by Daniel Stephens

Created on: February 15, 2009   Last Updated: September 08, 2011

The horror genre produces some of the most iconic movies to grace cinema as well as some of the most derided (best of the 1960s/1970s, best of the 1980s, best of the 2000s). It might have been dismissed as low-grade entertainment, satisfying the darkest fetishes of society's social outcasts and degrading our youth, but horror gives audiences the sort of frenzied adrenaline rush other forms of cinema cannot achieve.

In effect, fictional entertainment should take you out of yourself and into the satisfying and gratifying world of the make-believe. Horror achieves this like no other genre because it breaks down those inherent defence mechanisms by focusing on our primal instincts.

It was difficult picking ten scary moments from the countless horror movies I've seen. Regrettably, my order will probably change from day to day, and I'm sure there's a few outstanding moments I'm forgetting but below I present what I believe to be a pretty close representation of the ten biggest frights I've had during a horror film.

#10 THE VANISHING (George Sluizer, France/Holland, 1988)
The Vanishing is a peculiar movie. It was badly remade by Hollywood when it should have been left alone. Alas, as a foreign movie with subtitles, it is still largely undiscovered outside of horror aficionados and foreign film buffs but I'd recommend anyone with a passing interest in psychological horror to check it out.

I say the film is peculiar simply because it has the sort of tone and doom-like quality that really gets under your skin. It's also peculiar, and in many ways innovative, through its depiction of the killer. You see, the story begins when a couple on a travelling holiday stop at a petrol station. The girl disappears, beginning a long and desperate attempt by her boyfriend to find her. In films of a similar nature the identity of the killer or kidnapper is hidden from the audience in order to provide the element of 'whodunnit'.

Director George Sluizer actually tells us who the killer is, giving us a fairly good indication that the girl has been killed. The interest lies in both the boyfriend and the kidnapper's lives - how they interact and eventually meet, and perhaps some inkling to their motivations, one in search of lost love, the other their drive to commit atrocity.

The scene that provides the biggest scare is the film's climatic sequence. In the boyfriend's attempts to find his girlfriend he eventually tracks down the kidnapper. We as the audience know he's found the right person

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