These are the 10 Scariest Movies of All Time, According to a New Study

What are the scariest movies? This depends, largely, on taste. A knife-wielding maniac tormenting a few sexed-up teens in a cabin might make one person giddy with adrenaline and another spooked enough to never book a remote Airbnb. Your friends might be stoked to throw on Midsommar this weekend, while you’re fine — and still pretty haunted — simply reading the movie’s Wikipedia entry (Blood-Eagling? Really?)

One thing the best scary movies do is masterfully create — and release — tension. Doing so spikes an audience’s adrenaline. So, a decent — if quite limited — way to gauge the best horror movies, then, is to see which ones elevate heart rate the most. That’s exactly the metric a team of researchers on behalf of the website BroadBandChoices used to find the 10 scariest movies of all time for their “Science of Scare” project. While there’s certainly much, much more that determines a great horror film, it’s an interesting way to group a list.

Assembling a group of more than 50 film viewers, the UK-based team showed them 35 different scary films, from such old-school classics A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to more modern movies like The Ring, Hereditary, and The Conjuring. They then measured the group’s average rise in heart rate as they watched each film in 5.1 surround sound.

So, what film spiked heart rates enough to win first place? That honor goes to Sinister, the twisty, very unsettling Scott Derickson film about a true-crime writer (Ethan Hawke) who discovers various terrifying movies in his attic that depict murders done by a “Mr. Boogie.” The film had the largest average rise in heart rate, elevating from 65 bpm (average resting heart rate) to 86 bpm.

In second place was James Wan’s Insidious, which raised heart rates to 85 bpm, and in third place was The Conjuring, also by James Wan, which raised thumps to 84 bpm. Elsewhere on the top 10 are The Babadook, The Descent, The Visit, It Follows, Hereditary, The Conjuring 2, and Paranormal Activity.

If you’re looking for a list of scary movies to watch this Halloween, this is a pretty decent offering. The entire 35-film list is below. As for me? I’ll be reading the Wikipedia entries.

1. Sinister
2. Insidious
3. The Conjuring
4. Hereditary
5. Paranormal Activity
6. It Follows
7. The Conjuring 2
8. The Babadook
9. The Descent
10. The Visit
11. The Ring
12. A Quiet Place
13. A Nightmare on Elm Street
14. Halloween
15. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
16. 28 Days Later
17. The Exorcist
18. Hush
19. It
20. Scream
21. The Grudge
22. The Witch
23. The Blair Witch Project
24. Alien
25. The Thing
26. Poltergeist
27. Annabelle
28. Friday the 13th
29. The Orphanage
30. Dark Skies
31. Wolf Creek
32. The Omen
33. The Shining
34. Get Out
35. Audition

Is your preferred horror movie on this list? What do you think was left out?