THERE'S NO BETTER time of the year to watch scary movies than Halloween. Finishing the top 10 list that we began Tuesday, here are five more films that will make you both think and stay up nights peering fearfully into the darkness.

5. "Scream" (dir. Wes Craven, 1996)
With “Scream,” legendary horror director Wes Craven made the best film of his career, achieving a perfect balance between cleverly sending up his and others’ genre classics and creating a new classic frightening enough to be mentioned with the best and scariest. When the sleepy town of Woodsboro begins to be plagued by a brilliant serial killer who uses his intense love of horror films to evade the police and terrorize his victims, no one is safe and everyone is a suspect. It’s up to the paranoid townsfolk to put aside their personal problems to determine who in their community is committing the grisly murders, and who knows enough about scary movies to help them survive this one. Craven’s appreciation for and devotion to the horror genre and his penchant for creative shocks make “Scream” one of the scariest, and most wittily referential, films ever made.

4. "Alien" (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979)
Nothing I can say about “Alien” will be new to you. In fact, there are many who would rank this film even higher on an all-time top 10 than I have. And for good reason — one of the most prolific and influential thrillers of all time, Ridley Scott’s first truly great film reworked the dynamics of effective suspense filmmaking on a different plane than what had previously been imagined. The plot is deceptively simple but psychologically compelling — the crew members of a spaceship in the 23rd century unknowingly bring an alien life form onto their ship. The life form becomes a bigger life form, and a hungrier life form — proceeding to gruesomely pick off the crew one by one. Scott’s luminescent, visceral shots, inventive visual trickery and exceptional knack for intelligent storytelling (even more spectacularly present in Scott’s "Blade Runner") help make “Alien” a visionary pioneer on the real final frontier — the easily manipulated mind of man.

3. "28 Days Later …" (dir. Danny Boyle, 2003)
From the brilliant consciousness of “Trainspotting” director Danny Boyle sprang this mercilessly chilling masterpiece of horror. I chose this film over all of the classic Romerian zombie flicks that inspired it because truly, in visual mastery and eerily candid social commentary, it surpasses them all. Since George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” zombie films have been a powerful tool for social commentary because of the very nature of their subjects. In the 20th century, the blindly conformist mob mentality of the American public was mirrored in the behavior of the cinematic undead of the zombie subgenre. Of course, as Western culture becomes more and more homogenized, this disease begin to infect all of us. “28 Days Later …” finds coma patient Jim (the luminous Cillian Murphy) waking up a month after a killer virus outbreak to discover that the London he lived in is now a desolate wasteland of abandoned industry. The scene in which he walks through the calm, lonely city in his hospital attire is truly as profound and frightening as any moment captured in a film on this or any other list. The infected former residents of the London area (and those of a majority of the quarantined United Kingdom) now roam the streets as bloodthirsty zombies — not quite undead, but (hint, hint) having lost all traces of humanity. What follows is one of the most provocative, subtle, and unapologetically disturbing meditations on human nature ever caught on film.

2. "The Shining" (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
“The Shining” has been hated as much as it has been loved. The writer of its source material, Stephen King, dismissed it as “a great big beautiful car with no motor in it.” But that’s precisely why “The Shining” is so deeply disturbing and effortlessly creepy — it’s a void. Like the Overlook Hotel, in which new caretaker Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family are staying for the winter off-season, Stanley Kubrick’s film is expansive and crushingly empty. Kubrick, intensely original auteur that he was, seemed unsatisfied with simply scaring the hell out of the audience — he had to find new ways to do it. For his foray into horror cinema, he utilized the Steadicam, which allows us to smoothly and unwaveringly follow the characters, at times claustrophobically closely, as they move about the seemingly empty expanses in and around the Overlook Hotel. A filmmaker could spend his whole life making scary movies and never evoke the sense of dread Kubrick instills in us with each rounding of a corner. Cold, merciless, technically phenomenal, and bordering dangerously on perfection, “The Shining” is not only one of the most creatively terrifying experiences on celluloid, but a genuine masterpiece of cinema, regardless of genre.

And the No. 1 horror film of all time is …

1. "Scary Movie" (dir. Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000)
Surprised? Don’t be. After all, no other movie has been so influential as to have an entire genre of films retroactively named after it.

Just kidding. The real No. 1 is:

1. "Psycho" (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Very few films, in terms of impact on individual and societal levels, can claim comparability with Alfred Hitchcock’s crowning achievement. To put it succinctly, “Psycho” is the most imaginative and powerful subversion of cinematic sensibilities ever made. Fear is directly linked to uncertainty, and this becomes more and more clear in contemporary cinema as gory rehashes of horror classics are less and less effective the more they surrender to existing blueprints and cliché. Hitchcock understood this, and like the most useful of thinkers, he could also effectively communicate his understanding. Playing with our identification with characters and perception of death onscreen, “Psycho” undermines conventional filmmaking by shocking us with the senseless, random nature of death. I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but artistic awakenings of this caliber carry with them a sense of urgency, an essentiality. This is why no lover of scary movies (or cinema in general) can truly know the imaginative power of the medium until you’ve experienced this pinnacle of cinema, this jewel of man’s creative exploration. Oh, and the shower scene is pretty scary.