Science Reveals The Scariest Movie Ever; You Probably Haven't Seen It
Fans love to debate on merits of their favorite movies, and in case of horror movies this means arguing what movies are the scariest.
The number of choices, including both old and new titles, is humongous, and tastes are subjective, so it looked like the debate is never going to be settled – until Broadband Choices decided to approach it scientifically.
They have launched a study, aptly named "The Science of Scare Project," to determine the scariest movies of them all, based on objective criteria.
Specifically, they took a group of 250 test subjects. Those subjects are "fitted with special heart rate monitors and their heart rate is tracked throughout the movies, under researcher supervision". This allowed the experimenters to "measure the average impact" that the "shortlisted movies had on the heart rate (measured in BPM)" of the test subjects.
The results were then "compared to the average resting BPM of the total sample size, which each year has been 64 BPM." In other words, the harder your heart pounds, the more scared you are.
And then they made the subjects watch movies renowned for being scary, including both recent ones and old classics, such as The Ring and Nightmare on Elm Street.
Broadband Choices have been running this experiment since 2020, as an attempt to find movies which truly can make hearts of the audience race amidst the nearly endless ocean of various-budget horror movies, available on the web, through streaming or otherwise.
And for the last two years, the scariest horror movie was nothing else than Rob Savage's recent low-budget entry Host.
Host began its life as a 2-minute prank clip that went viral on Twitter, and ended up so popular that it was swiftly developed into a 56-minute feature film.
It is quite surprising that the scariest movie of all time is a movie shot entirely through Zoom video conferencing software! Before that, in 2020, the winner of the year was Scott Derrickson's Sinister, filmed in 2012. Runners-up included Insidious, The Conjuring and Hereditary.
So now, we have objective, scientific data on which movies you should watch if you want to sleep with your lights on. Here are the top ten scariest films, based on the experiment:
- Host
- Sinister
- Insidious
- The Conjuring
- Hereditary
- Terrified
- It Follows
- DASHCAM
- A Quiet Place Part 2
- Paranormal Activity