Burn, burn, burn!!
Get ready with your candies, your evil smiles and your original costumes because tonight is Halloween!! But before starting to shake your hips at the party, a good way to warm up is watching a good horror movie. And now we are lucky since there is another good reason to enjoy watching those little sources of funny frights: watching horror movies can burn nearly 200 calories a time!!
Simple and easy. With the uncertainty (although everybody always knows that something is going to happen), you get nervous. When you get nervous you are more on the alert, your muscles are in tension. Probably some of you start jumping in the sofa. Others would prefer to hug a big pillow and close the eyes in a desperate attempt to run away from the fear. But above all, all of you feel how your hearts start beating fast and loud and how a cold sweat goes across the nape of the neck. Obviously, that is the adrenaline pumping through our body, devouring energy and being able to burn off a whole bar of chocolate.
Perfect news for such a day like Halloween. The University of Westminster is the responsible one of this study, which has measured the total energy expenditure of ten different people as they watched a selection of frightening movies. And the result is that not all the movies can make us jump of our comfortable chair in the same way. The more a movie makes hearts rates to soar, the more calories we burn. Thus, The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) happened to be the most effective with the average viewer using up a whopping 184 calories. However, it is followed closely by the shark epic Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) with the amount of 161 calories burnt and the mysterious and full of dark legends The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), with 158 calories.
So you can breathe calmly without feeling guilty now that you know this. Don´t hesitate to eat all those sweets and snacks tonight because for sure you can burn at least part of it. Although some people are not convinced about this, since this small amount of calories are just the ones burnt in a 30 minutes-walk and even knitting for one hour could burn up to 102 calories, these palm-sweating, knee-knocking viewing can give you a lot of good and funny moments!
The top 10 calorie-burning frightening films were:
1. The Shining: 184 calories
2. Jaws: 161 calories
3. The Exorcist: 158 calories
4. Alien: 152 calories
5. Saw: 133 calories
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street: 118 calories
7. Paranormal Activity: 111 calories
8. The Blair Witch Project: 105 calories
9. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 107 calories
10. [Rec]: 101 calories