THE SCARIEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME

from "Night of the Hunter." Nothing like insane religious fundamentalist killers to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

We're thinking ahead to Halloween and our annual tradition of watching a scary movie--not some goopy gorefest, and not some cheesy teen slasher flick, but well-made scary. Some past favorites: The Exorcist, Repulsion, Dead Ringers, The Shining, Blue Velvet, The Thing ('82), Alien, 28 Days Later, The Night of the Living Dead, Erasorhead, The Silence of the Lambs, and Night of the Hunter. The Good stuff. As far back as the Greeks, dramatists knew that a well-told tale could flush out the petty fears and worries from our daily lives through our vicarious identification with the travails of a hero. Aristotle, in the Poetics, called this catharsis, or "an emotional cleansing." In other words, it's good to scare the hell out of yourself from time to time. These movies ought to do the trick.