Film · 1960 · Films · 1960s
The Flesh and the Fiends
Scored from 47 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
In 1828 Edinburgh, Dr. Robert Knox (Peter Cushing) is the city's most brilliant and most arrogant anatomy lecturer, contemptuous of the laws that keep his dissecting table starved of corpses. Two lodging-house Irishmen, William Burke (George Rose) and William Hare (Donald Pleasence), discover that Knox's assistants pay cash for a fresh body and ask no questions, and they graduate from robbing graves to smothering the drunk and the destitute of the West Port. Knox's student Chris Jackson, entangled with a tavern girl named Mary Patterson, is the one who starts to notice where the subjects come from. John Gilling's black-and-white British horror film dramatises the real Burke and Hare murders.
The Flesh and the Fiends is a 1960 crime, drama and thriller film. Its certificate is X (BBFC). It runs 1h 34m. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom.
Only 47 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 47 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 30 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Flesh and the Fiends 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 47.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
