The film has retained the much-coveted title for another year.

The Science of Scare project has been running since 2020 and is described as "an experiment to categorically find the scariest movies in existence, based on what gets hearts pumping and pulses racing".

To do this, a select number of horror films are chosen and screened for 250 test subjects, who are fitted with monitors to measure their heart rate and heart rate variance.

"With heart rate (BPM), the higher the number, the faster the movie got our audiences’ blood pumping, an indicator of excitement and fear as part of your fight or flight instinct," a project statement reads.

"On the other hand, heart rate variance (HRV), measures the time in between each beat of your heart. The lower the heart rate variance the more stressed our audience members became, a good indicator of slow burn fear and dread."

Speaking as a huge horror fan, it's a very fun project - albeit with some flaws.

Science of Scare professes that they can't show every horror film to their test subjects and it seems that they mainly prioritise newer entries in the genre - with a few classics sprinkled in.

Plus, the project only considers English-language movies.

So, we'd take the claims that Sinister is scientifically the scariest film ever with a pinch of salt. That said, it is still quite an honour to be bestowed the title and Sinister is pretty damn good, so we can't complain too much.

Streaming on Netflix right now, it stars Oscar-nominee Ethan Hawke (Training Day) as Ellison Oswalt, a one-hit-wonder true crime writer desperate to get back to the top of The New York Times Best Seller List.

As part of his harebrained scheme to do this, the writer moves himself, his wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance, The Knick) and their kids Ashley (Clare Foley) and Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) into a house where the grisly unsolved murder of a family just like his happened.

Keeping his family in the dark about the house's dark past, Ellison stumbles upon a box in his new home's attic containing a projector and reels of Super 8 film.

It turns out the reels are snuff movies, depicting different families being murdered in various hugely disturbing ways.

Appalled by the footage but also consumed with the idea of writing another hit book, Ellison does not share his findings with the police or his family - thinking he can crack the mysteries of the killings.

As he rewatches the snuff films over and over again in search of clues, the research begins to take a mental toll on the writer.

This is as he and his family are plagued by a series of strange occurrences.

Co-written and directed by horror icon Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Black Phone), alongside his frequent writing partner C. Robert Cargill, Sinister is a clever mix of several different sub-genres.

All at once, it's a murder investigation story, it's the tale of a decades-spanning curse, it's a 'something is wrong with the children' situation, while also being punctuated by the nerve-rattling sequences in which the audience gets a glimpse of the snuff movies Ellison becomes obsessed with.

Shot on actual Super 8 cameras and film stock for added authenticity, each reel - given a deceptively innocuous title like Lawn Work '86 (a family is run over by a lawnmower) or Family Hanging Out '11 (another family is slowly hung by a tree) - begins with a portrait of a seemingly normal happy family being watched from afar.

This is before we witness the most godawful cruelty inflicted upon them (Sinister may not be the most scary movie of all time, but its lawnmower sequence is easily one of the scariest scenes ever).

That said, Derrickson shoots these murder moments about as elegantly and tastefully as possible without sacrificing any of the terror, taking viewers up to the second of the killings before cutting away.

As such, the violence happens nearly entirely off-camera, the only exception being one of the snuff clips being shown obscured in the reflection of Ellison's glasses as he watches.

It's these sequences strung throughout Sinister which likely got the Science of Scare test subjects' hearts pounding. This is as the film's cautionary morality tale - a writer being so blinded by selfish desperation for a hit that he winds up putting himself and his nice family in terrible peril amidst his quest - probably provokes those important slow-burn chills.

What's also great about Sinister is that it has the courage of its convictions, taking its story to its shocking but logical endpoint - without feeling the need to stick on a happy ending.

Sinister wound up getting a sequel. It focused on Deputy So & So (played by a brilliant James Ransone, The Wire), an eccentric kindly cop who helped Ellison in his investigation and functioned as the original's much-needed comic relief.

That said, Sinister 2 faltered by overexplaining and overshowing the first flick's villain - a force terrifying in small doses as he lingers in the background of a shot but also kind of wack when given the full screen to take up.

Instead of watching its official sequel, we'd recommend 'Dreamkill' as a chaser to Sinister, Derrickson and Cargill's brilliant segment of the found-footage anthology V/H/S/85. It also features Ransone and revolves around snuff films but puts another supernatural spin on them.

Sinister is available to watch on Netflix, NOW Cinema and Sky Cinema in Ireland and the UK, while V/H/S/85 can be streamed on Shudder.

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