Every year around Halloween, movie fans around the world turn away from Oscar nominees and Judd Apatow comedies and begin browsing video stores for something really, honest-to-God scary. And that's not an easy task. While horror movies, on a whole, have a big fan-following thanks to their visceral thrills and gory kills, whenever you ask someone to name a legitimately scary movie, you'll normally hear the same titles repeated over and over. The Exorcist, Alien, The Shining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original), Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Halloween, The Thing, Evil Dead, The Fly, Night of the Living Dead - there are barely enough to count on your fingers and toes. These are the founding fathers of horror cinema and, from their horrific glories, several sub-genres have spun-off and, while not as popular or scary, they've won over large cult audiences. These cult subgenres - Japanese horror, torture porn, splatter-punk, zombie flicks, and Hammer horror, to name but a few - have their own founding fathers, which is why, though they'll never be as bone-chilling as The Exorcist, any horror fan worth his or her salt has seen Evil Dead II, The Re-Animator, Audition, Brain Dead, Freaks, Wicker Man, The Brood, or Ju-on, among many, many others.

So what should you be watching this Halloween? If at all possible, we'd like to move you away from the familiar choices and cult favorites - they're all going to be running on a 24/7 loop on basic cable anyway - and steer you towards a few horrific gems that might have fallen off your radar. Some of these movies you've heard of, some perhaps not. Some were big successes during their original release, others not so much. But we really feel that, at the moment, these ten movies are definitely not getting the attention they deserve and should be recognized by today's audiences as great additions to the horror genre. So, as a public service to the new generation of horror fans who've only grown up with the Saw movies and zombies who run, here are MovieRetriever's picks for ten truly underrated horror movies:

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1. Suspiria (1977)

Right up top, let's talk about the word "underrated." Can you really call Dario Argento's classic Suspiria underrated? Entertainment Weekly called it one of the top 25 scariest movies of all time, The Village Voice named it as one of the 100 best movies of the 20th century, film critics and scholars LOVE it, and Argento's status as one of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" has a LOT to do with the legacy of Suspiria within the horror genre. So why the hell do we consider Suspiria to be underrated? Here's the thing - while the truly horror-literate know and love the film, you'll be hard pressed to find the horror-freaks of the iPod generation watching any Dario Argento films, and that's a damn shame. The modern remake craze has brought new light to 80s slasher flicks and all aspects of Japanese horror - we know 15-year-olds familiar with the work of Takashi Miike, which is more than a little wrong - but we barely know anyone under thirty who's still talking about Argento movies, and that needs to change. Suspiria, Argento's masterpiece, is possibly the best witch movie ever made - an Angela Carter fractured fairy tale gone wrong, in which a naive young girl sent to a European dance academy finds herself trapped in a coven's murderous web, resulting in some of the most brutal kills in horror history, all awash in spine-chilling, Technicolor shades of blood red. Get yourself a copy, watch it late one night, and you'll soon find yourself on Netflix, adding the rest of Argento's body of work to your queue.

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2. Nightbreed (1990)

Whenever anyone mentions the name "Clive Barker," horror fans tend to immediately think of either a). Hellraiser or b). homoeroticism. And, while that might be great for out-and-proud Pinhead fans, the truth of the matter is that the best movie Barker has ever been associated with is, unquestionably, Nightbreed, a wholly original monster movie that is so much deeper, cooler, and less obvious than the emo S&M of the Cenobites and their brethren. Granted, it's not a perfect movie, but Nightbreed offers a fantastic take on the classic monster movie theme of "Who's more of a monster - the creatures of the night or us?" Nightbreed tells the story of Midian, a relatively peaceful graveyard city of monsters, which, thanks to its new freak-in-training, Boone, comes to the attention of evil redneck policemen and the monster-hating, serial-killer-to-end-all-serial-killers, Dr. Decker, played beautifully by horror legend David Cronenberg. (The button-faced killers of this year's horror hit The Strangers completely stole their look from Decker, and they're not nearly as creepy.) But be warned - Nightbreed isn't a scream-your-head-off slasher flick. Rather, it's a tremendously fun monster movie, which has you rooting for the monsters of Midian, in the same way you rooted for Frankenstein or the Wolfman. Barker keeps threatening to do a director's cut if he can find the 25 minutes of cut footage that went missing, so let's hope that the lost reels are found soon and a new generation can discover the macabre magic of Midian.

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3. Dog Soldiers (2002)

Werewolves are among THE most iconic movie monsters of all time, which is funny when you think about it, because how many good werewolf movies can you name off the top of your head? Aside from Lon Chaney Jr's The Wolf Man and John Landis' American Werewolf in London (both horror classics), can you come up with anything else? Maybe Joe Dante's The Howling or the 2000 teen-wolf thriller Ginger Snaps (even though those are both sketchy choices) and... yeah, that's about it. Werewolf movies are a hard act to pull off, and perhaps that's why we enjoy Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers so much. Marshall got much more attention for his second feature, the (thankfully) not-underrated The Descent - one of the most claustrophobic horror movies we've ever seen - but Dog Soldiers deserves recognition as a solid horror debut from a new director and for actually being a bloody exciting werewolf movie to boot. The story of a group of British soldiers under attack by lycanthropes in the Scottish Highlands, Dog Soldiers delivers the scares by showing us a group of tough-as-nails Army men terrified out of their minds as they're hunted through the wilderness (and eventually forced into a Precinct 13-esque siege situation) by a pack of paranormal predators. Plus it has everything you'd want from a horror film - scares, cool monsters, buckets of blood, and a nice tongue-in-cheek sense of humor (one of the characters is named after genre legend Bruce Campbell). Take note, future werewolf-movie directors. This is SO much better than watching Jack Nicholson awkwardly sniff Michelle Pfeiffer for two hours.

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4. Session 9 (2001)

Ghost movies are all about place. You never see ghost stories about random spirits jumping from house to house. Ghost movies are normally haunted house movies, tying the angry, malevolent specters to a single location that somehow reflects - either through its appearance or bloody history - the ugliness of the spirits within. Think about it - would The Shining have been as scary without the isolated, unwinding loneliness of The Overlook Hotel as its backdrop? Setting is probably the single most effective aspect of Brad Anderson's Session 9, a fantastic haunted house tale set within an abandoned mental hospital that looks so legitimately creepy you can hardly believe that Anderson found a crew that agreed to work in such a frightening locale. The story revolves around Gordon (Peter Mullan), the increasingly-desperate owner of an asbestos removal company who, with his team, agrees to work in the long-neglected Danvers State Hospital. When one of his workers finds old tapes of psychiatric sessions of a girl named Mary with multiple personality disorders - tapes labeled Sessions 1 through 9 - bad things start happening to Gordon's crew, and the audience is left to wonder whether the workers are slowly going insane, due to their insane surroundings, or if Simon, Mary's most unspeakable personality, is back and pissed about this serious breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. Anderson does amazing work with atmosphere throughout Session 9, and it totally pays off with the most engaging, seat-squirming haunted house movie in recent memory. The fact that 1999's ridiculous, Chris Kattan-starring House on Haunted Hill made roughly 100 times more at the box office than Session 9 is a crime against nature.

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5. Candyman (1992)

Can bad sequels ruin what once was a truly great horror movie? That's the big question surrounding almost every great horror film of the past 20 years, ranging from Halloween to Nightmare on Elm Street. But, much like we do with the Matrix sequels, sometimes you just have to suppress those memories of the substandard second and third chapters and just remember the great experience you had watching the original. That's how we approach Candyman, the second Clive Barker-related property on this list, which was a box-office hit at the time, but has since wrongly fallen off many horror fans' radar. This is a movie that made us so afraid of bathrooms the first time we saw it that we spent the last 30 minutes of the film cursing the comely snack-bar server who talked us into upgrading our soda to "the large for a quarter more." Forget 1998's craptastic Urban Legend slasher flick. Candyman is the ultimate urban-legend movie, a horrific mediation on the dark history behind even the most innocent "Bloody Mary" nursery rhymes of our youth and one of the few horror movies ever to truly explore the scary "otherness" of the American urban ghettos. Tony Todd's Candyman makes a terrific addition to the canon of modern horror icons like Freddy and Jason, the Philip Glass score will make you cringe with dread and anticipation, and Virginia Madsen does a wonderful job of selling the reality of the horror around her - the scene where, covered in blood, she's strip-searched by the police is both heartbreaking and unsettling as hell. Candyman's gotten a bad rap over the years thanks to its two terrible straight-to-video sequels - Farewell to the Flesh and Day of the Dead - but we still won't say his name five times within 100 miles of a mirror, so that's got to count for something.

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6. Dead Ringers (1988)

If you're a woman, trust us, Dead Ringers will be the scariest movie you've ever seen. Not because the film shows women being stalked and killed in horrific Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque ways, but rather because David Cronenberg, king of the venereal horror genre (and, yes, that IS a film genre), has taken something as everyday for women as a trip to the gynecologist and turned it into a perversely revolting experience... well, even more than normal, we guess. (You tell that this is being written by dudes, right?) Cronenberg's other horror films - the unparalleled The Fly, Dead Zone, The Brood, Scanners - get all the attention from the Fangoria crowd, but NOTHING he's done inspires the same creeping disgust with our own bodies as the critically-loved (though often popularly-ignored) Dead Ringers. Jeremy Irons turns in another career-defining performance as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, morally-shifty identical twin gynecologists who are obsessed both with reproductive abnormalities and hurting each other. As Beverly loses his mind thanks to his brother's machinations and heavy drug use, he begins hallucinating about women with mutated genitalia and... yeah, it gets worse from there. Trust us. Stainless steel medical instruments have never been more terrifying. This gorgeously composed psychological descent into Hell works so well because it recognizes that there's something really, really scary about all things medical, particularly something as intrusive as gynecology, and women around the world will be squirming thanks to Dead Ringers for years to come.

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7. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Again, how can we call a Guillermo Del Toro movie underrated? The guy has Oscar nominations, the Hellboy franchise, and he's about to make a bazillion dollars with The Hobbit movies. Not to mention that The Devil’s Backbone was a critical success and was rated by RottenTomatoes.com as one of the scariest movies ever. How exactly does the term "underrated" apply here? Well, everything's relative, and we've got two reasons we're including Devil’s Backbone on this list - 1). it's still relatively underseen by mainstream audiences and 2). it constantly lives in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth even though, in our opinion, Devil's Backbone is a MUCH better film. We're not ripping on Pan's, which is a great bloody fairy tale, but Backbone is a legitimately scary, grab-your-armrest and try-not-to-yelp, haunted house mystery, set against the blood-stained backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. We're not exactly sure why ghost stories are so much scarier when they feature little kids - as proven by The Shining, Pet Sematary, The Ring, The Grudge, etc. - but, as young Carlos wanders through his darkened orphanage at night, looking for ghosts, we're instantly reduced to being one of his juvenile cohorts, clutching our blankees and praying for a nightlight. This is THE movie that convinced us that Del Toro should only make Spanish language films and made us wish that more directors had his same ability to perfectly balance Hitchcockian thrills with a truly terrifying gothic ghost story. If the Warg chase scenes in The Hobbit have even 1/10 of the suspense of Devil's Backbone, then Tolkien fans are going to have a lot to be happy about.

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8. Seconds (1966)

When the late great director John Frankenheimer is brought up in conversation, the first movie that most people immediately think of is his 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate, a masterwork of political intrigue and paranoia. However, most people forget that Frankenheimer followed up Manchurian Candidate four years later with a film that was even more paranoid and claustrophobic, Seconds, a nightmare of a psychodrama that makes David Fincher's The Game look cute in comparison. The horror of Seconds is the kind of horror you would normally find in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, a noir cautionary tale of the secret conspiracies and ugliness hiding beneath the surface of Eisenhower's America. Arthur Hamilton plays a self-obsessed, disaffected banker who comes into contact with a mysteriously aggressive agency called "The Company," which can provide anyone with a new identity, if they can pay the price, that is. Arthur consents and, following some plastic surgery and psychological conditioning, comes out as Tony Wilson (the very manly Rock Hudson), a much younger and more vital artist-for-hire. However, as Tony begins missing his life as Arthur, he soon becomes aware that The Company is everywhere and going back to his old life might not be as easy as he hopes. If Seconds was made today, Arthur/Tony would be back to his old self by the third reel and he'd bring the evil Company to its knees with only the force of his will and a handgun to help. Fortunately, Seconds was made back in the 60s when Frankenheimer was in his prime, so, instead, we got this staggering look at middle-aged male ennui mixed with a heart-thumping thriller that ends with a black-as-nails, jaw-dropping finale. This is the movie that The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson says scared him so badly that it began his descent into schizophrenia and depression. (True story. Google it.) If you want to watch the best episode of The Twilight Zone that you've never seen, give Seconds a chance and prepare to be creeped out.

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9. Arachnophobia (1990)

This is the moment where most hardcore horror fans will throw up their hands and scream, "What the **** are they talking about?! They're joking, right?" But, please, hear us out. Yes, we're aware that Arachnophobia is a Spielberg-produced "thrillomedy" (their term, not ours) that's best remembered for some really goofy John Goodman moments and is considered so generally tame that you could probably show it on network TV with little or no editing. Yes, we're aware that Arachnophobia ISN'T Cannibal Holocaust. However, the phobia the film is based on IS one of the most common fears in the entire world and have you ever watched the movie Arachnophobia with someone who professes that they really hate spiders? It's like watching what happens in Room 101 at the end of Orwell's 1984, you know, that room with the rat-cage that goes on your face. We've seen 300-pound, tattooed splatterpunk junkies cover their eyes while watching Arachnophobia. It's amazing. The problem with most spider movies is that filmmakers mistakenly think that bigger is better and, let's be frank, a 50-foot spider just isn't scary. It's kitschy, for sure, but it doesn't seem real and the reason spiders freak us out so badly is that they're very, very real and they're probably lurking in our garage right now, trying to figure out how to get us. Director Frank Marshall wisely kept the spiders in Arachnophobia to a believable size, and that allowed him to really tap into the reasons why spiders make us all so uncomfortable. Arachnophobia gets attention for being a financially-successful mainstream studio film, but most horror fans never give it the credit it deserves for being a shudder-inducing thriller and one of the FEW movies that have every really sold how scary spiders actually are. THIS is the movie that Snakes on a Plane wanted to be and just couldn't deliver.

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10. Stuck (2008)

Forget The Strangers, Quarantine, or even the upcoming Saw V: The Final Frontier. Stuart Gordon's Stuck is the best horror movie of 2008, a movie that 95% of you haven't seen. (It was technically released at Cannes last year, but didn't hit US shores until 2008.) And that needs to be remedied as soon as possible. Not only because Gordon is a card-carrying "Master of Horror," whom we can all thank for such genre classics as The Re-Animator and From Beyond, but also because this is one of the few horror movies in recent memory that actually has something to say. Based on a so-disturbing-it-had-to-be-true 2001 news story that, trust us, someone forwarded to you via email, Stuck follows Brandi (Mena Suvari), a retirement home nurse who accidentally hits a homeless man (Stephen Rea) with her car, trapping the man halfway through her windshield, and then leaves the man stuck and bleeding to death in her garage rather than calling the authorities. Gordon obviously saw the potential for social commentary and caro-syrup-soaked blood-letting in the true story and, in response, crafted a razor-sharp, brutal-as-hell, and darkly comic look at how human life is valued in America today. It's almost like a grand guignol stage-play written by an unholy partnership between David Mamet and Evil Dead II-era Sam Raimi, and Gordon, fortunately, found two good enough actors (Rea and Suvari) to sell both the reality and the ridiculousness of their situation. While the ending isn't perfect, this is a smart, subversive horror flick that's makes The Happening and Prom Night 2008 look toothless and brain-dead in comparison. Forget about Jigsaw this year and spend your Halloween with Stuart Gordon instead.

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Those were the MovieRetriever crew's picks for underrated horror movies. Have we made some grave errors in judgment? Can't believe we didn't acknowledge the pee-your-pants terror of The Mangler, Slumber Party Massacre, or The Ice Cream Man? Want to waste your breath trying to convince us that Evil Dead II or Brain Dead is underrated?

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