It’s Halloween and that means it’s time to scare all your neighbors, eat lots of candy, and scare yourself silly with a great scary movie.
“What are the scariest movies ever?” has long been a favorite movie debate. We all have our favorites and the one that scared me to death probably didn’t make you nervous either. So we can sit here and argue with each other while wasting valuable time eating candy/watching movies, or we can let science settle this age old debate.
The Science of Scare Project wants to save us all the time and recently completed an annual study to find the 10 scariest English-language movies of all time. How, you ask? By attaching a heart rate monitor to audience members and measuring their heart rate per minute while they watch a scary movie. The project also measured heart rate variance, which calculates the time between each heartbeat. This is an attempt to find out how stressed audiences are about slow burn fear or dread.
Movies are rated on a scale of zero to 100. The study, conducted by price comparison website MoneySuperMarket, provides an example for comparison using the movie Shrek, which scores a three on the scare scale.
Here are the 10 scariest English-language movies this year, according to the Science of Scare Project:
- “bad”
- “Host”
- “Skinamirink”
- “Secret”
- “The Conjuring”
- “Heiress”
- “Smile”
- “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”
- “talk to me”
- “Hell House LLC”
Some of your favorites may be left off the list, but hey, it’s science, how can you argue with that?
Let’s dive a little deeper with a couple of experts – one about the human body and another a film pro.
Dr. Michael Hall Bourne Jr., a board-certified pulmonologist and critical care physician at St. Mark’s Hospital, and Salt Lake City-based writer/director Boston McConnaughey discussed what it means when the body reacts to scares and how the film works to achieve scares.
Bourne said the increased heart rate is part of the human body’s way of preparing to deal with perceived danger, whether it’s real or projected on a screen. He likened it to meeting a grizzly bear in the wild—hearts pound, blood flow increases, and bodies prepare for action. “Now we’re ready to either run from the zombie or fight the zombie,” Bourne said.
Can a scary movie then be bad for one’s health? Bourne said he wouldn’t stress too much about it, but, ultimately, it could, “especially for those with heart failure or those who may be prone to arrhythmias.”
Now that we know what happens to us when we watch a scary movie and that we may need to rethink it for our health, how can we build a great horror scene that gets our hearts pumping like we’re in the middle of a 10k zombies?
McConnaughey has directed numerous short and feature films, including Three Bullets, Take and Alien Country.
Alien Country is a fantasy-comedy monster movie shot in Utah. McConnaughey is a self-proclaimed lover of monster movies and ranked the “Alien” trilogy as his scariest movies of all time.
“Presenting a visual threat that the audience perceives but the characters on screen don’t” is a great way to build tension and get the heart pumping, according to McConnaughey. “When you introduce a time bomb, no matter how mundane the next scene seems, all the audience thinks is, ‘When is the bomb going to go off?’
McConnaughey points to a specific scene in “Alien Country” when a character is crawling through a house looking for a killer alien, and he said it takes a lot of moving parts from the actors, as well as camera movement, editing and sound design, to work. in harmony. and build tension and deliver the perfect scares. “The fast-paced edits from take to take all but stopped in that scene,” he said. “We lingered with our actors with long, lingering hand-held moments – it allows the audience to feel the physicality and organic movement of the camera operator and the actors. You start to breathe as they breathe and subconsciously enter that state of high tension.”
Without knowing that these study participants were watching scary movies, Bourne said the high levels of stress seen in the study or those created by the kind of tension McConnaughey creates on screen would be cause for alarm.
“Without context, it would bother me,” he said. “I would have fun (diagnosing) anxiety, PTSD, a pheochromocytoma or a primary arrhythmia problem if I saw people’s heart rates go up like in a scary movie.”
You can see Science of Scare’s entire list of the 50 scariest movies of all time here.
The key relationships for this article were created with the help of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article itself is written only by man.