"The Exorcist" top horror film: survey

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - "The Exorcist" was voted the scariest movie of all time in a Halloween poll published on Wednesday.

The 1973 horror classic, starring Linda Blair as a possessed child, came out ahead of the Jack Nicholson movie "The Shining" in a survey conducted online among 6,500 customers of British music retailer HMV.

John Carpenter's "Halloween" took third place ahead of "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

HMV executive Mark Frampton said: "The horror genre was not really taken seriously for a long time but it's moved on from the slightly camp Hammer stereotypes that many of us remember and now enjoys the respect it fully deserves."