Your scare score.

A scare score is Gasper's answer to the question people actually ask about a horror film: how scary is it? Not how well made, not how important, but how much it got to you. It is a number out of 10 with one decimal, shown in skulls, and you never type it. It is read from where the film sits in your ranked list.

What it is

Every film you rank gets a scare score. It lives on the film's page next to the Community Scare, under "YOU", and on your profile's Rankings tab, where films sort by it. A 9.1 means almost nothing you have ranked frightened you more. A 2.0 means it barely registered. The scale is yours: the top of it is the scariest thing you have personally ranked, and the bottom is the least.

The skull is deliberate. Stars are what other apps use for quality. Skulls are for the flinch, and the flinch is the only thing Gasper ranks.

How the number is made

You never pick it. When you rank a film, you first answer "How scary was it?" with Terrifying, Some scares, or Barely flinched. That answer gives the film its own range: Terrifying scores run from 7.0 to 10, Some scares from 4.0 to 6.9, and Barely flinched from 1.0 to 3.9. Then Gasper asks "Which was scarier?" against films you gave the same answer, one pair at a time. You tap the scarier poster or drag toward it. Each comparison narrows the possible landing spot, and after a handful the film sits somewhere definite in your ordered list.

The scare score is read from that position inside its range. Move the film, and the score moves with it. Rank a new film above it, and the list shifts slightly. The number is a readout of the list, not a separate judgment.

This is why two people can rank the same film and get different scare scores while both being honest. Your 8.3 for The Descent (2005) says where it sits among your films. Someone else's 6.0 says where it sits among theirs. The head-to-head ranking page walks through the whole flow.

Reading a scare score

Treat it as a position, not a grade. A 7.4 does not mean "pretty good scares" in any universal sense; it means the film terrified you and sits near the bottom of the films that did. That framing makes the number useful in a way a typed rating is not, because it carries your whole history with it.

The film page shows your score next to the Community Scare, which is the average of everyone's scare scores for that film. The gap between them is the interesting part. Over time those gaps become your Scare Tolerance, which tells you whether you scare more easily than the crowd or less, and the widest gap becomes your Hottest Take.

The first five films

Gasper scores a film by comparing it to the others you have ranked, so it needs 5 ranked films before it shows numbers at all. Until then the number on the result screen is blurred and the app says "Rank N more films to unlock your scare scores". Even past five, a position in a short list does not mean much yet: the scariest of six films is at the top of a very short ladder, and where it settles depends on what you rank next. By the time you have ranked twenty or thirty films, the scores settle, and from then on they mostly move only when you rank something that genuinely reshuffles your sense of scary.

The practical advice is simple. Rank the films you remember well first, spread across the spectrum: something that wrecked you, something that bored you, and some in between. A list with only terrifying films in it has no bottom, and then nothing can sit at the top. The building your rankings guide walks through a first pass that needs few corrections.

What it does not measure

A scare score does not measure quality, and it does not measure love. A film can earn a 3.0 on skulls and a heart, and plenty of great horror does: The Love Witch (2016) is not trying to scare anyone. If you loved a film that did not frighten you, heart it and let its scare score be low. The score is for the flinch, nothing else.

It does not measure how scary a film is in general. That is what the Community Scare is for, and even that is an average of personal lists, not an objective reading.

And it is not permanent. Re-rank any film, answer the head-to-heads again, and it moves. The glossary entry for scare score has the short version; how the scare score works has the long one.