10 scariest movies of all time, according to science

Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The Science of Scare Project ranks "Sinister" as the 2024 scariest movie.
• Heart rate monitors measured audience fear levels during horror films.
• Experts discuss physiological responses and filmmaking techniques that heighten fear.

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 movie-lovers favorite debate. We each have our favorites and what scared the death out of me likely didn't even make you nervous. So, we could sit here and argue with each other while wasting valuable candy-eating/movie-watching time, or we can let science settle this age-old debate.

The Science of Scare Project wants to save us all time and recently concluded an annual study to find the 10 scariest English-language movies of all time. How, you ask? By strapping a heart rate monitor to audience members and measuring their heartbeats 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 effort to find how stressed audiences are for slow-burn fear or dread.

The movies are scored on a scale of zero to 100. The study, conducted by the price-comparison website MoneySuperMarket, gives an example for comparison using the movie "Shrek," which scores a three on the scare scale.

Here are the top 10 scariest English-language films this year, according to the Science of Scare Project:

1. "Sinister"
2. "Host"
3. "Skinamirink"
4. "Insidious"
5. "The Conjuring"
6. "Hereditary"
7. "Smile"
8. "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"
9. "Talk to Me"
10. "Hell House LLC"

Some of your favorites may be left off the list, but hey, it's science, how can you argue that?

Let's dive a little deeper with a couple of experts — one on the human body and another movie professional.

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 film works to get scares.

Bourne said heart rate spikes are part of the human body's way of preparing to handle perceived danger, whether it is real or projected on screen. He compared it to encountering a grizzly bear in the wild — the heart races, blood flow increases and bodies brace for action. "We are now ready to either run away from the zombie or fight the zombie," Bourne said.

Could a scary movie then be bad for someone'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 see a scary movie and that we may need to rethink it for our health, how does one construct a great horror scene that gets hearts pumping blood like we're in the middle of a zombie 10k?

McConnaughey has directed multiple short and feature films including "Three Bullets," "Take" and the newly released "Alien Country."

"Alien Country" is a sci-fi/comedy monster flick shot in Utah. McConnaughey is a self-proclaimed monster movie lover and listed the "Alien" trilogy as the top scary movies of all time for him.

"Introducing a visual threat the audience perceives, but the characters on screen don't" is an excellent way to create tension and get hearts racing, according to McConnaughey. "When you introduce a ticking time bomb, no matter how mundane the next scene seems, all the audience is thinking about is, 'When is the bomb going to go off?'"

McConnaughey points to a specific scene in "Alien Country" when a character is creeping through a house looking for a murderous alien and he said it takes myriad moving parts from actors, as well as camera movement, editing and sound design, to work in harmony and create tension and deliver the perfect scares. "Fast-paced edits from shot to shot all but stopped in that scene," he said. "We lingered on our actors with long, drawn-out handheld moments — this 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 into that state of high tension."

Without knowing 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 worry me," he said. "I would be entertaining (diagnoses of) anxiety, PTSD, a pheochromocytoma, or a primary arrhythmia problem if I saw people's heart rates shoot up like they do in a scary movie."

You can see the entire list of the Science of Scare's 50 scariest movies of all time here.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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John Clyde

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John has grown up around movies and annoys friends and family with his movie facts and knowledge. He also has a passion for sports and pretty much anything awesome, and it just so happens, that these are the three things he writes about.