The Saw Experience is open near Tower Hill

WHAT are the top five horror movies?

Call me old-fashioned but they are The Birds, Jaws, An American Werewolf in London, Home Alone (which I assume is meant to be a horror flick about a demonic child) and The Omen 2 for the ridiculous lift cable death scene.

Damien the devil is certainly more terrifying as an adolescent, and perfects that deathly look seen in most teenagers when asked to look up from their phones.

The busy young adults of today, however, don’t want mental mind-benders and off screen threat. No, it’s all vats of blood and sick torture devices, and people drowning in razored pig guts.

And so last night (Thursday) I found myself in the new Saw Experience near the Tower of London for some office bonding as one of our colleagues compiled a review.

This follows the never-ending film franchise in which a puppet clown on a bike traps people in chains, handcuffs, masks, metal boxes and all sorts of other equipment I haven’t seen since my last visit to Daphne in Soho.

They are then given about a minute to contemplate a sin that horrid little Jigsaw has decided they have committed – a minute in which they are asked to confess their greed and selfishness to avoid having a body part detached with an elaborate cleaver pulley system. Freedom usually comes with something equally as bloody though.

The moral messaging in the Sawiverse is similar to, well, all films – doesn’t every movie ever made end up teaching us about the sharing, love and common care needed in the world? … just before the applauding audience goes home and votes at every election in their own self interest.

But I did wonder how Saw’s famously graphic death count would be brought to life in a nondescript building, ironically close to the financial quarters often roasted by the films.

When we were asked to sign a form that meant our restless ghosts couldn’t sue the organisers if we were dead by the end of it, it did make you wonder what was inside.

There was a twist to come, however.

While there were one or two shocks in the dark, all that gore is swapped for almost wholesome code-breaking puzzles, albeit in a blood-splattered bathroom.

I mustn’t give too much away as you may try it for yourself, but don’t expect to be strapped to a chair and told your fingers will be cut off unless a friend finds a key in bath full of offal.

In that sense, the posters on the tube and the menacing social media promoting the attraction are returning to the classic ingredient of what really makes the horror genre unnerving.

The worry of what might happen next is always more terrifying than seeing a monster revealing its whole too keenly and too soon.

The prickliest goosebumps last night came from simply standing in the queue and waiting to go in.