was the head horror director of the eighties and his first movie still frightens viewers. Set in a cabin in the woods, a group of friends go to have a nice weekend, until the forest and a bunch of demons come alive and start terrorizing the group. Some of the effects are as cheesy as cheesy can be, but with a measly budget of 380,000 dollars there’s not much you could do, but it still manages to work to this day.

7. Poltergeist

Make fun of me all you want for this one but when the house becomes possessed, consider me gone. One of Steven Spielberg’s first movies after “E.T.” and “Jaws” a family begins to notice strange things occurring around the house, like the infamous TV scene with the girl staring into the static filled TV calmly saying “They’re here”. The house becomes possessed, sucking in there daughter to a portal in the closet. With a limited amount of violence, Poltergeist still manages to scare long after the eighties.

8. Rosemary’s Baby

The thought of giving birth to the devil still terrifies me. Some don’t agree with this one because of the somewhat slow pace, but I still believe this one will stand the test of time. The movie is about a newlywed couple getting ready to have a baby but turns out she gives birth to the devil.

9. Halloween

John Carpenter’s classic, which spawned an unthinkable amount of sequels and so many more like it. The movie begins with Michael Myers killing his older sister and being sent to an insane asylum only to escape and wreck havoc on the town where he once lived. This is the movie that gave life to the slasher genre and still holds its title as the greatest slasher movie of all time.

10. The Exorcist

I recently re-watched this for the first time in a few years and I can’t remember being more terrified watching a movie. This is the grandmother of all horror movies because this is where we get all our horror movies now. For example, “The Possession”, “Sinister”, pretty much any movie involving demons or the devil. It revolutionized the term “horror” forever and, really terrified us.