How can you measure whether a movie is actually scary? The increased heart rate while watching? Approximately how often do you squint your eyes? Or what adjectives are used to describe the film? A small but nice study from 2021 chose the latter method and came up with a way to make the horror factor of horror films measurable, the so-called ‘Scare Score’.
The result: if you really want to be scared, there is no alternative to the cult-found-footage-horror”Blair Witch Project“From 1999 onwards! If you dare, you can tune into Tele 5 tonight, March 27, 2024 at 10:05 PM. If you prefer to watch in daylight, you can of course also use VoD, Blu-ray or DVD.
50,000 reviews of 25 films were analyzed
For the study, 50,000 reviews (both from users and journalists) on the film database site IMDb were analyzed for the 25 most successful horror films of all time – the Stephen King film adaptation “IT” is currently in first place. It counted how often words like “creepy,” “scary,” “terrifying” and other synonymous terms appeared in the reviews.
The highest number of such adjectives describing fear appeared in the reviews of the horror film “Blair Witch Project” – as many as 2,805. This means that ‘Blair Witch Project’ has the highest ‘Scare Score’ of the 25 films taken into account in this small study.
This is obviously not a high scientific achievement, but even horror pope Stephen King can confirm that the search for the titular Blair Witch is really not for the faint of heart: he found the film so scary the first time he saw it that he had to stop watching it to look.
Headscratcher: Is “Blair Witch Project” Real or Not?
And the campaign at the time to launch the ‘Blair Witch Project’ wasn’t bad either, as it brought the horror into real life to some extent, by deliberately blurring the line between film and reality through the pseudo-documentary style of the film. “Found Footage” was still fairly new in the mainstream at the time, the appearance that these could be real events was exactly what was intended.
And so, quite a few viewers at the time wondered if the blurry footage from a video camera supposedly found in the woods that captured the nighttime encounter between three students and the Blair Witch witch might not be real after all. No later than the hype surrounding ‘Blair Witch Project’, cinema audiences were suitably educated and watched the following Found Footage films shot on a shaky camera, such as ‘[REC]’ and ‘Cloverfield’ were no longer (so quickly) accepted as true.