Scare Tolerance.

Everyone thinks they are hard to scare. Scare Tolerance is the part of Gasper that checks. It compares your scare scores with the community's on the same films and tells you, in plain words, where you land: whether you scare more easily than the crowd, less, or about the same.

What it is

Scare Tolerance lives on the Taste tab of your profile, the first card, under the line "How easily films scare you". It is a named reading, not just a number. There are five bands, from the easily scared end to the other: Terror-Prone, Easily Spooked, Steady Nerve, Hard to Rattle, Unshakeable. "Steady Nerve" means you land about where the crowd lands. Score films consistently higher than the community and the reading says, without euphemism, that it does not take much to scare you. Score them lower and it takes a lot. The old FAQ put it best: there is no shame in it. There is a little shame in it.

How it is worked out

Only shared films count. For every film you have ranked that other members have also ranked, Gasper takes the gap between your scare score and the Community Scare. If you gave The Babadook (2014) an 8.5 and the crowd averages lower, that is a gap in one direction: it got to you more than to most. Average those gaps across your whole list and the result is your tolerance. Within a point of the crowd is Steady Nerve; one to four points off is Easily Spooked or Hard to Rattle; further than that is Terror-Prone or Unshakeable.

Because the comparison is film by film, it is fair. A viewer who only watches extreme films is not marked as fearless for scoring them high, and a viewer who sticks to gateway horror is not marked as timid. You are compared with the people who saw what you saw.

It is also all time. Nothing resets in January. Your tolerance is built from everything you have ever ranked, which is why it gets steadier the more you log, and it needs a few ranked films before it shows anything.

Your fear stats

The same tab carries the rest of your fear stats, every one of them all time.

Hours watched, totaled from what you have ranked. Your Hottest Take, the film where your scare score differs most from the community's, in either direction. Your Deepest Cut, the film in your rankings that the fewest other members have ranked, which is a quiet honor on an app for people who go looking. Your top subgenre. Your top watch partner, the person you tag most. Your fear twin, the member whose taste matches yours most closely, as a percentage. The button at the bottom, "Show your Bloodwork", turns the same stats into a tap-through story you can share.

The Hottest Take is the one people talk about. It is also the most useful, because it says something true about you that a top ten cannot: here is where you and everyone else disagree. If your Hottest Take is a beloved classic you found inert, you have learned something about what reaches you. If it is an obscure film that wrecked you, you have a recommendation to make.

Reading it honestly

A high tolerance is not a trophy, and a low one is not a weakness. Scaring easily means horror works on you, which is the whole point of watching it. The people who get the most out of the genre are often the ones who still flinch.

What tolerance is good for is choosing. If you know you land well above the crowd, a film with a middling Community Scare may hit you hard, and that is useful to know before a Friday night. If you land below it, the "Scariest on Gasper" shelf in Discover is where you should be looking.

If you are on the easily scared end, the guide to getting into horror if you scare easily is written for you, and the help entry on what if I scare easily is the short version. The blog post on what your Scare Tolerance says goes further.

What it does not do

Scare Tolerance does not judge your taste. It uses scare scores only, never the heart, so which films you loved plays no part.

It does not work from films no one else has ranked. A film only you have ranked may be your Deepest Cut, but it cannot be compared, because there is no crowd to compare with.

It is not yearly. Bloodwork is the same all-time stats told as a story, not a year in review.

And none of it costs anything. Everything on the Taste tab is free, like the rest of Gasper. The glossary has short entries on Scare Tolerance, fear stats, Hottest Take and Deepest Cut.