Introducing Gasper: A Horror-Only App That Ranks by Fear

Gasper is a horror-only film logger, free on iOS today. You log what you watched, and instead of picking a number out of the air, you answer a short run of "Which was scarier?" questions against films you have already ranked. The app places the new film in your personal ordered list and gives it one number, a scare score, plus a heart if you loved it. That is the whole idea, and this post is about why we built it this way.

What it is

Every film logger asks you to rate what you saw. We think that is the wrong question, or at least the wrong way to ask it. A typed score is a guess at a scale that does not exist. Ask yourself what a 7 means and you will give a different answer on a different day.

So Gasper never asks you for a number. Tap Rank, find the film, and the app first asks how scary it was: Terrifying, Some scares, or Barely flinched. Then it shows the film beside one you already ranked and asks which was scarier. Tap a poster, or drag toward it. A few questions later, the film has a place in your rankings, and the place is the score. How it works walks through the flow screen by screen.

Film data, posters, credits, trailers and where to watch come from TMDb. The app runs on iOS 18 and up.

Why horror only

Because horror is the only genre you come out of feeling more alive than when you sat down. You survived something. We wanted a community built around that feeling, and we did not want it diluted by everything else people watch.

There is a practical reason too. "Which was scarier?" is a fair question between any two horror films. It is a meaningless question between a horror film and a courtroom drama. Keeping the app to one genre is what makes every score comparable with every other score, and what makes the community average on a film, the Community Scare, mean something.

Horror is also a genre that rewards this kind of attention. It has more subgenres than almost any other, from slashers to cosmic horror, and fans who care about the difference. Gasper browses by all of them.

One number, and a heart

Every film in your rankings carries a scare score, shown with skulls, read from where the film sits among everything you have ranked. It is the only thing Gasper ranks. There is no second ladder for how good a film was, because a film can be the scariest thing you have ever seen and not very good, or a masterpiece that never made you flinch, and a second number built the same way would only blur the first.

So there is a heart instead. Mark a film Loved and it gets its own filter on your profile's Rankings tab, independent of the score, and the film page counts you in the percentage who loved it. That one is for the films you adore even though they did not scare you, which, as our FAQ notes, it would be a disservice to the Scary Movie franchise to deny.

Once you have ranked enough films, your Profile's Taste tab shows your Scare Tolerance: how your scores compare with the crowd's on the same films, and a name for where you land. If you scare easily, it will say so. There is no shame in it. There is a little shame in it.

Friends, lists and the crowd

Follow people, and the feed fills with what they ranked and want to watch, each with the film, their score and a note. Tag who you watched with. Build lists alone or with collaborators. Check the leaderboards, where Films ranks the scariest films by Community Scare and Fans ranks members by films watched.

All of it is free.

What is next

We have a list, and most of it came from people who used the early builds. More ways to see how your taste compares with your friends. More depth in your fear stats. We are not going to promise dates, because we would rather ship things that work than things that are on time.

If you watch horror, download Gasper, rank the scariest film you have ever seen, and then the second scariest. The list will take it from there. Tell us what we got wrong at support@gasperapp.com. We read everything.