Compiled by Steve Biodrowski

Horror fans have their favorite horror movies, but what about the people behind the scenes? What films ranks as favorites among industry insiders who make a living in the genre? To find out, we asked a handful of directors, writers and actors: What films have frightened you? What films have influenced you? And, knowing that sometimes artists are their own worst critics, we even let a few name their favorites from their own filmography. You?ll find a sample of all their answers below?

DIRECTOR WILLIAM FRIEDKIN (The Exorcist) 

To me, the horror films that I admire are Rosemary's Baby, Alien, Diabolique, Psycho -- that's about it. I would say those are horror films, but they totally transcend the genre. They're every bit as good as stories as horror films: the stories are believable; the characters are believable; the situations they?re put in, the style of performance, is believable. There's also a Japanese film that I love called Onibaba, another wonderful film of fantasy and imagination, worked very carefully into a fairly realistic story. Whereas in something like Nightmare on Elm Street or Jason, it isn't believable. There's an automatic distance there -- between what's on the screen and the audience's perception of real people in real situations.

If I could find a film like this genre all the time, this is probably all I would do, because I am attracted to this kind of story. There aren't that many good ones, though; there aren't many films that have hit the level I'm after -- like Rosemary's Baby or Alien or Psycho or Diabolique, which I think are the best, still. Most of the horror scripts and stories people send me, I have no interest in whatever. I wouldn't want to film one of the Stephen King books, either -- although It, I think, is terrific. It's like the Moby Dick of horror stories. Stephen King is far and away the best of that sort. But there are other, more obscure names that even you might not be familiar with. There's an excellent writer called Dan Simmons -- wonderful. One of his most frightening novels is called The Song of Kali -- a great, great work of horror set in modern India. Terrific.

I like The Blair Witch Project; I really do. I applaud its ingenuity. It was something different, and it was pure to what it was: it did not break the focus. It was a documentary. When people set the camera down, all it showed you was shoes or sometimes nothing. I have to tell you, I sat there with my then fourteen-year-old son, and it scared the hell out of us. That picture scared me. I thought it was really good, because I love documentaries. I love that somebody took the horror genre, and did almost a pure documentary with it. I think Blair Witch is a helluva a film, a good film.

DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOTT (Alien)

The thing I always worried about doing a monster movie -- I was frightened that the monster wouldn't be good, because they very rarely are. Probably the last great monster before that was the little girl in the bed in The Exorcist. But all you had to put on her was the voice -- of Mercedes McCambridge -- and that one trick was chilling. I decided to see Creature From the Black Lagoon, Them and It [The Terror From Beyond Space] -- which actually were good fun at the time, used to scare the living daylights out of me as a kid, and now are kind of collector's items. The first science fiction that rang a bell with me was Patricia Neal and Michael Rennie in Day The Earth Stood Still -- that was good. I registered that when I was a youngster, thinking, 'Hm, that's interesting.' Funnily enough, as a child, I was always brought up not to see horror movies, because my parents classified them along with sex movies, so I wasn't allowed to see them. I saw this poster in Piccadilly of this guy standing there with the facemask on and the buzz saw, and I just decided not to see the film -- that [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ] was pretty tough stuff.

DIRECTOR WILLIAM MALONE (The House on Haunted Hill)

Of recent ilk, one of my favorites was Alien, which is just a brilliant movie; it's artistically brilliant. I still love Creature From the Black Lagoon: there's something evocative about it that really works. I love things like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Frankenstein, which is a wonderful picture; the original still really holds up. Mad Love is a really cool movie, with Peter Lorre. And some other stuff has been overlooked like Planet of the Vampires, the Mario Bava picture, which I think is a wonderful film. I was heavily influenced by The Black Cat [1934], which is one of my favorite films. I love that movie. When I first met Geoffrey [Rush, whom Malone directed in House], he'd just gone to see The Black Cat, and he talked about how much he loved it. It's got this perversity, this weird, dark undertone. What's great about it is that you can't put your finger on it, except if you actually look at the plot of that movie, you could never do that today. It's too twisted: the fact that Karloff kills Lugosi's wife and then keeps her body preserved in the basement, and then marries her daughter! I'm a big fan of [director Edgar G.] Ulmer's work.

DIRECTOR GUILLERMO DEL TORO (The Devil's Backbone, Blade 2)

I started watching horror films without caring much about their origin. We got some Mario Bava films. Of course, we have the Mexican wrestler/masked avengers type of horror film. Then every Sunday there was a local channel that showed all the Universal monster movies: everything from the classics Frankenstein to Bride of Frankenstein and so forth. Then at the matinee, my mother took me to see the Hammer films: Dracula, Horror of Frankenstein, all of them. So I really got every single thing on the spectrum fed into my brain at this very tender age.

Not everyone we interviewed is in the film industry. We also spoke to some authors whose work has been much influenced by horror films.

DAVID SKAL (V Is For Vampire) AND LEONARD WOLF (Dracula: A Connoisseurs Guide) ON THEIR FAVORITE ADAPTATION OF BRAM STOKER?S NOVEL

DAVID SKAL: People always ask me what's the definite film version of the book, and I say, 'There isn't any.' I tell them my favorite version would be one pieced together from the best scenes out of all the others, because they never get it all; they very often don't even try. To present the novel as Stoker wrote it, with the character as Stoker described him, still has not been done. It would be a fairly repulsive kind of Dracula -- not as repulsive as Max Scheck in Nosferatu, but definitely an otherworldly presence in Victorian London. I hope somebody approaches it, maybe with a very small budget and an ensemble group of actors, shoots it in black-and-white, and really avoids embellishing and embroidering the text. It's a very frightening tale exactly the way Stoker wrote it, and that is the one version we have yet to see. I thought the BBC television version with Louis Jordan was certainly the most careful recreation of the book, even though Jordan?s appearance and performance brought in a lot of the smarmy matinee idol stuff as well. But that aside, it retained almost everything that was in the book. I think the scene that first came to Stoker, in his earliest notes, is the three women coming to Harker in the bedroom, and that's always one of the highlights of every different version. It's been done many different ways, in a stylized and balletic way in the Lugosi film, in a very overheated erotic way in the Coppola film, and with many, many other variations. That is the dream image out of which Dracula seems to have grown, so it's not surprising that considerable attention is usually given to that.

LEONARD WOLF:  I am very drawn, curiously enough, to the silent film, Nosferatu. When Count Orlock comes to -- her name is either Nina or Ellen, depending on the subtitles -- they exchange looks across the areaway. It is so charged with complex implications. Clearly, he is now going to be in the role of the demon lover, making love to a woman who sends her husband away -- it's got elements of French comedy in it. At the same time it's a ghoulish moment, when this guy who's not really living shows up in her bedroom and crouches at the side of her bed. You never know what they're doing, but whatever they're doing is so silent and so horrible and so Christian and so appalling -- I've said somewhere in my book that the silence is intensified. We know we're in a silent film, but somehow that scene takes on a terror because it's so utterly still.

NOVELISTS CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO (A Feast in Exile)AND SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS (The Vampire Tapestry) ON THE FILMS THAT INFLUENCED THEM

SUZY McKEE CHARNAS: I read much than I went to movies. I think you'll find that most writers of our generation got most of our inspiration from the printed page. We were not visually raised. Which isn't to say that we didn't go to movies.

CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO: Or didn't enjoy them.

CHARNAS: I think that one thing that happens when you are raised as a reader rather than a visual consumer is that when you do go to films, they're really pretty overwhelming. I remember being really impressed by silly things like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

YARBRO: It's a wonderful movie!

CHARNAS: It is wonderful, but it shouldn't send you screaming! It did influence me, to put it mildly. For a very long time, the whole vampire thing was very tightly attached to the Hungarian actor whose name we all know. I still kind of balk when people get too far away from a basic sort of dignity. I don't really go for Buffy The Vampire Slayer-type of vampires, and the punk rocker ones really turn me off.

It's a bit of a cheat, but we let these few genre talents identify a favorite from among the films they worked on, just to see whether they agree with their fans.

ACTRESS BARBARA STEEL ON BLACK SUNDAY

Black Sunday (a.k.a, Mask of the Demon) is the best of the genre films I made -- the final result was most perfected in terms of the whole film, but I don't feel it was best for me as an actress. I never saw a completed script for Black Sunday. We were given the pages day to day. We had hardly any idea of what was ever going down on that film. We had no idea of the end or the beginning, either. I'm sure he [director Mario Bava] had, or maybe he hadn't. He really geared it to play out all his cinematographic-visual fantasies, and I think that one of the strongest points of the movie is the look of it. It's just fortuitous for an actress to find herself in something that well structured.

PATRICK MACNEE (The Avengers) ON THE HOWLING

You just can't get a more stunning film. My darling wife and my friends sat there watching it like that [grips the armrest of his chair and forms his mouth into a silent scream to demonstrate]. It's a wonderful, wonderful film. Now all my other films -- The Creature Wasn't Nice, Lobster Man From Mars -- I have been in more movies of that type. I'm not saying we weren?t good in them, but they were movies you never see again, hopefully. When Dennis Bartok [of American Cinematheque] said, 'We're going to do a retrospective of your movies,' I said, 'Which one? There's only one worth seeing, and this is it!'

WRITER NEIL GAIMAN (American Gods) ON PRINCESS MONONOKE

I was astonished; I was amazed by the film. I'd never see anything like that before. That was what got me to agree [to write the English-language script]. I had expected to say no. I came to Los Angeles, went to a screening room, sat down, fully expecting to come out at the end of the day and say, "I don't think so, but thank you very much for asking me." The film started, and all of a sudden there's a giant demon creature that turns out to be a giant bore but looks like a spider covered with snake-worms, and I was hooked. I sat there, and sat there, and sat, and came out at the end and said, "I have to do this. I have to be involved. This is so cool, and I've never seen anything like it. I love the gods, and I love the animals and monsters. I love the complexity of the people and all the motives." I felt I could write these people, but more important I felt I could write the gods, these giant animals, without ever going Disney.

Finally, we give the last words to an uber-fan-turned-filmmaker who voices sentiments that should sound familiar to many of us.

DIRECTOR JOE DANTE (The Howling)

There are too many monster movies for me to pick. I spent a misspent youth watching monster movies, and then I spent a misspent adulthood making them. So I would refer you to any list of decent monster movies, and I'm sure my favorites will be on there.