Every time I went to IMDb or Letterboxd and saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre sitting at 7.4/10 or 3.8/5, I'd think: the internet needs a horror-specific film database. So I built one. And the beta testers have rated Chain Saw a proper 4.7/5. (hurrah!) We've always needed a site by and for us, because "horror" is too broad a genre to lump into one bucket. There's body horror, mad science, home invasion, eco-horror, ghost stories, folk horror tales, killer dolls... a proper exploration of all these films requires a map. And mapping these films into various subgenres, it turns out, is something you can (after a couple of weeks of trial and error) train an LLM to do. (again, hurrah!) Which is the whole reason this exists now and couldn't have three years ago. No one person could hand-classify 65,000 horror (and horror-adjacent) films. So AI drafts the tags, I audit them against the horror-studies canon, and the community corrects what we both get wrong. But that was just the start of my wishlist. I wanted a search interface with a preview pane that felt like grabbing a VHS off the shelf at the rental store and flipping it to the back cover. I wanted to let users vote not just on a film's quality, but also its intensity, and to let them dim films they've already seen from search results. I wanted to let them filter by streaming service, so they can find something and know it's available. I wanted, instead of two dozen Sharksploitation lists created by different users, a Community Sharksploitation List that all users could collaborate on. I wanted to give users the option to improve the recommendation algorithm by suggesting related films. I wanted an interactive world map, and detailed index pages to showcase horror films produced in different countries. I wanted a blog where I could create charts and graphs based on the site's data to illustrate different trends in horror over the years. I wanted to give users the ability to discover one another through published lists or notes they've left on film detail pages, and to allow them to follow one another. I even created a leaderboard to track user contributions. And more. I might even think of something new tomorrow. But I just started building everything that I thought would be cool and didn't stop until I had the thing that I wanted. And now I do. Which is pretty rad. People say "built with love" and it's kind of a cringe cliche, but I hope that's how using this site feels. At least to true fans of horror cinema. And I hope the site grows into a thriving community of horror obsessives. Casuals keep out! JK. Kinda. 🙂 Anyhow — I'd love feedback. What features am I missing? If you have a good idea, I'll build it. Also, dare you to find a horror flick that's not in the database. Thanks for taking a peek!

The Horror Codex

Every horror film ever made, properly sorted.

Every horror film ever made, properly sorted.