Browse by subgenre.

Horror is not one genre. It is thirty of them wearing the same coat, and a person who loves cosmic horror may have no use for a slasher. Gasper's Discover tab is built on that fact: a shelf for every subgenre, from Slashers to Killer Dolls, so you can browse by the specific thing that scares you.

The shelves

Discover is a stack of horizontal poster shelves, one per subgenre. The full set today, thirty-three of them: Slashers, Serial Killers, Supernatural, Haunted Houses, Ghosts, Paranormal, Demonic, Possession, Witchcraft, Occult, Cults, Zombies, Infection, Vampires, Werewolves, Monsters, Kaiju, Killer Sharks, Animal Attack, Sci-Fi Horror, Cosmic Horror, Body Horror, Psychological, Found Footage, Survival, Home Invasion, Cannibal, Splatter & Gore, Torture, Evil Children, Killer Dolls, Teen Horror, and Comedy Horror.

Some of these are broad churches and some are rooms with one chair. Supernatural covers half the genre; Killer Sharks is a shelf you can finish in a weekend. Both deserve their own place, because the person looking for the second does not want to dig through the first. The narrow shelves are also where the surprises are. Nobody expects much from Evil Children until they have seen The Innocents (1961) and The Omen (1976) back to back.

Tap any poster for the film's page: the trailer, "Where to watch" with its streaming providers, the Community Scare, the percentage who loved it, the cast, crew and studios, what people said about it in tags, recent reviews, and the Rank button.

How subgenres are resolved

Film data comes from TMDb, and so do the subgenres: each shelf is resolved from TMDb's keywords on a title. A film tagged with found footage lands in Found Footage; one tagged with both possession and demon lands in Possession and Demonic. That means a film can sit on more than one shelf, which is accurate, because The Thing (1982) is a monster film, a body horror film and a sci-fi horror film at once.

It also means the shelves are only as good as the keywords. If a film is missing from a shelf it obviously belongs on, the fix is usually on TMDb itself, and it flows through. The help entry on where film data comes from explains how.

Beyond subgenres

More shelves round out Discover. "Your next scare" is your daily pick, once you have ranked five films. "Scariest on Gasper" mirrors the Films leaderboard, sorted by Community Scare, and is the right shelf when you want something that works on most people. "Essential horror" is the films TMDb rates highest. "New this season" gathers recent releases, with "Releasing today" and "Upcoming" beside it. "International horror" pulls from outside the English-language mainstream, where a lot of the best work of the last twenty-five years lives: Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, Indonesian, and more. "Featured lists" is a small set of members' lists worth a look.

Search sits above it all, with two tabs, "Horror films" and "Horror fans". Type any horror film and it comes up, whether or not it is on a shelf, and the Horror films tab can be narrowed by Streaming, Subgenre, Decade and Rating. Trailers play in the app, so you can check a film's tone without leaving.

Watchlist and unreleased films

Anything you find can go on your watchlist with "Add to Watchlist", and the watchlist is one of the two shelves on the Rank tab, so logging later takes no searching. You can tag who you "Want to watch with" and choose who sees it with "Edit who can see". Unreleased films can go on the watchlist too, but they cannot be ranked: the page says "Not released yet" and the Rank button waits. The help entry on unreleased films covers the edge cases, and the glossary defines the watchlist in a paragraph.

What it does not do

Subgenre browsing is not a recommendation engine. The shelves are the same for everyone; they are a map, not a guide. For a pick chosen for you, that is the daily pick, which is the "Your next scare" shelf at the top.

It does not cover other genres. Gasper is horror only, and a film that is not filed as horror will not appear, which is a feature: every film in Discover has a scare score worth comparing. The help entry on why horror only makes the case.

It does not include TV series. Gasper is a horror film logger, and the catalog is films.

And the shelves are not the same as this site's subgenre pages, which are essays on what each subgenre is, where it came from and where to start. The shelves are the films themselves. Read the essay on found footage, then open the shelf and rank three.