The Heart Ratings
Everyone has an opinion on which horror movie is the scariest, but we wanted to help settle the debate. So we conducted a unique experiment.
We attached Jess to a state-of-the-art heart monitor and measured her response to lots of different horror films.
The heart readings were then analysed by Clinical Cardiac Physiologist, Rekha Dave, who provided us with a breakdown of Jess’ heart rate during each minute of each film.
We used this data to plot the films as graphs. The graphs gave us a graphical representation of each film, showing the fluctuations in heart rate throughout.
From these graphs we were able to rank the films in order of scariness. The rankings are based on Jess’ average heart rate during each film. The higher the average heart rate, the scarier the movie.
Her average resting heart rate when not exposed to a horror film is 73bpm (beats per minute), yet during some of the films it rocketed to over 167bpm.
Here are the results:
1 Funny Games (2007) – 144bpm
2 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – 127bpm
3 Aliens – 123bpm
4 Martyrs – 118bpm
5 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) – 106bpm
6 The Others – 104bpm
7 [Rec] – 96bpm
8 Halloween (1978) – 95bpm
9 The Grudge (2004) – 94.22bpm
10 The Orphanage (2007) – 93.73bpm
11 The Blair Witch Project – 93.72bpm
12 Dawn of the Dead (2004) – 93.11bpm
13 28 Days Later – 92.47bpm
14 Psycho (1960) – 91bpm
15 Alien – 90bpm
16 Friday the 13th (1980) – 89bpm
17 Rosemary’s Baby – 88.19bpm
18 Paranormal Activity – 87.59bpm
19 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) – 86.81bpm
20 Ringu (aka ‘The Ring’) – 86.44bpm
21 The Descent (2005) – 85.50bpm
22 The Omen (1976) – 84.21bpm
23 Saw (2004) – 84.20bpm
24 Dawn of the Dead (1978) – 83.86bpm
25 The Thing (1982) – 83.15bpm
26 The Exorcist – 82bpm
27 Silent Hill – 81bpm
28 The Shining – 79bpm
29 Hellraiser – 77.39bpm
30 Poltergeist – 76.90bpm
The Bedford Voices Project
With the General Election just days away, we're being bombarded with politicians' plans for the future. But what do the people of Britain actually want?
To give normal people a voice, we created ten billboards, each of which expressed the wants and needs of a different community group in bedford - a key battleground of the election. One poster was so controversial it was banned by The Home Office.
The project was created in collaboration with the Bedford Arts Council and leading political cartoonist Patrick Blower
Rankin's Hunger Magazine
Rankin asked us to create a fake advert for a fake product to run in his magazine Hunger.
Stylist Magazine
Stylist asked us to write an article and create a visual explaining how we would rebrand feminism. Our solution was to come up with a new word for feminism that was free from the negative connotations and reminded people what the movement was originally all about. Equality. Not female superiority or man-bashing.
