Get ready to hide behind your settee because, at last, we tackle the best horror films of all time.

At last, this blog's author shows his true face to the world.

This site's recent talk of what are the greatest science fiction films of all time - and whether the form always benefits from a dose of added horror - inevitably turns the conversation to horror itself and, through that, to just what are the finest films of that genre.

And that's all for the good because I must confess that, even more than sci-fi, I do love a good horror film.

When it comes to the golden oldies, my favourites list will always include Quatermass and the Pit, Night of the Demon and The Innocents, while, from more modern times, I have a serious liking for Let the Right One In and Ginger Snaps.

Leaving Quatermass and the Pit aside, my favourite Hammer productions would have to be The Devil Rides Out, The Plague of the Zombies and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde. The latter of  those films clearly should be a right load of old cobblers, a film built around a joke of a title, and yet it does what it does with a style that makes it impossible not to love it.

Talk of Hammer inevitably brings me to a curious subgenre, which is movies that aren't by Hammer but are clearly pretending to be. My favourites from that frequently strange movement have to be Horror Express, a somewhat unhinged look at what happens when Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas and a space alien all find themselves on the same train together, and The Creeping Flesh, in which Peter Cushing experiments with a mysterious skeleton he's uncovered, and then lives to regret it.

Although I love Hammer films, I must confess I'm not so fussed about their predecessors, the old Universal horror movies. They're good fun but I generally don't find them very compelling. My favourite of them would probably have to be Bride of Frankenstein, if only for Elsa Lanchester's hair.

When it comes to science fiction tales with a horror angle, who can beat the first two Alien offerings and the first two versions of The Thing From Another World? Not to mention the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? With its monster from the id, Forbidden Planet also makes effective use of its horror dimension.

I must confess I'm not a huge fan of slasher movies, as they all blur into one for me, which is probably why the cliché-mocking Scream is easily my favourite of that genre.

Other than the aforementioned The Plague of the Zombies, zombie movies also mostly leave me cold. I generally find the zombies in them to be poor conversationalists.

Anyway, I'm sure I've missed out a million and one great films and, if I have, you're free to say so in the comments section below. Then again, if I haven't, you are, of course, free to agree with me. Then again, you're also free to disagree with me. That's how liberated the internet is these days.