A scientific study has finally worked out the scariest movie of all time.
The Science of Scare study, now in its fourth year, tracks the heart rate of volunteers as they watch horror movies to calculate which has the biggest impact.
Whilst the “science” behind the study might be debatable, it does provide a fascinating insight into the films which have the biggest impact on viewers.
The Science of Scare study takes 250 volunteers and measures their heart rate and heart variance which measures the time in between each beat.
These results are then monitored to assess which film causes the biggest variation in the two measures to produce a list of the top 20 scariest movies.
Popular films such as The Conjuring 2, Paranormal Activity and The Autopsy of Jane Doe fail to make it into the top 10, placing 11th, 15th and 18th respectively.
The list is dominated by modern films, with classics such as Scream, Saw and The Blair Witch Project falling comfortably outside of the top 20.
The study uses previous results and user feedback to determine the 50 films that will be shown to viewers.
The previous years’ top 25 are guaranteed to be included in the study undertaken the following year, with the remainder being determined by expert recommendation, user and community feedback.
Any film that falls out of the top 50 is banned from the study for 12 months.
The 2013 paranormal thriller The Conjuring makes it into fifth place whilst Insidious and Skinamarink sit in fourth and third place.
Host, a 2020 release centred around six friends holding a lockdown séance via Zoom, is this year’s runner-up after causing viewers’ average heart rate to jump from 64bpm to 88bpm, giving it an overall scare score of 95.
But the film was narrowly beaten to the crown by Scott Derrickson’s 2012 supernatural horror, Sinister, which led the way with a scare score of 96.
Sinister saw viewers’ heart rates jump from 64bpm to 86bpm, with the highest spike hitting a whopping 131bpm.
