by Spencer Hawken

Created on: August 24, 2008

Before writing this I pondered the subject heading for some time, being somewhat a horror aficionado I found it hard to figure out how to pick the movies. Do I try and limit it to ten? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? The fact is I'm rather fond of a great number of horror movies from all countries, and age periods... This is one thing I cannot turn down to numbers, so join me on my mission to uncover some of my favourite horror movies of all time.

On American soil John Carpenter has made some of my favourite horror movies, generally avoiding the usual loves I was never overly impressed with the first Halloween, but I loved his movie The Fog. The Fog was one of the first modern horror movies I ever saw; watching this foreboding terror slowly move in on a small community really impressed me. Unlike a lot of popular horror movies The Fog had a really low body count, in fact just seven people die, but it was the slow selection of these and the knowledge that seven would die from early on added to the tension, you really just do not know who is next; there are some nice (though not for the victims) surprises. Sticking with Carpenter his 1987 movie Prince Of Darkness gave me one of the first chills I ever experienced from a horror movie. Carpenter created a very real horror in the form of a transmitted message from the future, a figure in a doorway was teleported like a television transmission into the brains of sleeping scientists, as the movie continues the more you see of the figure, the final reveal is just chilling. My final John Carpenter addition is his 1990's take on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. This brutal re-telling of evil children with "a mission" included some of the most disturbing scenes in a Carpenter movie. Children Of The Damned also offers the last active bodied performance of the late Christopher Reeve, who sadly shows movie goers that he was actually a pretty good actor.

The three original Omen movies are great to watch even now over thirty years since the original movie was made. Damien is adopted secretly into the Thorn family, wealthy and powerful, Damien stands to inherit an awful lot. But Damien's greatest inheritance comes from his real father. Damien is the son of the devil, and as the original three movies continue it seems that there are no end to the people that will put their lives on the line to protect him. The second of the movies Damien: Omen II is by far the most brutal, and the one with the most elongated but filled story,

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