GeometERRIFYING!

(es+u+cs+t)squared + s + (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x-1 = scary movie

That is the mathematical formula which determines the scariness of a film according to a group of British mathematicians.

In my mind, the formula is too rooted in suspense and largely ignores imagery (setting is maybe the one nod to that form of creepiness). Really great horror movies have images that haunt you like waking nightmares, and those are the moments that get seered into the collective conscious. In The Shining, there's the hallway scene. In The Exorcist, there's the head spinning. When you hear the name of a movie that scared you, there are images that immediately reveal themselves from the fog of memory.

But this attempt at systemizing fright, fails to acknowledge something beyond tension in a horror film.

One of the reasons I actually prefer the American version of The Ring over its Japanese source is the prior's tapping of the kind of images that our conscious thought recoils from but our subconscious has some morbid fascination with. One can picture the director sitting around with friends making a list of scary images: "Alright, so we've got bucket of maggots, blank stares on children and pitch black pools of water... Anybody got thoughts on horse carcasses?" These are the things (aside from that weird music) that still rest precariously inside my head. That's the important thing in a horror movie, what carries on after the film reel has ended. Everything else just falls into the genre of Suspense. So, take the entire algorithm and multiply it by the variable "i" for "images".

While on the subject of the two Ring movies and this formula, I'll add a note on my favor for the use of the "true life" variable. My biggest turn-off to the Japanese film was the psychic bonds of the main characters as it destroyed my human empathy for them. Call me a mutant hater, but I'm not a fan of protagonists with magic powers in horror films.

While on the subject of British systems, I should also note that I think we (America) should adapt the procedure of punctuating a sentence outside of quotation marks. It makes life almost easiest enough to bear.