Scary. Scarier. Scariest.

It is the season of Hallowe'en, when all our fears are let loose, including panophobia, which is fear of everything. What to do, except lock the doors, close the windows, and stay inside? But what if what we fear most is inside with us? Scream now.

However, most us find a contained fear, an unexpected fright, delicious. Why else would "Psycho" and "Hallowe'en" draw crowds to theatres? To assist an audience searching for the scariest of scares, we offer this hair-raising assembly.

Literature: Classicists may turn to M.R. James and Edgar Allan Poe, and others may choose H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, but our choice is Kingsley Amis's "The Green Man," published in 1965, and based on the enduring English legend of a leafy monster. The Guardian wrote "How rarely do we come across the really frightening story now." Bonus: it is also very funny.

Music: Many radio stations will be playing Saint-Saens's "Danse Macabre," while those having fun will dig out 1962's "Monster Mash," but a truly chilling piece of music is the theremin-shrouded dream theme from Hitchcock's "Spellbound," composed by Miklos Rosza. It will rattle your nerves as surely as a creaking door in the middle of the night. It's said Hitchcock didn't like the music, but the Academy did, and awarded Rosza an Oscar.

Film: Among the memorably scary films for this writer are 1931's nightmare-inducing "The Spider" and, from 1943, "The Seventh Victim," which sent some viewers running from the theatre. Most famous fearful presence, along with Boris Karloff's Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula, is the possessed child in "The Exorcist," a film that caused at least one CFL star to stay awake all night with the lights on. But our choice for most entertaining is "The Uninvited" from 1944, a ghost movie with a Freudian undercurrent.

Scary. Scarier. Scariest. Happy Haunting.