Every film fan has made a top 5 list of their favourite movies at sometime in their lives. Placing your top anything in a list is a tough job, but for the movie lover, those privileged few that fill the top spots are all well considered and liable to change on a weekly basis.

To place my personal top 5 list on the Horror Movie Guide would be an indulgence at this point. So seeing as this article will be among the first on the site, what better way to open than a top 5 list of the best movies for those just starting out on the road to Horror nirvana.

If you can tick all these movies off as having seen them, you are well on your way to being a fully-fledged Horror fan. However, there will be some of you who have not dipped a toe into the murky waters that are horror movies, so these will set you up nicely.

1. Psycho
2. The Sixth Sense
3. Halloween
4. The Omen
5. The Evil Dead

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho should need no introduction and many will not even consider it horror. However the masterful direction, tense atmosphere and genuinely frightening situation has rarely been bettered in contemporary horror. The Sixth Sense is another film that is borderline horror. The twist ending may be cliché now, but the jumps and scares that litter the film are not. Classy acting and lots of clues to pick up on repeated viewing make it a fabulous ‘My First Horror’.

Halloween is the father of the slasher movie. If it has teens, knives and a killer then chances are it will borrow from John Carpenter’s groundbreaking horror. Superior scares, a great soundtrack and Jamie Lee Curtis are all good reasons to see this. If you are serious about knowing horror, Halloween acts as a photo-fit for so many other movies that it would be a crime not to include it in your initial selection.

Film number 4 was a hard choice. We are now getting more serious so we need a scarier subject. There was a slew of great horror in the 70s and 80s and Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon with the excellent (The Exorcist), the average (The Amityville Horror) and this, The Omen. I considered The Exorcist as too visceral for a beginners list, and Amityville as being to ordinary, so The Omen it was. Scary subject, some nasty effects and a few memorable set pieces show what Hollywood could do when it tried.

Finally we come to a film which in my view, is what horror is all about. Innovative, bloody and occasionally funny, this no budget scarer launched the careers of director Sam Raimi, star Bruce Campbell and producer Rob Tappert. It was banned in the UK during the ‘video nasty’ period (something I shall cover in another article) and has had more DVD releases than I care to mention. If you enjoy The Evil Dead, then you are ready to watch proper horror.