Horror fans are celebrating the last “official” week of spooky season (although it lives on forever in our hearts) by bingeing all of the most spine-tingling and frightful films they can imagine. It’s not time for the cutesy horror or the wholesome family watches; fans are diving into the most frightening that horror has to offer.
Honchō has put together a list of the most stressful horror films to watch, and it’s been crafted with carefully studied scientific research. The UK-based organization used Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb to conjure up a list of the “best Halloween movies.” From there, the study began.
Honcho explains how they “sourced scripts and ran these through TensiStrength to discover which are the most stressful based on the language used.”
The company then ranked the films by tier, explaining each category and what makes the movies fit into them.
“God-tier equates to films that have the most stressful elements and the least relaxing ones, mid-tier where there are stressful and relaxing elements at different percentages; and bottom-tier where the elements are neutral, so the film is equally as stressful as it is relaxing.”
We’ve all sat down to watch a scary movie before and felt wholly unnerved without really being able to put that sensation into words. This study helps horror aficionados realize that the feeling is a mix of many things we don’t consider when sitting down to be spooked.
So what films are in each category? Let’s take a look.
God-tier horror contains the following frightful watches:
Candyman, The Mummy, Scream 3, Saw, and A Quiet Place
Candyman certainly had a lot of unsettling elements, so many that it’s hard to pinpoint the most frightening. A Quiet Place was physically stressful to watch; audiences almost felt like they had to keep quiet while watching to avoid getting caught in their own battle with terror.
These horror favorites fall under the mid-tier category:
The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Shining, The Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Silence of the Lambs, Paranormal Activity, Don’t Breathe, It, and Get Out.
It’s hard to believe movies like The Silence of the Lambs and It aren’t higher on the list, but with the configuration, these movies ended up in the mid-tier. You might not sleep well for a few nights after watching them, but you shouldn’t get too much anxiety from them.
Of course, if you want to be spooked but not so terribly that you can’t sleep, these bottom-tier movies will hit the sweet spot:
Carrie, It Follows, and The Conjuring 2.
Carrie might not be the most anxiety-inducing movie to watch compared to other films on the list, but in terms of existential high school dread — it certainly makes an impact.
If you’ve decided to add any of these movies to your final week of October’s spooky-watch list, you might go into them considering your levels of anxiety before and after. It certainly could make them more interesting to dive into for the 100th time.