Obviously what people find scary is pretty subjective, but rest assured, when Boris Karloff tells you what's scary, you'd do well to listen.

Karloff is a veteran of films that terrify viewers to this day, like The Mummy and Frankenstein. The actor seemed to be a master at scaring people.

But in an interview with the Associated Press, Karloff argued that there was a fine formula to scaring an audience, and a correct way to go about it as well. Specifically, Karloff argued that horror and terror were two completely different things, and one was definitely superior to the other.

"Horror spells revulsion," said Karloff. "I do not believe in horror and sadism when introduced purely and simply for their own sake...The idea of terror, which is much better, is to make people's hair stand on end, and not to make them lose their breakfasts."

When plenty of scary films today tend to fall into the latter category, one must wonder what Karloff's opinion of the spooky cinema of today would have been. In his own time, Karloff said that there was a method to his process. While plenty of horror films veer into some pretty fantastical storytelling, Karloff believed that many of them are actually grounded in stories from our history.

"The kind of formula with which I've been associated all these years is rooted firmly in legend," he said. "Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy are all basically fairy stories."