If your taste in films occasionally tends towards the cheap and trashy – think Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus, Birdemic or Tommy Wiseau’s trash-classic The Room – it probably indicates you have varied and refined tastes and are of above-average education.

That’s the verdict of a new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, published this week in the journal Poetics.

Lead author Keyvan Sarkhosh singled out Sharknado as a “perfect example” of a trash film: "Apart from flying sharks, blood and guts are the main ingredients of this surprise trash hit.”