What we believe about horror

You came out of the theater shaking and laughing at the same time, and you have been trying to explain that feeling to people ever since. We built Gasper for the feeling. This is what we believe about it.

Horror is the only genre you leave more alive

Every other genre sends you home the way it found you. Horror does not. You sat in the dark and something came for you, and you survived it. For two hours you met a fear on your own terms, at a distance you chose, and you walked out more awake than you have been all week.

That is not a cheap thrill. It is the oldest thing stories do, and horror is the genre that still does it without apology. We think it deserves a place of its own, not a tag on a general-purpose film app beside the romantic comedies. So Gasper is horror only. Every film here is trying to scare you, and that is exactly what makes every score worth comparing with every other.

A number you type drifts

When you rate a film out of 10, the number drifts. A 7 in March and a 7 in October rarely mean the same thing, and favorites get top marks because they are favorites. Gasper skips the guessing: you only ever say which of two films was scarier, and your scores come from those choices.

A comparison is honest. Which was scarier, this one or that one, has an answer you can give in a second and defend in a year, because it is anchored to two things that happened to you. So on Gasper you never type a number. You answer head-to-heads against films you have already ranked, and the app places the new one in your list. The scare score is where it landed, read as a number. You cannot inflate it. You can only change your mind and rank again, which you are welcome to do.

Scary and loved are different things

A film can be the most frightening thing you have ever seen and not one you would watch again. A film can be one you love that never once made you check the hallway.

So Gasper gives a number to one thing only: how scary. The scare score says how scary a film was to you, and nothing else. Beside it there is a heart, a simple yes for the films you love, separate from the score and with no number of its own. Loving a film that did not scare you is perfectly fine; tap the heart and keep its honest score.

Your fear is yours

What frightens you is personal, and we treat it that way. Your rankings reach the community only as an anonymous aggregate. Any rank can go into Stealth mode. Your account can be private. If you let Gasper find your friends from your contacts, only hashes leave your phone.

Community without the leaderboard of cruelty

Horror fans are generous people who sometimes forget it online. We want the argument, because the argument is the best part of the genre. We do not want the contest in which the person who scares least wins.

So the Scare Tolerance reading says plainly where you land and attaches no prize to any end of it. Scaring easily means the films work on you. Being hard to rattle means you have to look harder. The leaderboards rank films by how scary the crowd found them, and fans by how much horror they have watched, never by how brave they claim to be.

And when someone is cruel anyway, you can block them, and they will not be told. You can report any post, review, comment, list or profile, and it is reviewed within 24 hours. A community built around fear has to be a safe place to admit one. That is the whole point.

Rank what scared you, and your rankings will show you what your fear looks like.