How To Measure How Scary A Movie Is: This Says Science

Throughout film history, one of the genres most desired and commented on by the public has been that of terror, which has as its main characteristics provoking fear, anguish, and discomfort to its viewers, through the representation of ghosts, vampires, zombies, demons, or aliens that usually play an antagonistic role in the movies and that tend to cause some kind of threat to the protagonists of the different productions that develop this theme as the main plot.

Movies like "The Exorcist", "The Shining", "Psycho", "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" or "The Omen "; series like "Calls", "The Haunting of Hill House", "The Vampire Diaries", "Ghost Hunters" or "Dark Shadows" and iconic characters like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Hannibal Lecter, Pennywise the clown or Chuky, the doll diabolical, they have managed to remain in the collective unconscious during all these years, to a greater or lesser extent.

A study by the British website Broadbandchoices, called "The Science of Scare", decided to go in search of the horror movie that throughout the years has been the most terrifying. For this, and in their most recent analysis, they invited a total of 250 people to watch 40 feature films that, for expert critics in the field, are among the best horror films; And, once everyone was looking at the tapes, a heart rate monitor was placed on them, which is an ideal device to record the heart's cardiac activity, in order to quantify the rate of blood pumping in each heart per minute and to be able to visualize with which of all the films a higher quantity was obtained to obtain the expected result.

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What was the winning film and how was that determined?

After the study was carried out, it was decided that "Host", a British film released last December 2020, is the most terrifying film of all time, displacing Sinister, a film that in the study carried out last year by the same website held such recognition.

The instrument that was used to determine the winning feature film was, as mentioned above, the maximum heart rate that people were reaching per minute, which was an average of 130 beats per 60 seconds.

And in that sense, Host has managed to generate 88 beats per minute in viewers, slightly higher than the 86 beats achieved by "Sinister" in the object of study.

Other films that stand out in this prestigious list and that should be taken into consideration if you are a lover of this film genre are "Insidious", "Warren File", "Hereditary", "Aterrados", "It Follows", "A place quiet II "," Paranormal Activity "," Warren File: the Enfield case ", among many others that make up this final list of the study made in the middle of the pandemic.

Spirits and demons, the most frightening paranormal phenomena

Something that has probably been surprising in the study is that it is no longer necessarily vampires, zombies, or aliens who can generate the most fear in the population as could be thought in the last century or at the beginning of the 2000s. That place has been passed to occupy spirits and demons, which could also be called the boom of paranormal phenomena since people nowadays and according to the ranking of this same study are more scared by films that have themes where very infrequent events happen and that change the life of a family or a person forever.

"Expediente Warren", which occupies the fourth position and is recognized in Latin America as "El Conjuro", is the clearest example of how a film inspired by real events and that deals with paranormal phenomena that begin to happen to a family that decides to move to a farm can have an expected effect on the audience. These types of movies cause your heart to have more beats per minute, which according to science ultimately measures whether a movie is scary enough.