For the final round of my application to the Data School, I was given a dataset about horror movies. For my Tableau viz, I focused on the words in the horror movie titles, and what we can learn by analyzing them. Working on this project led me to some interesting findings which I'd like to share.
First, I found the top 10 words used in the horror movie titles. The top word was 'Dead', found in 123 movie titles, followed by 'Blood', 'House', 'Night', 'Dark', 'Zombie', 'Evil', 'Man', 'Devil' and 'Kill'. As we can see, these words cover standard themes and tropes of the genre.
Drilling down, we can see the top horror movie words by country. Some of the words come from the countries' respective languages. The top word 'Rumah' in Indonesia is Indonesian for 'House', while the top word 'Dabbe' in Turkey is turkish for 'Creature'.
Some of the differences at the country level are not as easily explained. For example, while worldwide 'Zombie' is 6th most popular, in 'Japan' it jumps to 3rd place. Perhaps this is a reflection of Japan's culture and movie-going sensibilities.
I also looked at the top words by average movie budget. The words most associated with higher budget films were 'War', 'Frankenstein', 'Alien', 'Vampire' and 'Dracula'. These words all indicate characters and scenarios that might require expensive CGI and special effects to do justice.
Looking specifically at movies with sensitive/explicit content, I found one word in particular pop up. 'Massacre' is tied for first place among this subset of movies, while it doesn't even crack the overall top 10. This suggests that movies with 'Massacre' in the title are more likely to be particularly gruesome and gory.
Explore the viz for yourself at https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/alan.grunberg/viz/HorrorWords/Dashboard and see what other interesting trends you can find!