With Halloween just a few days away I thought this would be a great time to unveil my top 10 favorite horror flicks. When reading this keep in mind that these are my personal favorites, and I am in no way claiming that they are the best ever made. I’m going to split the list into 3 parts. Numbers 10-6 will be named today, 5-2 will be posted tomorrow, and on Halloween Day I will let you all know my Number 1 all time favorite horror flick.

Without further ado, here are the first 5 movies in my personal top 10

10: Friday the 13th

Released in 1980, Friday the 13th is one of the most popular slasher films of all time. A group of camp counselors, are busy trying to re-open Camp Crystal Lake years after multiple murders shut it down. One by one the counselors are knocked off (in creative ways) by a mysterious unseen killer. We soon learn that the murderer is Mrs. Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer, who is killing the camp members as a sick way to avenge her son Jason’s death. Jason drowned in Crystal Lake in 1957 when, as Mrs. V puts it, two counselors were having sex instead of paying attention to her son. Mrs. Voorhees is, famously, decapitated in a battle with the last remaining camp member, ending the horrible nightmare….until…

In the final scene of the movie Alice, the last living counselor, is in a canoe on Crystal Lake waiting to be rescued. The decomposing “young Jason” leaps out of the water and pulls Alice into the lake, but just as she goes under she wakes up in a hospital bed. She tells the police about the boy, but they claim that they never found him….I wonder what happened to him.

9: Session 9

Session 9 was released in 2001 and is a great example of a phychologial “slow burn” horror flick. The interaction between the characters and their environment make you realize that the most frightening things in the world are often the elements that are inside every human.

Session 9 is set in and around the very real Danvers State Mental Hospital, which has a very disturbing backstory. A 5 member team of asbestos removers is contracted to remove all of the harmful materials from the hospital in only 5 days. As each day passes the team starts to crack under the pressure of the unrealistic deadline and the creepy atmosphere of the hospital. On top of that, each character has problems outside of work, so no matter where they are stress is with them. The movie progresses at a very slow pace, but if you stick with it you are rewarded with a disturbingly realistic story that will stick with you for a very long time.

8: Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into an apartment in a building that has a bad reputation. They discover that their neighbors are a very friendly elderly couple named Roman and Minnie Castevet, and Guy begins to spend a lot of time with them. Strange things start to happen: a woman Rosemary meets in the washroom dies a mysterious death, Rosemary has strange dreams and hears strange noises and Guy becomes remote and distant. Then Rosemary becomes pregnant and begins to suspect that her neighbors have special plans for her child.

She soon discovers that Roman and Minnie are the leaders of a coven of witches and her husband, a struggling actor, allowed the devil to impregnate her in exchange for a successful career, but she is unable to convince anyone to believe her. She is eventually informed that she is the mother of the long-awaited anti-Christ.

7: May

May is one of the saddest, darkest, and strangest movies I have ever seen. The story of May revolves around a sad, awkward, and lonely girl named May Canady, played by the always wonderful Angela Bettis. May has had a very troubled childhood which included growing up with a lazy eye that excluded her from the rest of society. While she was growing up she had very few social interactions with her peers, and her only friend was a doll that her mother gave her when she was young.

Later in life she makes a point to attempt to interact with other people, even trying to find love with a man named Adam. Eventually he rejects her because of her social shortcomings, and May comes to a strange realization…she is never able to find perfect people, only people with perfect parts. She decides that the only option she has is to create a perfect friend from all of the available parts.

6: Evil Dead 2

Evil Dead 2 is a sequel/remake of the first Evil Dead film. A young man named Ash takes his girlfriend, Linda, to a secluded cabin, and plays back a professor’s tape recorded recitation of passages from the Book of the Dead. The recording contains a spell that calls up an evil force from the woods which turns Linda into a demon called a Deadite, and threatens to do the same to Ash. When the professor’s daughter and her friends show up at the cabin, the night turns into a non-stop, battle between the chainsaw wielding Ash, and an advancing demon horde.

The end of the move features Ash being transported back into the Middle Ages, where a group of knights take him for a Deadite. When one of the real demons shows up Ash blasts the creature with his shotgun and the people of that time begin to worship him as a hero. This scene sets up the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness.