This project is super interesting because it measures heartbeats in real time and gives the movies a ranking, super clever!
Is there anything better than a truly terrifying movie? One that gets your heart pounding, makes you jump out of your seat or sleep with the lights on?We don’t think so, but with streaming services giving us an endless supply of horror films at our fingertips, it can be hard to know which can give you a true fright night, and which are child’s play.That's why in 2020 we founded the Science of Scare Project, an experiment to categorically find the scariest movies in existence, based on what gets hearts pumping and pulses racing.Now in its fourth year, the Science of Scare is back and bigger than ever tracking the scariest movies ever made, at its new home at MoneySuperMarket broadband.How to measure the scariest movies?
Each year, the Science of Scare Project curates a list of the most terrifying English language films and puts them to our 250 strong panel.Our test subjects are invited to special screenings of our movies where they are fitted with heart rate monitors and their heart rate is tracked throughout each movie.To prevent audience fatigue, screenings take place over the course of several weeks throughout the year, before we publish our results in October, just in time for Halloween.In previous years, we would measure the average impact our shortlisted movies had on the heart rate (measured in BPM) of our subjects, compared to the average resting BPM of the total sample size (64 BPM).However, in 2023, we developed a more detailed way of measuring, with the creation of the Science of Scare Score.What is the scariest movie of all time?