We all love a spine-chilling tale every now and again, so why not batten down the hatches for the evening and feel the fear with our top five scary movies

1. The Exorcist (Director's Cut)
Starring: Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair
Rated one of the most shocking and gripping movies ever made, this film is sure to keep you gripping on to something or someone for absolute fear. The Exorcist won the 1973 Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound, and it still does the job today. When an innocent girl is taken over by an evil entity, it's no easy task to rid her of it as she shouts obscenities and turns her head 360 degrees. And there's more than a fair share of projectile vomiting. You might want to forget the popcorn for this one.

2. The Blair Witch Project
Starring: Heather Donahue and Joshua Leonard
Don't let the hype put you off this one. It really is scary as hell. When three student filmmakers travel to Burkittsville, Maryland to make a film about a local legend, they enter the woods and are never seen again. One year later, their footage is found documenting what happened. Terror strikes on the second night when the students hear their tent being circled and later find a hair ritualistically tied with blood and a human tooth. From there on, the film dares you to face your fear of the unknown, and the twisted, ambiguous end will leave you too scared to close your eyes.

3. Halloween
Starring: Donald Pleasence and P.J. Soles
Directed by John Carpenter, this classic 1978 horror is the original and best teen slasher movie of all time. A six-year-old psychopath kills his older sister on Halloween, and escapes from a mental institution 15 years later to relive the crime in his sleepy hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. So begins his reign of terror on three babysitting friends on the night of Halloween, killing them off one by one.

4. Dawn of the Dead (Uncut)
Starring: David Emge and Ken Foree
This cult classic is George A Romero's nightmare vision of a world populated by flesh-eating zombies and four people struggling for survival. Things get from bad to worse when they start to run out of food and water and lose power, and the dead keep breaking through their defences. They make a plan to escape to an island by reinforcing two mall shuttle buses, but will they get through the mass of hungry zombies?

5. The Others
Starring: Nicole Kidman and Fionnula Flanagan
It's 1945, and a woman lives with her children, who are hypersensitive to light, in a darkened musty manor off the British coast. With her husband presumably lost at war, three strangers respond to an as yet unposted advert for domestic help. The twist that ensues reaches from far beyond the grave. This classic ghost story with supernatural underpinnings will leave you with goosebumps and an urge to keep your doors locked. Just don't watch it alone.