Whilst watching one of my favourite films last night, John Carpenter's The Thing, I took the top 250 films from IMDB and ran them through Wordle, using English translations of titles where appropriate, and setting it to ignore commonly used words. Here is the result. I'm not sure it tells you much, except that sequels will bump you up a bit, and feminists might like to note the prominence of 'man', 'men' and 'Lord' (the last one all from the Lord of the Rings) while the only female terms that arise are Princess and Bride. In truth though it shows that in the top 250 there is little commonality in titles.
I hypothesised that this would not be the case for a genre, where you would see greater use of similar terms, so not to let a half-baked hypothesis sit idle, I took the top 100 horror films from Best Horror Movies and put them through Wordle. And yes, look at the size of 'Dead'! Which sure proves something. I think.
I want to see 'Big Frankenstein Day', or the cult blaxploitation classic 'Dead Black Frankenstein'!
Posted by: Foomandoonian | 18/12/2008 at 02:18 PM