We've had a pretty outstanding year in horror so far. In addition to recent breakout indie hits like The Witch and The Invitation, there's also been a string of solid studio horror, including The Conjuring 2, Light's Out, The Shallows, and Don't Breath, and a wealth of adventurous, genre-bending treats like The Neon Demon, The Greasy Strangler, and 10 Cloverfield Land.We even got a critically acclaimed Ouija sequel, if you can believe it. But in the final days of October, the lead-up to Halloween is in full swing, and now's the perfect time to watch as many horror films as possible.

To that end, we have to turn to DVR, Netflix, and old DVD collections for a good thrill. To help you get started on your October horror-watching binge, I've put together a list of five films that scared the hell out of me, spanning from my very first horror movie to the films that still keep me up at night. This is not to say that these are the best horror films of all time (though some of them certainly rank on my list); they are simply the movies that stoked my primal instinct to get up, get the fuck out, and never look back. Check out the five films that scared the hell out of me below.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors (1987)

A Nightmare on Elm: Dream Warriors was my first proper horror film, watched at an astonishingly unsupervised childhood sleepover. Widely regarded as the best of the Elm Street sequels, Dream Warriors reunites us with Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), our heroine from the first film.  She is, remarkably enough, still a sane, functioning woman, and her experiences from the first film have led her to a career in dream psychology.  When she takes a job at local mental hospital she meets a group of troubled teenagers who've been dreaming of her old foe, Freddy Kruger (Robert Englund). If you haven’t seen the Nightmare on Elm Street films, you should obviously begin with the original, which is one of my favorites and a classic beyond need of my recommendation.

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In Dream Warriors, the third in the Elm Street series, Freddy is at the peak of his jaunty sadism and Englund now inhabits his skin with ease and grandeur. We also learn the mythology behind his conception, so appropriately tasteless in the Elm Street tradition.  His mother, held captive in a violent madhouse, gave birth to “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs”. Dream Warriors is admired for its remarkable nightmare sequences. Director Chuck Russell embraces the skewed logic of nightmares, blurring the line between reality and dreamscapes, crafting highly imaginative and equally brutal kill sequences: A boy is strung up by his tendons as a marionette and walked off the roof; a recovering addict confronts Freddy, unafraid and ready for a fight until he morphs his razor claws into syringes, finding her weakness and pumps her full of heroin; a mute boy is tied to a bed with grotesque, wagging tongues (Get it? Tongue-tied, Ha!) and suspended over a pit of Hell. The kills are personalized, intimate, and exquisitely sadistic.

Simply put, Freddy Kruger was the most terrifying concept I had encountered in my tiny little life. A monster who looked and talked like a man, but behaved inhumanly, taking pleasure in the murder of young innocents, dispatching them with creative relish.  For the first time I faced the fear of bodily violation. Kruger was not just violent and vicious; he was perverse in ways completely foreign to a young Baptist girl.  Furthermore, you couldn’t fight him, or at least not for long; he snuck into your dreams and ripped you apart in your most vulnerable state. That night “I dreamed of a man in dirty red and green sweater.” I slept fitfully in a stranger’s house with no one to comfort me, but when I woke up I was a goner. Freddy Krueger was my chaperone into the world of horror. I was hooked on the scare, and I never looked back.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

After that night, I voraciously consumed every horror film I could get my hands on. I snuck peaks at forbidden films through the stairway banisters. I surreptitiously set up rental accounts and watched video nasties on the sly. I worked my way through the classics and the currents and I fell in love with many movies, but nothing inspired that illicit sense of terror again until I saw Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Over the years, Texas Chain Saw Massacre has seen a plethora of remakes and sequels to varying degrees of success, but none have come close to the down and dirty, raw carnality of the original film.  Some films lose their impact through the years, age betrays them and they seem antiquated, borderline laughable in their idea of what frightens. Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not one of those movies. It has grit, it has guts, it has a texture and culture that you can feel, and it rubs like sandpaper on an open wound.

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The plot is simple, no frills. Sally Hardesty (Marylin Burns) and her group of friends are picked off one by one by a family of cannibals on an ill-fated road trip. The scenes are classic by now.  A mentally unstable hitchhiker lashing out with a knife. A screaming young girl hanged on a meat hook. A man with a human-skin mask wielding his chainsaw in erratic arcs. But the scene that always got to me, the one that set my skin crawling and left me ill at ease, is the climactic dinner table scene. There you see the whole fucked-up family as a unit, a sideshow nightmare come for supper. You see Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) for all his vulnerability, a pitiful character, tragic but deplorable. You see his father (Jim Siedow); impatient, erratic, and deeply unintelligent. You see his brother (Edwin Neal), the unstable hitchhiker, delight in Sally’s hysterical fear. Then they go get grandpa (John Dugan). Respecting of their elders (What do you think they are? Heathens?), they offer up the job of finally killing Sally to little old gramps, but he’s just not up to the task. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from trying. Over and over, he attempts to bash in Sally’s head with a hammer. He misses most of the blows, connects with others and the whole thing is a nauseating affair. I’ve rarely felt a level of disdain so sharp as I felt for that despicable, impotent old man; the patriarch of this madness, the root of this pathetic backwoods evil.

Hooper excels at telling the story through action and setting rather than newspaper close-ups or monologues of exposition. You simply have to watch these people in action to know that they’re seriously damaged; nobody has to tell you. The bones and feathers that decorate every inch of their home inform you that this is a family entirely rooted in the lifestyle of butchery, and from there the violence just happens. It all happens suddenly and on the spot, without slow pans and musical spikes to tell you how to feel. Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a lesson in the visceral nature of horror. It doesn’t need painstakingly clever and elaborate death sequences. It doesn’t need fancy effects or the slow, painful execution of “name” actors. It’s about creating the intricate tapestry of a nightmarescape and dropping us right in the heart of it. It’s about creating a horror show so base that a woman will jump straight out of a second story window to escape it.  It’s without a doubt one of the most horrifying films of all time and it’s effective every single time I watch it.

The Descent (2005)

The 90s were a decade notoriously lacking in quality horror films. While there were a few hits, my personal favorite being Scream, it was largely a decade of misses. Woe was the horror fan until the 2000’s when suddenly a number of really good and genuinely scary movies hit the scene all at once. Equal parts tense thriller and badass gore-fest, The Descent, a film about a group of tough spelunking women trapped in a cave full of ancient humanoid monsters, was the first of these films that caught my attention. The Descent opens with a prologue that introduces our main trio - Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Beth (Alex Reid) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza), daredevil outdoor enthusiasts always looking for the next great thrill - and defines the flaws in their relationships that will eventually come to seal their fates. Juno is having an affair with Sarah’s husband Paul, and Beth sees too clearly what Sarah can’t.  On the way back from their latest excursion, a whitewater rafting trip, Sarah’s husband and daughter are tragically killed in a jarring on-screen car crash. Fast-forward a year, and the gang is reunited for a cave diving expedition to help Sarah escape her grief.  Sarah’s loss has pushed her to her mental breaking point and driven a wedge in the friendships, a distance only exacerbated by Juno’s guilt. Joined by friends Becca (Saskia Mulder), Sam (MyAnna Bunning), and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), the ladies set off for what everyone expects to be a boring trip through amateur caves. But Juno, in some seriously deranged logic, takes them to an unexplored cave system in the hopes that they can discover it together and emerge closer than ever before. Naturally that all goes to shit. The exit path caves in and the women find themselves trapped in a monster-infested, off-the-map cave with no clue how to get out and no one on the outside who knows where they are.

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Marshall has the good sense to refrain from jumping straight to the bloody action, and the movie is damn freaky long before the creatures show up.  As the women search for an exit, we are given time to explore the intricacies of their relationships. The sense of claustrophobia and tension between the women increase in tandem, bringing the overall atmosphere to a peak of piano-wire tension. The unspoken distance between Sarah and Juno, the barely-concealed rivalry between Juno and Beth, Beth’s overprotective instinct for Sarah—each relationship has its place in the architecture of the film, and each is played out to its most tragic resolution. On top of the emotional tension, Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy mess with our heads, playing on some of our most primal fears: the dark and entrapment. The women descend deeper and deeper into a shadow world lit only by headlamps, glow sticks, and camcorders; a palate of reds and greens. It’s a disorienting trick of color and light that ratchets up the sense of unease, creating a disquieting otherworldly realm. Almost all of the women have an opportunity to showcase feats of impressive physical strength and mental fortitude, so when these ladies get scared we know it’s time to get scared with them. When the panic reaches its peak, Marshall drops the monster bomb and the pure carnal Darwinism begins. It’s survival of the fittest in action and each woman is in full Ripley mode. It’s a bloody, gruesome affair.

Marshall’s greatest success is his ability to layer on the scares, putting the women through a constantly escalating series of frights that begins with the cave-in and doesn’t let up until the credits roll. The creatures themselves, designed to look like ancient alternatively-evolved relatives of the human species, are fantastically creepy in appearance, movement, and sound.  Their effect is immediately unsettling, and by opting for heavily made-up actors over CGI, Marshall allows for his characters to engage in all out warfare; no mercy, go for the throat, life or death brawls that get you pumped up in your seat through pure kinetic transference.  The Descent not only scared the hell out of me the first time I saw it, it’s my favorite horror movie to show non-genre fans looking for a good scare. It’s frightening, gory, and tense without ever becoming disturbing or sadistic.

A L’interieur AKA Inside (2007)

One of the best things to come out of the horror scene of the early 2000’s was the new wave of extreme French horror. I consider Inside to be the crowning achievement of this sticky, splattery sub-genre. The film opens in utero, the peaceful pre-life of an unborn baby, until we hear a woman’s voice gently cooing promises of safety, abruptly cut off by the sound of vehicles colliding. The film pans back to reveal a gruesome crash, our bloodied heroine Sarah (Alysson Paradis), gasping for breath and looking on the even bloodier corpse of her husband. Pick up to four months later, it’s Christmas Eve, Sarah is due, and she’s not super stoked about it. Depressed and still in mourning, Sarah decides to spend Christmas alone. That is until a mysterious woman, known only as La Femme (Beatrice Dalle), shows up on her doorstep hell bent on cutting Sarah’s unborn baby straight from the womb with a big ass pair of scissors; no anesthetic.

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The setup is real enough, like a ghastly headline we’ve all grown accustomed to waking to on any given day. Inside begins subtly with quietly creepy scenes that don’t announce themselves to the audience. La Femme speaking softly through Sarah’s door, taunting her. La Femme’s silhouette in the window, a glimpse of her face as she lights a cigarette. The chilling way she slips, unnoticed, past Sarah and the cops. The silence in the room as La Femme sterilizes her scissors over Sarah’s sleeping form. But from the moment La Femme slips those scissors into Sarah’s navel, from the moment blood is drawn, the movie descends into frenetic in-your-face chaos caked with blood that spatters, sprays, drips, drops, jets, explodes and oozes absolutely everywhere on screen. Sarah escapes La Femme’s initial attack to a pristine white bathroom, gleaming with white tiles, white towels, a white shower curtain, and Sarah herself in a white nightgown. Then we watch as minute by minute it's desecrated and defaced by unending torrents of bloodshed. Nearly every single character introduced in the film falls prey to the slaughter in Sarah’s home. They die in a variety of ways, but they all die hard, and Sarah repeatedly takes hits throughout the process.

The fact that Sarah is bursting-at-the-belly pregnant only intensifies the violence. We live in a culture where we give up our seats to pregnant women. It's a do-no-harm scenario and watching a pregnant woman put through the ringer places a magnifying glass on the violence. La Femme is an absolutely unrelenting villain and an instant icon of horror cinema. She doesn’t seem to take any obvious pleasure in her deeds, but neither does she shy away from any act, no matter how loathsome. She simply does what she must do to prevail, waits for the dust to clear, and carries on unmoved. And unlike most horror villains, La Femme is affected by the violence inflicted on her. Sarah gets in more than one good shot and each blow is felt. Each counter attack leaves La Femme screaming and crying in pain and rage. It’s fascinating to watch her take punishment after punishment and continue, unhindered, toward her goal with the hysterical strength of mothers who lift cars off their children. The two women go at each other with primal ferocity, and Inside transforms everyday household items into objects of terror. Scissors, knitting needles, hairpins, toasters, teeth, and air freshener are all used to inflict maximum damage. Absolutely anything and everything that can be used as a weapon is brought to bear as an instrument of destruction in this war. Because what this film boils down to in its final act is an all-out, no prisoners, guerilla war between two badass bitches determined to keep this baby; a savage battle that leaves the house awash in a waterfall of blood and viscera.

Spoorloos AKA The Vanishing (1988)

Let me start this with a very firm warning: Do not, for any reason, under any circumstances, watch the 1993 American remake of The Vanishing. It is a pathetic, washed out film that undermines everything impactful about the original. Seriously, just don’t.

The original film picks up on a beautiful day in the South of France where we witness a devastating abduction. Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and his wife Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) stop at a gas station for a break in their road trip.  They are a lovely couple; young and in love. They see the flaws in each other and accept them gladly. Ultimately they are a quickly, but proficiently, drawn sketch of what we all hope to find in a marriage. It all falls apart without a moment’s notice when Saskia wanders into the gas station to buy a soda and never comes back out. Steege pulls off an impressive feat in making us fall for Saskia almost instantly; she’s playful and full of mirth without ever seeming breezy or insubstantial. When she is taken from Rex we feel the loss with him and share his consummate desire to learn the truth. But the film is not a puzzle that offers any comfort in the solving of it.  You know from the onset who is responsible for the crime, and every revelation, every step closer to the truth only deepens your horror and sadness.

The Vanishing is a unique entry in this list because even though there is a total absence of violence or profane imagery in the film it is perhaps the scariest movie I've ever seen. Unlike so many of the great horror films, this is not a terror driven by graphic visual stimulus, but a mentally torturous thriller about the terror of the banal. The Vanishing forces you to confront the paralyzing reality that the person you most love can be gone in an instant, and that the cruelest of people can hide with the greatest efficiency.  It is a reminder that you make a fool of yourself every time you let your guard down.

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Over the course of the film we get to know Saskia's captor Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) intimately, and we see how deeply horrifying he is in both psychology and behavior.  Beloved father and respected teacher, he is in truth only a husk of the man he pretends to be, inside a calculating killer who murders not out of passion and desire, but plain intellectual curiosity.  Our justice system punishes a crime more severely if there is evidence of premeditation; it is seen to be a more abominable and deeply evil act when planned and considered beforehand. Through Raymond Lemorne we bear witness to every meticulous, calculating step of a murder in preparation. He is especially terrifying not only because of his clinical approach to taking a life, but because of how ordinary he appears and how well he functions in daily life. He is not moved to his crimes by passion or impulse. He commits them simply to prove that he can. It is an intellectual exercise in cruelty, a casually evil indulgence. Ultimately the film is a horrifically detailed portrait of every step, misstep and unintended aberration that contribute to the execution of an all too realistic crime.

When we meet Rex and Raymond again it is three years since Saskia’s abduction and Rex has sacrificed his finances, relationships, and sanity in pursuit of the truth behind Saskia’s disappearance.  Raymond has continued with his life, unsuspected of anything but adultery, and it's hinted that he has successfully committed more abductions in the years gone by. He taunts Rex through letters, admiring his commitment, testing the limits of his dedication. After Rex pleads for closure on TV, Raymond presents himself and makes an offer. He will tell Rex the details of Saskia’s fate only if Rex agrees to submit himself to exactly the same fate.  Should Rex choose to pursue revenge instead, Raymond is prepared for death or imprisonment, but he will never disclose what he knows. I won’t reveal Rex’s final decision or the consequences of that choice, I will only say it is the most mentally agonizing end of any film I’ve ever watched. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Vanishing is that it doesn’t lose potency upon repeat viewings. In fact, I am more disturbed each time through, picking up on sinister details I missed the last time around, watching helplessly as Saskia and Rex walk blindly toward their devastating fates.

So there you have it, five films that scared the living daylights out of me. Fear is intimate and infinite in variation, so odds are a lot of you won’t agree with these picks. That’s A-Okay with me and I look forward to seeing what keeps you up at night in the comments.

[Note: This article was previously published at an earlier date, but in an effort to continually highlight Collider’s great original content, we’ve bumped it up to the front page.]