Gasper vs Letterboxd: a horror ranker next to a film diary

Letterboxd is where a lot of film people live, and for good reason. If you watch everything, it is the best diary there is. Gasper does one thing Letterboxd does not try to do: it ranks horror, only horror, by asking you which film was scarier rather than how many stars you would give it. This page lays out the difference fairly, including where Letterboxd is plainly the better tool.

What Letterboxd does

Letterboxd is a film diary and social network for all films. You log what you watched, with a date, an optional half-star rating from half a star to five, a review of any length, and tags. You keep a watchlist, build lists on any theme, follow people, and read their reviews. Film pages collect the community's ratings into an average and show friends' ratings alongside. It covers every genre and every era, and it has a long history, with years of diaries behind many members. Pro and Patron tiers add features on top of a free account. It runs on the web, iOS and Android.

The heart of Letterboxd is the review and the diary entry. People write there, and the writing is the community.

What Gasper does

Gasper is a free iOS app that logs horror films and nothing else. You do not type a score. When you tap Rank, you say how scary the film was (Terrifying, Some scares, or Barely flinched), then answer a handful of head-to-heads, "Which was scarier?", two posters at a time, tap or drag toward the scarier one. The film lands in your rankings, your personal ordered list, with one number out of 10 read from where it sits: a scare score. If you loved the film regardless of how scary it was, you tap a heart and it is marked as Loved.

On top of that: a Community Scare on every film page, a Scare Tolerance that compares your scores to the crowd's and names how easily you scare, leaderboards for the scariest films and most active fans, a feed of friends' rankings, lists, a daily pick, a week streak, and Bloodwork. Film data comes from TMDb. There is no price for any of it.

Side by side

Where Letterboxd is better

Breadth. If you watched a documentary, a musical and a horror film this week, Letterboxd logs all three; Gasper logs one. Its community is larger and older, with years of reviews on films that have only a few rankings anywhere else. Its writing culture is unmatched: long reviews, running jokes, lists that become reference points. Its history as a diary means a long-time member has a decade of dates and rewatches that no new app can replicate. It is also on the web and Android, which Gasper is not. For a general film diary, Letterboxd is the right tool and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Where Gasper is different

Gasper is not a smaller Letterboxd. The difference is in the ranking method and in what horror makes possible.

Comparisons instead of stars. A star rating asks you to produce a number from nothing. A head-to-head asks whether The Descent (2005) or Hereditary (2018) scared you more, which you can answer. The number comes from the position. Your list is always internally consistent and you never have to decide whether something is a three and a half.

Scary, then loved. Horror is the genre where "scary" and "good" come apart most often. Gasper ranks only the scare, so a crude film that rattled you lands high without anyone pretending it was well made, and a beautiful film that did not can land low and get a heart. The heart (Loved) is a separate flag, not a second rating, for the films you adore regardless of where they sit.

Horror-only stats. Because everyone is ranking the same kind of film, the crowd number means something specific, and comparing your scores to it produces Scare Tolerance, a Hottest Take and a Deepest Cut. The leaderboards, Films and Fans, are only possible because the scope is narrow.

Using both

Most Gasper members who came from Letterboxd keep using it. The split that works: Letterboxd for the diary and the writing across everything you watch, Gasper for ranking the horror properly and for the stats that fall out of that. Log the film in both; write the review on one and do the head-to-heads on the other.

Gasper does not import from Letterboxd or from anywhere else yet, and because scores come from comparisons rather than typed numbers, an import would not fill a ranked list on its own anyway. Starting fresh is quicker than it sounds: the start here guide walks through the first dozen rankings, which is about when the scores stop calibrating and start to mean something.