FILM CRITIC GOES WITH GUT REACTION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

It's not easy to frighten professional movie-watchers. Yeah, the fact that Steven Seagal keeps working gives us a chill, but you can't make us jump just by tossing a cat through a window or tearing a cheerleader in two. We've seen the grossest effects and have memorized all the cheap tricks that filmmakers somehow imagine are still shocking.

So when they asked this critic to list 10 horror movies that actually scared me, it was a tall order. I pondered the matter over many midnights dreary and eventually realized that, if I wasn't going to laugh or yawn my way through a fright film, it better have show me something appallingly dire about the human condition.

Or, at least, be the first film to fool me with that dead-monster-jumps-to-life-at-the-end ploy.

Aliens James Cameron's brisk sequel ingeniously combined the terror of combat with our evidently eternal fear of big space bugs. Tense and taut from start to finish, with some marvelously icky ideas about motherhood thrown in for good measure. (1986)

Carrie The ultimate expression of teen-age trauma. When that pig blood fell, Brian De Palma staged the squirmiest anticipation in cinematic history as we waited for Sissy Spacek's telekinetic response. And the gut-grabbing closing scene has never been topped by any ``It-ain't-dead'' imitators. (1976)

Cat People With shadow, inference and psychological subtext, Jacques Tourner created a chilling tale of erotic unease with an incredibly effective minimum of means. (1942)

The Evil Dead Nonstop energy and perverse, sadistic imagination - not to mention a sense of humor that softens you up for sucker-punch shocks - makes Sam Raimi's low-budget satire the zombie/slasher bloodbath all others expire trying to be. (1983)

Five Million Years to Earth Also known as ``Quatermass and the Pit,'' this greatest of Britain's Hammer horrors is as intelligent as it is deep soul disturbing. The discovery of a long-buried alien life form (a great big ant, like you needed to ask) in a London tunnel triggers a mass panic that touches our most basic supernatural fears. Just released in a beautiful new videotape edition. (1968)

The FlyJeff Goldblum's slow, sad, inexorable morph into something both more and less than human stands as film's most shattering monster transformation. David Cronenberg invested every new stage of devolving development with poignant apprehension. (1986)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers The original and never topped parable about never knowing who you can trust. As alien pods take over more and more of Kevin McCarthy's lifelong friends, the paranoia rises to unbearable intensity. (1956)

Night of the Living Dead George Romero's independent zombie romp is another great siege movie, this time in an isolated house gradually being overrun by brain-hungry corpses. Individual moments of sheer screaming fear are set in an overall framework of futile struggle against the inevitable. (1968)

Psycho The shower and stair-landing scenes still shake you up after all these years and rip-offs. Alfred Hitchcock simply knew how deft use of basic film grammar, camera angles and montage could deepen the impact of the most outrageous violations. It's a lesson his filmmaking descendants have never properly absorbed. (1960)

Vampyr The eeriest movie of all time. In his first sound film, the great Carl Theodore Dreyer (``Passion of Joan of Arc'') created a dream vision of evil and obsession in a truly spooky castle from which the disease of vampirism radiates like unchecked sin. Filled with visual evocations of the uncanny that remain remarkably fresh 65 years later. (1932)