Halloween is Coming: 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time by Variety

The American magazine Variety has published a rating of the 100 best horror films of all time.

The ranking was created by film critics Siddhant Adlakha, Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman, Variety editor William Earl, film critic and journalist Courtney Howard, film reviewer Tomris Laffly, film critic Amy Nicholson and reviewer Rene Rodriguez.

‘In compiling our list of the genre's greatest achievements, we've looked at everything from the pretentious to the simple, from outright nonsense to Hitchcock (whose Psycho topped our Best of list, but not this one), from the very beginning of cinema,’ the authors of the rankings say.

As an example of the very first horror film, the rating's creators mentioned the Lumiere brothers' film, created in 1896. In it, a train was moving towards the audience, which scared them at the time. However, they did not include the film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in their rating.

According to the authors, while creating this ranking, they spent long hours arguing about what a horror film is and where the boundaries of the genre lie.

Here's what the top ten looks like:

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) by director Tobe Hooper;

2. The Exorcist (1973) by William Friedkin;

3. Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock;

4. Jaws (1975) by Steven Spielberg;

5. Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski;

6. Night of the Living Dead (1968) by George A. Romero;

7. Audition (1999) by Takashi Miike;

8. Frankenstein (1931) by James Whale;

9. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini;

10. Carrie (1976) by Brian De Palma.