We see a lot of lists of the best horror films. The lists are subjective as to how the authors decided on the standards for a movie to be included in their rankings. This subjectivity and variety of standards makes the lists on the Internet quite different from each other. How about a list created using science? A new study imaged people’s brains as they watched horror movies. Not only were they able to rank the scariest movies through this study, they were also able to discover what makes horror movies so scary, as RT details:
Any list of best movies is sure to be controversial – just ask the people who run the Oscars. But this one is brought to you by science – based on a study by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Turku in Finland, published this month in the scientific journal NeuroImage.
First, they used Rotten Tomatoes, AllMovie and IMDb to come to a list of 100. They then had hundreds of volunteers, many of them horror movie fans, complete a survey asking them to rate the 100 movies on a scale of 1 to 10 for scariness and quality. (Incidentally, if you would like to take part in the survey, it is still active: Part 1 is here and Part 2 here.)
the survey was only part of this study, mainly a way of selecting the films. The researchers went all out on this study, and had 40 volunteers watch horror movies while hooked up to an MRI to scan their brain activity. They watched trimmed-down versions of The Conjuring 2 and Insidious, selected for their high place in the table, but also because they contained over 20 jump scares (or ‘acute threatening events’) apiece.
What they found rings true for any horror movie fan. Essentially, there are separate brain pathways for two main types of movie-induced fear: ‘sustained fear’, or a slow burning increase in tension, and ‘acute fear’, which is a fright or a jump scare.
During tension-building scenes, for instance when the soundtrack goes quiet and the protagonist is investigating a sinister place, our visual and auditory centres fire up so as to strain for any faint movement or sound in the darkness. Upon a jump scare, however, the threat evaluation and decision-making centres in the brain light up, similar to the ‘fight-or-flight’ response.
image via wikimedia commons
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There's scary with good story like The Conjuring, even the Exorcist, then there's blood and gore and guts, slice and dice, like movies I don't watch. Texas Chainsaw Massacre? No thanks.
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