Hi Product Hunt. I am the founder and built all of Watch Darkly myself, front to back. It started with a question I kept hitting: is this horror film actually scary, or just gross? A single star rating collapses very different films into one number. On our scale, The Conjuring is fear 9, gore 2. Saw is fear 3, gore 7. Their overall scores are nearly identical (8.3 and 8.0), and they are completely different nights. One number cannot tell you which one you are in the mood for. Often times horror movie scores are low on traditional film sites like imdb (which puts Smile and Smile 2 at a paltry 6.5/10) - this is insultingly low and doesn't scale properly with the other genres (horror films are rated historically low on imdb). So every film is scored on five separate axes (Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, Intensity, and an Overall), and search combines them with tags and jump-scare counts. Ask for high fear with low gore, or folk horror with no jump scares, and get a real result. The scary-but-not-gory cut, the thing I always wanted and could never search for anywhere, has its own page. Recommendations come from a model of your own taste as a vector rather than crowd popularity, and the similar-films rail explains each pick in plain words. The scores are not a crowd average and not AI. Two curators (my co-founder and I) rate every film against a written rubric, and the displayed score averages our independent ratings. The methodology is public at watchdarkly.com/how-we-score, including how often we disagree: across 78 films we both rated, our overall scores differ by about half a point on average. Honest current state: this is early. The catalog is over 540 films, all hand-curated, and over 300 carry a Curator Score so far. Intensity is the newest axis and covers over half the scored films now. Recommendations need a little input first: you favorite a few films and it recommends from there. Free to use. The ask: sign up, favorite a few horror films you love, and tell me what the recommendations get wrong. Where does the taste model miss, and which film is scored wrong? That feedback is what I want most today.

Watch Darkly

Horror films scored on fear, gore, atmosphere, intensity

Horror films scored on fear, gore, atmosphere, intensity