Fancast: The Big Picture

Yeah, splatter films have their place in this Halloween season - it was a blast watching a giant guy in a hockey mask on fire stalking stoners through a cornfield in Freddy vs. Jason - but those are cheap and easy scares, preying on the 'sudden jumpy' fears we all have. It's easy to startle people. Actually scaring people, freaking them out and leaving them disturbed, is another ball of blood and guts altogether.

28 Days Later - Zombies that can run fast. It was bad enough that they shambled creepily and moaned about brains, but imagine wiping out in a bike accident one day and waking up to an empty city, with the plague of the undead having destroyed everybody. Creepy, disturbing and intense. Dawn of the Dead also works as a companion piece, the American side of the Zombie Apocalypse.

American Psycho - Christian Bale's star-making performance as the self-obsessed 1980s serial killer Patrick Bateman is undeniably creepy and unsettling, rhapsodizing about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News before killing hookers. As his insane bloodbaths get increasingly more reckless and frequent, the sickeningly dark comedy and social commentary escalate, but it doesn't in any way negate the general discomfiting mood, and the sense that absolutely anyone you meet could secretly be this crazy.

Happiness - A truly horrifying movie that has nothing to do with the supernatural or mass murder. In fact, the stomach-churning distress comes from the unfortunate reality of these disturbed, sickening characters that range from Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sweaty mouth-breathing pervert to Dylan Baker as a good father who's secretly struggling with his pedophilia. Not nearly as appalling, but still eerie is One Hour Photo, which in the same vein of "even the creepy just want to be happy."

Seven - or, if you want to be annoying Se7en. Yes, Brad Pitt forgot how to act at the end of the movie, but the unbelievably meticulous planning of Kevin Spacey's John Doe, creating elaborate and haunting scenarios to punish people in accordance with the seven deadly sins, remains a completely chilling symphony of death.

Fight Club - A David Fincher double shot. Not a standard choice, and considered more of a dark comedy than a scary movie, but the more one thinks about this film, the scarier it seems. The depiction of raw, brutal violence as not just something celebratory but as a necessary cathartic experience for humankind, not to mention the personal catharsis those in the audience feel as the dream to destroy society at large is achieved... well, it's pretty freaky, when you think about it. A movie that can make you root for the destruction of our own way of life is truly scary. Perhaps as scary as the thought that it might actually need destroying.