With the scariest day of the year drawing near, we present five titles that will give you chills down to the bones.

Fatal Frame: The Crimson Butterfly (PS2)

While the first installment in Tecmo's photo-horror trilogy packed its fair share of scares, the sequel ratchets the tension up with the addition of a companion character who, like Yorda in Ico, must be kept safe from the predatory attentions of supernatural beings. However, in this case the girl is your twin sister, and as the game goes on you'll find her slipping farther and farther from sanity as you explore a village infested with howling, ephemeral ghosts, with your only weapon against them a rickety old camera.

The Lurking Horror (PC)

Every horror film director knows that the most effective special effect is the viewer's imagination. What goes unshown is always more terrifying than what's made explicit. That's the principle behind Infocom's chilling 1987 text adventure The Lurking Horror. The masters of the parser-based narrative, Infocom developed games in a wide variety of genres, and The Lurking Horror sees them delving into Lovecraftian eldritch madness with surprisingly effective results. As a humble college student trapped during a blizzard, you must explore a maze of tunnels below your school to escape, and what you find there isn't pretty.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (GameCube)

Originally slated to be a Nintendo 64 game, Eternal Darkness may look primitive - the graphics are chunky and the textures are blurry, and the controls are slightly clumsy. But the thing that pushes the game over the top is the (patented) Sanity Meter - every exposure to the game's bizarre enemies pushes you closer to the precipice of lunacy,and the game reflects that with a number of effects - the player loses control of the character, bizarre sound effects are played, the game "glitches" in a number of ways (including one panic-inducing one where the game tells you it has erased your memory card), et cetera. This effect lends a sense of real-life panic to the survival horror game.

Haunted House (Atari 2600)

The limited power of the 2600 meant that making a scary game was a matter of atmosphere and ambiance, not graphics or gameplay. Haunted House, maybe the first survival horror game, casts you as a poor dumb schmuck struggling to escape the titular domicile while retrieving three pieces of an urn. Armed only with a book of matches, you're helpless against the ghosts, tarantulas and bats that seek to make you a permanent resident.

The Uninvited (Nintendo Entertainment System)

Kemco's bizarre first-person horror adventure didn't make much of a splash in the States - the controls were slow-paced and arcane, and the text-adventure format didn't play to the NES's strengths. However, those who played it (especially as kids) were permanently scarred by the mature, twisting plot and crude but effective graphics. Trapped in a decaying mansion on a quest to rescue your missing sister, The Uninvited is a deeply creepy experience.