And so we come to Horror, the seventh and last part of the Guardian and Observer's series to the greatest films of all time.
Horror turned out to be one of the more straightforward areas to cover: we all know what a good horror film is. But like every other type of cinema, it's a tricky job disentangling classic horror from more modern developments in the genre; all the more so, as certain aspects of horror film-making – the gore, the violence, the headchopping sadism – have definitely escalated in the last two or three decades.
Creditably, our critics kept torture porn and stalk-n-slash at a distance: only Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Evil Dead on our list can be considered to have even a toehold in the gorehound universe. The highly-rated modern horror films tended to be more scary than gruesome: The Blair Witch Project, Ringu, Let the Right One In.
But horror has a tremendous range, reinventing itself in different forms for different decades. You can compare vampire movies in the 20s to those in the 50s, plot the rise of satanist movies from Rosemary's Baby to The Wicker Man, and try and work out whether The Haunting, from 1963, is creepier than Don't Look Now, a decade later.
But horror movies have arguably the most intense aficionados of all movie genres, so there will no doubt be plenty of people out there ready to tell us what should have been on the list, and in what order. Over to you ...
