How scared were you, really, during the last horror film you watched? Not "I jumped once" scared. Actually scared, in numbers. That's the question a new app called ScareScore is trying to answer, and it just had its first public outing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.
I read about it on Rue Morgue, who were there for the debut, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. If you want the full story straight from the source, their piece is here, and it's worth a read if you like your horror news with actual detail in it.
What exactly is ScareScore?
From what Rue Morgue describes, ScareScore is a biometric app that tracks your physical fear response while you watch a horror film and turns it into a number. Think heart rate, think the kind of signals a fitness tracker already picks up, except instead of telling you how many steps you took, it's telling you how close you came to needing a lie down during the third act.
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The idea, as I understand it, is that your body doesn't lie the way your face does. You can sit stone still in a cinema seat with your arms crossed, looking completely unbothered, while your heart is doing something closer to a drum solo. ScareScore is built to catch that gap between the performance and the actual data.
It debuted at Toronto After Dark, which is one of those festivals that exists specifically for films like this: genre work, horror, the stuff that doesn't always get a slot at the bigger, more respectable festivals. If a scare-measuring app was going to launch anywhere first, a horror festival audience is exactly the right crowd to test it on. These are people who go to a festival specifically to be frightened, so if the app can't get a reading off that room, it isn't going to get one anywhere.
Why does this feel like such an obvious idea in hindsight?
Because horror fans have been arguing about "how scary" a film actually is since the dawn of the genre, and we've never had anything better than vibes to settle it. You tell me a film terrified you. I watch the same film and laugh through most of it. Neither of us is lying, we just scared differently, and until now there's been no way to actually compare the two beyond trading opinions in a comment section.
A tool that puts an actual number on a fear response changes that conversation completely. Suddenly a festival screening isn't just "the audience seemed into it." It's data. You could, in theory, rank an entire festival slate by audience fear response rather than by applause or walkouts, which is a genuinely new way to talk about horror as a genre rather than relying on word of mouth or a single critic's nerve.
I also think about what this could mean for the people actually making these films. A director spends months, sometimes years, building towards one specific jump scare or one slow-burn sequence they're convinced will wreck an audience. Right now, the only feedback they get is whether people scream in the room, which is useful but blunt. A tool like ScareScore gives them something closer to a heart rate graph of their own film, scene by scene. That's the kind of thing a sound designer or an editor could genuinely use, not just a novelty for festival marketing.
What would I actually want to know if I tried it?
Honestly, I want to know if my own reactions match what I think they are. I'll quite happily tell anyone who asks that jump scares barely touch me and it's the slow, patient dread that gets under my skin, the kind of film where nothing much happens for twenty minutes and your shoulders are somewhere near your ears the whole time anyway. I'd love to see if a heart rate monitor agrees with me, or if it turns out I'm lying to myself and a good jump scare gets me every time, I just don't admit it afterwards.
I'd also want to try it on something properly atmospheric rather than a film built around shocks. Something like Crimson Peak (#ad; as an Amazon Associate, Erin earns from qualifying purchases), which leans entirely on dread and atmosphere rather than cheap scares, feels like exactly the sort of test case where ScareScore could tell you something you didn't already know about your own nervous system.
There's no word yet on whether this becomes something the rest of us can actually download, or whether it stays a festival novelty that pops up once a year at events like Toronto After Dark. I hope it's the former. A film club built entirely around the question of who gets scared and by what feels like exactly my kind of club, and right now the only person telling me how scared I was during a film is me, several hours later, when I'm trying to fall asleep with the landing light on.
Either way, I'll be keeping an eye on where ScareScore turns up next. If it does make it to a wider release, you'd better believe I'm putting my own numbers where my mouth is.
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