Always wanted to know what the scariest movie of all time is, but just a little bit suspect of any AFI list? Well thanks to a group of mathematicians from King’s College, London, THE SHINING can now be listed as the scariest flick ever made.
Mathematicians you may ask yourself? Why yes, dear readers. They spent two weeks watching classic horror tales like JAWS, THE EXORCIST, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in order to develop the following formula for frightfulness. Hold onto your hats compadres.
(es+u+cs+t)squared +s+ (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x – 1
Simple enough, right? Not! Just in case you’re now as confused as I am, but may want to try and apply this at home, here’s further explanation:
Suspense, the experts agreed, was the most important component in a horror movie, hence the various elements of suspense, es+u+cs+t (escalating music + the unknown + chase scenes + the sense of being trapped), are added and squared and shock, ‘s’, is added to it.
A horror flick must also find the right balance between being too realistic, which could be disturbing, and too far-fetched, which wouldn’t seem believable — achieved by finding the right mix of true life, ‘tl’, and fantasy, ‘f’.
Then there are the usual suspects — the number of characters who are alone, ‘a’, in the dark, ‘dr’, and in a film setting, ‘fs’, and they are divided by the number of characters in the movie, ‘n’ – the maths wizards believe that the fewer the number of characters, the greater the empathy generated in the viewers. This explains why the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho is widely regarded as one of the scariest moments in cinema.
There must also be the right mix of blood and gore, represented by a mathematical sine function, and then you subtract one point for any stereotypes in the movie.
So can you really determine how scary a movie is through a math formula? I seriously doubt it, but it’s awfully good to know that somebody tried. Now get out there and brush up on your pre-Calculus!
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