Top 20 Scariest Horror movies to watch this Halloween - including Scream and A Quiet Place

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Experts have determined the top 20 scariest movies and how many jump scares are in each one.

The weather getting colder, and the darker nights creeping in can mean only one thing - Spooky season is upon us. Halloween is one of the UK’s most popular holidays, with people waiting all year long to dress up in their favourite costumes and eat plenty of themed treats.

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There are so many ways to get into the spooky spirit from pumpkin picking at your local patch to going on a ghost walk. One of the most common ways to spend Halloween is watching the ultimate horror movie marathon with friends.

Horror movies are the perfect way to scare yourself silly this Halloween with all the jumpscares to get the adrenaline pumping. Jumpscares are one of the best parts of horror movies, keeping you on your toes and coming back for more.

Lilly Sabir, a psychologist at Oxford Spires Practice, commented on what being scared does to a person’s psyche and why people like watching horror movies, and therefore, feeling scared: “This is to do with human beings feeling the need to be stimulated. Fear responses can produce anxiety-like symptoms but we are prepared for them when watching a horror movie so the effect is stimulation within our control.

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Scream/Paramount Studios

“We produce chemical responses in the body and mind, and that stimulation process can lead to heightened arousal. If you like, we sometimes refer to it as getting a bit of a kick from our environmental stimuli, getting spooked and quite literally feeling ‘alive’.”

So, what are the top scariest movies according to experts? Here’s everything you need to know.

What are the top 20 scariest horror movies?

Here is a breakdown of the top 20 scariest movies, where they rank and how many jump scares there are throughout the films:

  • 1 - Insidious (2010) - 24 jumpscares
  • 2 - It (2017) - 23 jumpscares
  • 2 - Drag Me to Hell (2009) - 23 jumpscares
  • 2 - Friday the 13th (2009) - 23 jumpscares
  • 5 - The Evil Dead (1981) - 22 jumpscares
  • 6 - Evil Dead (2013) - 20 jumpscares
  • 7 - Scream (1996) - 19 jumpscares
  • 8 - Scream 4 (2011) - 18 jumpscares
  • 9 - Sinister (2012) - 17 jumpscares
  • 9 - Don’t Breathe (2016) - 17 jumpscares
  • 11 - X (2022) - 16 jumpscares
  • 11 - The Descent (2005) - 16 jumpscares
  • 11 - The Strangers (2008) - 16 jumpscares
  • 11 - Candyman (1992) - 16 jumpscares
  • 15 - A Quiet Place Part II (2020) - 15 jumpscares
  • 15 - Martyrs (2008) - 15 jumpscares
  • 15 - The Ritual (2017) - 15 jumpscares
  • 15 - Underwater (2020) - 15 jumpscares
  • 19 - A Quiet Place (2018) - 14 jumpscares
  • 19 - Halloween (2018) - 14 jumpscares

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What was the methodology behind the study?

FindMyCasino shared how they determined which were the scariest movies.They received a comprehensive list of 100 of the most popular horror movies of all time from IMDb and ranked them based on the amount of jump scares throughout each of them.

The company determined the jumpscares by inputting each movie manually into Where’s the Jump? (a website, which tracks the number of jump scares throughout a horror movie) and the number of jump scares, the jump scare rating (out of five), along with the movies’ runtime (min) were recorded. Additionally, the jump scare percentage and jump scares per minute were calculated for each movie.

FindMyCasino said that data was collected on 29 September 2022 and is subject to change.

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