As any Londoner will tell you, zombies on TfL are just your average Monday morning sight. But our historic capital, one full of ghosts, has always been a fine setting for actual horror films too.

Here are the very best of those films. This Halloween, seek out them out for late night viewing.. and then lock your doors.

Still the best of Danny Boyle’s zombie films, this has Cillian Murphy’s courier waking up from a coma to find London (and beyond), has been devastated by a viral outbreak. One which tapped into innate human rage to create highly aggressive zombies.

The innovation here was to make zombies fast, not the shuffling braindead versions established by George A. Romero. It gave an added heartstopping approach to the handheld action where there was no let up for the remaining humans.

Of course, the bit we all know and love is the iconic image of Murphy wandering through a deserted London, achieved by closing off different roads in the city for short stretches, usually early on Sunday mornings. Facts!

Usually overshadowed by The Exorcist in the blockbuster horror with a scary child stakes, this is still a fine and deeply troubling film. Gregory Peck’s American diplomat Robert Thorn agrees with a chaplain in Rome to replace his child who has died at birth with another child they have hanging around, and not tell his wife. A decision which will bite him on the bum when it turns out the new child is the Antichrist. Oops.

Anyway, lots of the scary stuff happens in London, particularly when Damien’s nanny hangs herself in public at his fifth birthday party. “It’s all for you, Damien!” Genuinely horrible.

8. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)

A Hollywood production but with suitably foggy and shadowy set of Victorian London, this is a gloriously creepy old classic. And it’s famously racy too – made pre-Hays Code (when the ‘moral majority’ successful enabled Will Hays’ office to censor Hollywood films) – with Frederic March playing Hyde as an animalistic, sexual beast who hunts down bar singer Ivy (Miriam Hopkins). Remember, he’s simply the inner demon of the respectable Dr Jekyll. The tale still packs a grotty punch.

Cult classic starring Donald Pleasance – this is probably his second best horror film in his long career, after Halloween – which plays upon an urban legend that a bunch of Underground workers who survived a cave-in are still living underground. And now, are praying upon dopey commuters. Sounds a bit daft, but it’s brilliantly atmospheric with some great 70s looks, and Pleasance is as creepily unnverving as ever.

Alfred Hitchcock’s breakthrough film, a silent classic which showed the influence of German Expressionism on the young London filmmaker, and which contains many of what later became his (sometimes questionable) hallmarks: anxious and suspicious male heroes, high suspense, and blondes in peril.

A Ripper-ish serial killer is on the loose in London, and it may well the new lodger who has moved into the Bunting family’s townhouse. He’s played by Ivor Novello, the actor/musician who beats DiCaprio in the looks and charisma stakes any day.

It’s subtitled A Story of the London Fog, and this is played out fully to maximum atmospheric effect.

5. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Despite promising faithfulness to the novel in the title, Francis Ford Coppola’s film takes all kinds of liberties, including moving much of the action from Whitby to London. Sorry, Whitby… anyway, this is an all-time pulp horror classic, camp and melodramatic with acting that veers from the slight (Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves) to the extreme (Gary Oldman as Dracula, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Tom Waits as Renfield). The whole thing is a glorious hoot and Oldman’s younger Count seducing Ryder around the streets of London is the ultimate vampire as pinup.

Roman Polanski’s classic of paranoia and lonely psychosis features Catherine Deneuve slowly going around the bend in a London flat, haunted by visions. Cracks start appearing in the floor, men break in to attack her, and hands start reaching out the walls in its most famous sequence. It’s about a woman who is afraid of male interest, and the violence beneath their attraction… which seems fair enough.

This is a film so horrible that it effectively destroyed the career of director Michael Powell (as in Powell and Pressburger). It’s a Hitchockian horror about a serial killer who kills women with a camera so he can record their dying moments. It was annihilated by critics when it was released, but has since come to be regarded as a masterpiece. It is not a perverted film at all, rather one which forces the viewers into uncomfortable realisations about their own desire to see violence on screen… filmed in its unique style, the audience – the camera – is rendered as the killer.

An adaptation by Clive Barker of his own novel, The Hellbound Heart, this is a wickedly effective horror which feels transgressive and totally unique even now. It features a puzzle box, which when opened, unleashes otherwordly beings called the Cenobites, led by the iconic Pinhead. These creatures are S&M monsters, exploring the boundaries between pleasure and pain. It’s all kinds of messed up, all the more so since most of the action is set in a nice London town house. If you’ve never seen it, do so immediately.

1. An American Werewolf in London

The best horror to have graced the capital is also the funniest, with director John Landis somehow melding comedy with scariness is a way that’s never been matched since. After the incident on the Yorkshire moors, much of the fun is the way it makes use of London locations. The terrifying stalking of the commuter by the wolf at the Underground station. David (David Naughton) walking up naked in the wolf enclosure at London zoo after a night on the blood. The deceased Jack (Griffin Dunne) appearing as a rotting corpse in Piccadilly Circus. The final mayhem on the streets as the wolf is unleashed…

All in all, a great advert for the capital.