Martin Scorsese has named his top 11 scary movies – and surprise, surprise, there's not a Hostel or Saw to be seen.

Instead the professorial director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Shutter Island has come down firmly in favour of old-school black-and-white chillers, with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the Barbara Hershey starrer The Entity, and the child-ghost shocker The Changeling being the most recently-made entries, all in the early 1980s.

Number one on Scorsese's list, compiled for the Daily Beast website, is The Haunting, the 1963 British-made spookfest about a group of ghosthunters staying overnight in a creepy mansion. Directed by Robert Wise, and starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, it was remade in 1999 to general disdain.

In second and third places are two more black and white horrors: The Isle of the Dead, the creepy 1945 walking-dead pic from cult exploitation director Val Lewton, and The Uninvited, a haunted house thriller made in 1944 with Ray Milland.

He also finds room for two other classic British horrors: Dead of Night (no 5), the 1945 "portmanteau" chiller which contains the famous story of the ventriloquist who believes his dummy is alive, and the creepy ghost story The Innocents (no 10), directed by Jack Clayton and adapted from Henry James' Turn of the Screw.

Scorsese's main concession to conventionality comes at no 7 with The Shining, of which he says: "Kubrick made a majestically terrifying movie, where what you don't see or comprehend shadows every move the characters make." One place below comes The Exorcist, made by Scorsese's fellow Hollywood New Waver William Friedkin, which he decribes as "utterly horrifying as it was the day it came out".

He rounds things off by placing Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho – the film that topped the Guardian and Observer critics' poll of top 10 horror films – at number 11.

Full list of Martin Scorsese's scariest films

Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Scorsese's top choice is Robert Wise's "absolutely terrifying" haunted house horror from 1963.

Scorsese identifies a premature burial scene in this 1945 Greek-set shocker from Val Lewton as especially chilling.

The Uninvited

Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey star in this 1944 haunted house picture, set in Cornwall.



Barbara Hershey is tormented and raped by an invisible assailant in this obscure 1982 film, whose "banal settings … accentuate the unnerving quality".



Another mid-40s Brit classic: a "playful" portmanteau including the classic Michael Redgrave-with-dummy segment.

The Changeling

Not the Angelina Jolie-lost son drama, but a 1980 spooky mansion story starring George C Scott as a grieving dad.

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros

Scorsese says he's never read the novel and doesn't care how faithful or otherwise it is. "Kubrick made a majestically terrifying movie, where what you don't see or comprehend shadows every move the characters make."

Photograph: Everett/Rex Features/Warner Bros

William Friedkin's 1973 classic is, says Marty, "as utterly horrifying as it was the day it came out".

Photograph: BFI

A 1957 adaptation of the MR James story Casting the Runes, about an American psychologist (not pictured) sent to investigate a satanic cult suspected of mass murder.

Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Jack Clayton's 1961 masterpiece, which plonks Deborah Kerr in the haunted house.

Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar

Hitchcock's 1960 classic is still scary after all these years, says Scorsese.

• Guardian and Observer critics' top 10 horror movies

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