It's Saturday night and you're sitting in a darkened theater. Eerie music rises from the speakers around you. Suddenly, screams ring out, and the audience gasps.

Has Dracula just gone for the jugular? Is a werewolf rending some poor helpless extra limb from limb? Is some demon spawn's head spinning wildly, spraying the room with gallons of split pea soup?

No! It's. . .it's. . .the guy next door.

An informal, Internet poll conducted by Crescent Blues confirmed the evidence of video racks and movie listings. Vampires, werewolves and devils just can't hack it anymore -- at least not like Hannibal Lector or Norman Bates.

Eighty-five percent of our 300 respondents said that movies that were "real" -- that might actually happen -- scared them the most. Their messages cited Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Kiss the Girls and the granddaddy of all homicidal maniac movies, Psycho, over and over.

"What really freaked me out the most," one woman wrote, "was the methodical evil of the crimes in [Seven], and the fact that it really could happen. Serial killers exist."

Younger fans praised different movies in the same vein. They consider Scream, Scream 2, and I Know What You Did Last Summer a slash above the competition. And they plan to hold the producers of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer to their promise that this Thanksgiving, "The turkey won't be the only thing that gets sliced..."

Movies that touched people's personal phobias ranked a strong but distant second. Arachnophobia won big in this category, followed closely by Jaws and The Birds. But except for Jaws, which is really an old-fashioned monster movie in disguise, phobic thrills tend to be subtler. More intimate.

Submitted for your consideration: your car. Now picture your car covered in guano so thick it slithers like pancake batter down your door as you try to fight your way inside. Your bone-deep revulsion makes you a sitting duck long before the first avian terror swoops down for the kill. Director Alfred Hitchcock mastered this double-whammy in The Birds, and fear-mongers are still cribbing from his book.

Last, but certainly not least, was the good old spook story. Though often overshadowed by more tangible perils, ghosts still raise big goose bumps in the night. Stephen King was top scaremeister here. It, followed by The Shining (movie and television versions) won raves for causing the most sleepless nights.

King fans agreed the small screen did best by his novels. Few could forget the their first view of Salem's Lot, The Stand and It on television. The big movie factories, they felt, miss the point -- that nothing's quite as scary as the thing you sense, but can't quite place. You just know it's there.

The fear you know but cannot place is also the secret of the "real" horrors that supplanted yesterday's blatant monstrosities. One of the people sitting with you in the popcorn scented murk of your local theater could be a serial killer. Only you don't know which one, or where or how or if or why his (or her) blade will strike.

As one respondent wrote: "You can never know the mind of another. Inside ordinary looking people lurk monsters you cannot see until it is too late. When you can expect or predict the appearance of evil, it is easier to accept. When it blindsides you out of nowhere, you keep asking 'why?' Which is a question that has no answer."

But that's never stopped otherwise rational men and women from asking -- and scaring themselves all over again.

Teri Dohmen