I watched the scariest horror movie according to science with a heart rate monitor
Warning: spoilers for Sinister ahead
Let me get one thing straight – I hate horror films. And by that, I mean I have never, ever watched a horror film from start to finish.
But as they say, you've got to suffer for your art, so what better way to break that duck than to dive straight into it with one of the scariest horror movies ever made?
That's not my opinion either – it's something that was determined through a scientific study carried out by MoneySuperMarket, which found the the most terrifying film out there to be Sinister.
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The list is determined by the analysis of viewers' heart rates while watching thousands of hours of bloody, haunted, supernatural-filled horror.
They have recently added something called a 'Scare Score system', using both heart rate and heart rate variance, which measures the time between each beat of your heart to determine how terrifying a film is.
While jump scare movies were favoured in the past, it's now a level playing field and the Ethan Hawke-led supernatural horror leads the pack with a colossal score of 96.
So you can probably imagine how thrilled I was when I agreed to give the 2012 movie a watch-through for the sake of science - all 110 minutes of it - putting my mental wellbeing and weeks of sound sleep on the line.
'I was hiding behind a pillow'
I strapped my Apple Watch on, started recording a workout to monitor my heart rate and held my eyelids open as the film began.
Why did I agree to this? Why do people like horror films? What's the point? These were just some of the questions flying around in my head as the movie opened with snuff footage showing a family being hanged from a tree in slow-motion.
It really does throw you into the deep end, with the eerie sound of Super 8 film playing from the off, becoming a regular fixture in the 'scariest film ever'. Remember, that's scientifically proven.
From a film perspective, I can give a lot of credit to the cinematography and music used to build (a hell of a lot of) tension, because even when I was hiding behind my hands or a pillow, the nerves in my body built from audio alone.
My heart rate tells the story - it should be noted that readings won't be 100 percent accurate on the Apple Watch, though they do show you where I felt like my life flashed before my eyes.
For those who haven't seen the film, it follows a struggling crime writer moving into a home with his own family, which is the site of a different family's hanging, as he tries to recapture the fame he achieved with a previous title.
Instead, he finds out that this is one of many murders made in connection with Babylonian pagan deity Buguul, who consumes the souls of children and convinces them to kill their families.
'My heart was pounding from the first minute'
According to the study, the average movie heart rate was 86bpm, while the highest spike went up to 131 bpm.
On a regular day, my resting heart rate could be anywhere from 55-60bpm, but as seen from the image, it stayed around 70bpm and my heart rate even spiked to 106 at the worst jumpscares.
I did finger my pulse at a point in the film though, counting that I was on a rate higher than the recorded 70bpm but for argument's sake, let's say this was the case.
You can see the nerves I was feeling at the start of the film, which opens on the snuff footage, as I was preparing to force myself to watch a horror film in full, for the first time in my life.
In all honesty, the snuff films that Hawke's character, true crime writer Ellison Oswalt, watches through, had me clutching onto pillows and the eerie, unsettling music didn't help.
'I found myself standing up whenever I got jump-scared'
One of the tapes includes an entire family getting run over by a lawnmower, with others including death by drowning, lighting their own car on fire and, well, a hanging.
I did also stand up for some reason whenever I got jump-scared, which may have contributed to the dramatic spikes.
Other spikes can be seen when Oswalt discovers a snake in his attic, or when his son is temporarily possessed and screams while flailing out of a box.
There are far more spikes at the end, which is where we see the ghost children watching Buguul on an old projector, after popping up behind our protagonist several times, of course.
This is where things start becoming dark for me - not because I blacked out, but because my head was firmly planted in a pillow.
'It's some messed up s**t'
When the Oswalts finally decided that enough was enough, they up and leave overnight, only to find out that the families were all killed after moving from the previous haunted house, by one of their own children.
It's some messed up s**t, to put it lightly.
At this point, everything was making me jump, and when Oswalt is drugged, gagged, and murdered by his daughter while under the influence of Buguul, I was gritting my teeth.
Seeing all the children and the deity together, before dragging the writer's daughter in and therefore taking her soul, signalled that it was the end of the film. Only for his face to jump-scare me at the end and make me jump one last time, explaining the final spike.
Horror films. Never again.
Joshua Nair