Horror movies had more than the usual impact on my life. It was an un-sanctioned all-night horrorama at the Ingleside Drive-in that got me got kicked out of home and started on life. My very first video production was a horror short in which a neurosurgeon is caught in an infinite loop of bloody surgery and amnesia. And I’ve followed horror film with both social and aesthetic interest…like Disney heroines and album covers, I think horror films are one of the barometers social scientists will keep coming back to for centuries to figure out what we were really all about.

We’re kind of antisocial socialists at the Bunker, and none of us particularly enjoy handing out carbos to kids. So we tend to turn off the lights on Hallowe’e'n, settle down with the mead and popcorn, and enjoy a dusk to dawn session of our favourite scary movies. Only the very best of the best make it to the list. There’s were no real criteria for admission to the honour roll, but in each case the directors of these films somehow manage to reach past simple shock or gore, right down into your gut, and pull an image out of your nightmares - or one that will soon JOIN your nightmares. (Insert Crypt-Keeper-style cackle here.)

Here’s this year’s program.

6:00 pm: DEAD OF NIGHT, Ealing Studios, 1945.

The first great horror anthology film, with segments by four different directors. A group of people, seemingly randomly assembled at a British country house, exchange their own tales of supernatural experience, as it becomes clearer and clearer they were all somehow predestined to come together…for what terrible purpose? Heh. Watch the frickin’ film.

The anthology genre turned silly in the sixties, but this one is top notch. A couple of the segments haven’t aged particularly well (especially the tale of a golfer who comes back from the grave to haunt his romantic rival), but the whole film, shot in high contrast black and white. has a disturbing, moody look that gets creepier and creepier as evening arrives and the stories get darker and darker.

The nightmare moment: a tour de force performance by Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist terrified of his own dummy. The moment when the dummy first speaks from the shadows…

8:00 pm: The Thing, John Carpenter version, 1982

A remake of a classic horror/sci-fi/suspense film by Howard Hawks (also pretty good) with Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimsley. A research team in Antarctica is trapped in their isolated outpost with…something. First the dogs are killed. Most of them. And then the scientists begin to die.

Stock situation, but Carpenter, for once, handles it brilliantly. The opening sequence (a weirdly intelligent husky being pursued across the ice by a helicopter) sets the tone for a long descent into paranoia, periodic bloody deaths, a rising claustrophobic sense of panic, and a wonderfully bleak, ambiguous climax. Even without the excellent special effects, the film would stand up as a thriller/mystery with a great plot. But the monster itself, like the Alien, is a horror movie classic.

Trivia bonus: There is a character name “Mac” and another named “Windows”

The nightmare moment: Kirt Russel desperately administers CPR to one of his colleagues. Suddenly the man’s chest splinters and collapses inward under Russell’s blows, and from it emerges… the most nightmarish two minutes of film shot in the 1980s. Often dismissed as an “Alien” ripoff, this scene is indescribable.

10:00 pm The Haunting, Robert Wise, 1963

Eleanor, a deeply troubled young woman, is invited to join a team of paranormal researchers in an investigation of Hill House. A classic haunted house setup defuses your tension with a couple of amusing secondary characters (a young, cynical Ross Tamblyn and Clair Bloom as the “it’s 1962 so we can’t actually acknowledge she’s a lesbian” Theodora). And then slowly, deep in the bowels of the house, something stirs…

Directed (improbably) by Robert Wise, a former editor of Orson Welles films who went on to do “The Sound of Music” and the first Star Trek film. The original “Haunting”, based on a short novel by Shirley Jackson (never to be confused with the horrible 1999 remake) has no blood, no violence, and nary a visible ghost. It terrifies simply through its performances, lighting, pace, and a haunted house that seems to be ALL dark corners, tortured angles, coffinlike rococo decor, and…voices.

The nightmare moment: When Theo tremulously tells Eleanor that it wasn’t her hand she had been holding in the dark.

Midnight: The Shining

You all know this one. No need to dwell on the many excellences of what I think is Stanley Kubrick’s best film - maybe because it’s the only one in which he really allowed his contempt for people its full expression. Every scene is a strange, perfectly scripted little set piece, with an oppressively symmetrical , square-frame composition throughout (watch the number of scenes in which two centred, seated characters talk to each other in a series of medium closeups that get gradually tighter and tighter.)

Another descent in madness. But the real horror of this film…and Kubrick’s slyest, nastiest achievement - is that as Jack goes slowly mad, he becomes more and more gleefully normal, more alive, funnier, smarter, while the characters around him…especially Shelley Duvall…become laughable caricatures. No-one has ever made going homicidally insane look like so much fun.

The nightmare moment: Too many to list. When Jack looks up and sees the bartender…in a empty bar. When we see a long shot down the hotel hall, then cut to an overhead shot…and a ball rolls into frame from a hallway we just saw was empty. The Diane Arbus twins.

2:00 AM: Audition, Takashi Mike

As “The Shining” is almost a comedy, “The Audition” is almost a social drama. A bereaved Japanese television producer decides he’s going to audition women for his next relationship. He is strangely attracted to one lovely, quiet, shy candidate, and ends up dating her. The first third of the movie is quite slow, and funny in spots, including a demo reel of the women he auditions. Then it starts to get a bit odd. Then it becomes one of the most horrific films of obsession I’ve seen, with a climax that is almost unwatchable. Mike has become a bit of a cult figure among gorehounds: like Cronenberg, he has a unique ability to push physical horror right to its absolute limits without flooding the screen with blood. But this is much, much more than the new wave of torture-porn (you’ll note there are no “Saw” or “Hostel” flicks on this list): Mike is interested in horrifying you on a much deeper level than that.

The nightmare moment: Our hero is speaking on the phone to the lovely, shy woman he has become infatuated with. We watch his face, we hear her demure, shy voice, we smile…he’s in love. Then we cut to a wide shot, from behind her, of the room from which she’s speaking. She is squatting, wearing a filthy nightdress. Her room is a midden of filth. IN the backbround, there is a large, stained canvas sack. The contrast between her sweet conversation and the setting is overwhelming. And then suddenly, the sack heaves….

4:00 AM: Alien, Ridley Scott, 1979

Ridley Scott said he wanted to direct a haunted house movie, set in space. The result was Alien, the best of the series that followed by such a margin that the others hardly deserve to be called sequels. The incredibly realistic performances by Tom Skerrit, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton and Sigourney Weaver are perfectly supported by Scott’s handheld, near documentary style, which makes the growing horror that much more terrifying. I don’t know know many times I’ve seen Jones the Cat lunge out from the darkness, but it still gives me a near cardiac arrest every time.

It’s hard now to remember what a revolutionary film this really was. It was one of the first “grunge in space” films, showing a decaying spaceship and an exhausted crew of workies, in contrast to Stanley Kubrick’s pristeen Jupiter Mission with its NASA squeaky clean crew. It was probably the most horrific monster filmed to date. And of course, let’s not forget Sigourney hiding away in the escape pod in her skivvies.

The nightmare moment: John Hurt’s slow descent by rope into the bowels of the alien vessel. It’s even worse watching it when you know what’s going to happen.

6:00 AM: Evil Dead 2, Sam Raimi, 1987

Sam Raimi gets to remake his earlier no-budget, black and white cult film, Evil Dead, with a budget and colour stock, but preserves the same hilarious, WAY over the top humour and energy. A bunch of students accidentally evoke some nasty Sumerian demons (the worst kind) in a cabin out in the bush, and get offed in a variety of ridiculous ways. An insanely gory film that never lets up for a second. You’re either completely repelled within five minutes, or surrender to the bloody hilarity and go along for the ride. It’s an absolute masterpiece of some kind, but I’ve never been sure what.

The nightmare moment: When Ash sees the emaciated, skeletal Sumerian Demon woman delicately pirouetting in the moonlight…just before he cuts off his own hand with the chainsaw.

8:00 am: Yawn, finish honey mead, resume world conquest.