A straw poll of the Times office has revealed the cinema frighteners that still haunt us and thirteen of the most distressing are listed below.

But what about you? Are you plagued by visions of the eerie puppet mask from Saw? Or petrified by the unseen horrors in The Innocents? Leave your own nightmare nominations in the comments below.

Click on the titles to see film clips of our deadly baker's dozen. If you dare.

13: Se7en

David Fincher's unremittingly dark serial killer tale has a number of scenes that sear themselves on the viewer’s memory. About seven, in fact. The most morbidly memorable moment of all was the discovery of the ‘sloth’ victim. St. Thomas Aquinas was never so unsettling.

12: Mulholland Drive

David Lynch’s cryptic, steamily Sapphic Hollywood noir captures that scrambled logic of nightmare, when we first see the scuzzy hitman behind the diner. There may be more coherent films available, but few more certain to keep us awake long after the credits have rolled.

11: The Wizard of Oz (Flying Monkeys)

The terrors we encounter as children live with us long after the more seemingly potent shocks of adulthood have subsided. The eerie grin of the blue-skinned flying simians of Oz is about as disturbing a sight as one might wish to see.

10: The Blair Witch Project

The hype preceding the film built up our expectation of terror to such a degree that it was almost impossible for audiences to get as frightened as they thought they ought to be. Until that final scene, with the figure facing the wall, that evoked that powerless feeling of nameless dread that can make the most sanguine of us wake up with a start.

9: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

David Lynch again. This time with the most disturbing 'man-in-an-alcove' scene of any film in recent memory. Watch it tonight, you’ll check your bedroom twice before turning in all week.

8: Psycho

Hitchcock demonstrates his unsurpassed mastery of the psychological chiller with his early dispatch of a major character and his evocation of the oppressively tenebrous atmosphere of the Bates house

7: It

A scary clown is a straightforward enough horror trope, everyone’s afraid of clowns to some extent . The masterstroke is in the casting of Tim Curry as Pennywise, and then having him pop up in unexpected locations that leave you unsure as to whether you are dreaming, or in real trouble.

6: Duel

Every driver’s worst nightmare: The implacable, anonymous road rage antagonist that just will not give up.

5: Jurassic Park

Dinosaurs may have just been large carnivorous turkeys, but the scene with a boy and girl cornered by two ravenous and relentless velociraptors has the power to raise your heart rate more effectively than the briskest country walk

4: Alien

Apart from the shockingly iconic 'chest burster' scene the sinister Xenomorph from the original film is cloaked in shadow for the first hour, only glimpsed for a few seconds at a time while the full horror is seen on the faces of the victims and (in one case) the ship's cat. The mystery only adds to the overpowering sense of dread.

3: Jaws

A film so widely imitated and parodied should by now have lost all its bite, but the moment when the camera discovers a decomposing corpse in the wreck of a fishing vessel still has the power to shock, three decades later.

2: The Omen

An object lesson in how the most prosaic architectural features can turn into deadly weapons, The Omen is a masterclass in the evocation of supernatural paranoia.

1: The Shining

Madness, ESP, and an old fashioned haunting combine in Stephen King’s claustrophobic thriller about an isolated family in a snowbound hotel. Jack Nicholson's bravura scenery-chewing, door destroying performance is the finishing touch to the gripping tale of an ancient brooding evil awakened.

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