On this page
Because horror is the only genre you come out of feeling more alive than when you sat down. You survived something. It puts you closer to your own life and lets you meet a fear on your own terms, and we wanted a community built around that feeling.
The practical reason
Keeping every film on Gasper horror is also what makes every score worth comparing. The scare score asks "which was scarier?", and that question only works when both films are trying to scare you. Put a romantic comedy in the list and the head-to-head collapses: nothing is scarier than nothing, and the list stops meaning anything.
A horror-only list also makes the Community Scare honest. Every member who ranked The Conjuring (2013) did so against other horror, so the average is a reading of how it lands among people who watch the genre on purpose, not among people who stumbled into it.
And it makes the subgenre shelves possible. A general film app has one shelf for horror. Gasper has thirty-three, from Slashers to Cosmic Horror, because when the whole app is horror there is room to be specific.
What counts as horror
Gasper leans on TMDb, which supplies genres and keywords for every title. That net is wide on purpose: comedy horror, teen horror, gateway films and most of what sits on the thriller border are all in. If a film you think of as horror does not come up, it is usually because of how TMDb files it; the help entry on where film data comes from explains how to get that fixed.
Related
The manifesto says why we built it. The subgenre browsing page lists every shelf. For a comparison with general-purpose loggers, see Gasper versus Letterboxd.
