Horror films scared the hell out of me as a kid. Some horror films still scare me today. So why do I enjoy watching them so much?

The Last Exorcism promises more than it delivers. Two very good performances though.

Just in time for Halloween, we conclude our look at the best horror movies of the late 1960s and 1970s. In Part 3 we run down the top 10 scary movies released between 1967 and 1979. We have witches, and we have demonic children, pagan cults and fanatically religious mothers. Also in the mix are a family of cannibals, a host of dispensable teenagers, an insane brother, a loving father, a computer named Mother, and a son hell bent on taking over the world. And we must not forget the terrifying alien, the shark off Amity Island, and that strange little woman who stalks Donald Suhterland in Don’t Look Now.

“The Amityville Horror” was a film born out of public fascination. That fascination was fuelled by post-Exorcist hysteria, that demanded haunted house flicks anchored by American history and the collapse of the American dream., with all the trappings of religious folklore and the dark side of the Catholic church. No longer would garlic and silver bullets keep the demons away. Now the evil was one’s home itself, and audience’s were loving it.

The horror genre produces some of the most iconic movies to grace cinema as well as some of the most derided. 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 …