Each year, the Science of Scare Project curates a list of the most terrifying feature length movies and puts them to their panel of 250 test subjects.
To decide what films to screen, they take recommendations for the most frightening films from horror experts, critics' "best of" lists, online communities (in particular r/horror), and their own personal picks.
Screenings take place over the course of several weeks throughout the year, before they publish their results in October.
This is the somewhat standardized and averaged data for three years of "The Science of Scare Project" by Broadband Choices (https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/features/science-of-scare).
I decided to make a list of the top 15 (out of 41) because the numbers quickly die down after that.
In…
Each year, the Science of Scare Project curates a list of the most terrifying feature length movies and puts them to their panel of 250 test subjects.
To decide what films to screen, they take recommendations for the most frightening films from horror experts, critics' "best of" lists, online communities (in particular r/horror), and their own personal picks.
Screenings take place over the course of several weeks throughout the year, before they publish their results in October.
This is the somewhat standardized and averaged data for three years of "The Science of Scare Project" by Broadband Choices (https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/features/science-of-scare).
I decided to make a list of the top 15 (out of 41) because the numbers quickly die down after that.
In my humble opinion the top 5 is legit (in no particular order), but I'd suggest taking that data with a grain of salt, because this is not very scientific. We don't know if outliers were ruled out for the highest spike, and the average BPM doesn't take into account the length of the movie (hence why Host is ranked 1st). We also don't have separate data for subjects that already watched the movies, we don't know in which order they were screened, and we don't know if the selection of members was random enough for a sample size of "only" 250 people. Note that for the first year they had only 50 people.
The first number is the overall difference in BPM between the average resting heart rate of the 250 test subjects and their average movie heart rate. Ranking is done according to this number.
The second number is the highest recorded spike in BPM while watching the movie. See below if you wanted a "best of jumpscares" ranking instead.
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If the top 15 ranking were done according to the highest recorded spike in BPM:
1 Insidious
2 The Conjuring
3 Host
3 Sinister
4 A Quiet Place Part 2
5 Terrified
5 The Autopsy of Jane Doe
6 The Descent
7 A Quiet Place
8 Paranormal Activity
9 The Babadook
10 The Conjuring 2
11 [REC]
12 DASHCAM
13 The Ring
Films I purposefully didn't include (because they were not ranked higher):
The Ring
The Visit
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Halloween (1978)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Hush
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
[REC]
It (2017)
28 Days Later
The Excorcist
Oculus
Candyman (2021)
The Grudge
Scream
The Invisible Man
Poltergeist
The Blair Witch Project
Black Phone
The Witch
Alien
Friday The 13th
The Orphanage
The Thing
Annabelle
Dark Skies
Films that didn't make it to their own top 30:
Nope (2022)
Malignant (2021)
X (2022)
Scream (2022)
Films I'd really wish to see in the 2023 edition:
Ghostland (2018)
Smile (2022)
Barbarian (2022)
The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Saint Maud (2019)
