Film · 2015 · Films · 2010s
The Fear of 13
Scored from 45 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
David Sington's documentary consists almost entirely of Nick Yarris, convicted of a 1981 murder in Pennsylvania and sent to death row, telling his own life story straight to camera on a darkened stage. Filmed as one sustained piece of testimony and cut with dramatic reconstructions, he recounts a childhood assault, drug use, his arrest, and 21 years of confinement in which he taught himself to read and collected words like triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13 that gives the film its title. The account is framed by his decision to petition the court to drop his remaining appeals and let the execution go ahead. No lawyers, relatives or other interviewees appear to corroborate or interrupt him.
The Fear of 13 (2015) is a film IMDb files under the biography, crime and documentary genres. The runtime is 80 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Only 45 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 46 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 41 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Fear of 13 lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2010s (13,059 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 45.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
