What Kind of Scary?

How it works

Trigger-warning sites tell you whether something happens. This one also tries to tell you how much, how graphically, and what the rest of the movie feels like, so you can decide if it is your kind of scary.

Three kinds of information

  1. Scare profile. Five scores out of ten:
    • Scary: How frightened a typical horror-tolerant viewer will be, overall.
    • Dread: Slow-burn tension and unease that builds and does not let go.
    • Jump scares: How often it makes you flinch with sudden loud scares.
    • Disturbing: How much it sticks with you afterward. Lingering, upsetting images and ideas.
    • Grim: Tone. Low means campy, playful or cathartic. High means bleak, hopeless, cruel.
  2. What kind of scary. Flavor tags like supernatural, demonic & religious, psychological, slasher, serial killer & crime and 18 more, so “I want psychological but not supernatural” is a filter, not a hope.
  3. Upsetting elements. 42 specific things across 9 categories, each with an intensity:
    • None: Reported as not present
    • Brief: Brief, implied, off-screen, or a single moment
    • Moderate: Clearly depicted, or recurs a few times
    • Heavy: Graphic, prolonged, or central to the film

Where the data comes from

  • Community reports. Anyone who has seen a movie can submit a report. Scores are averaged; element intensities are the rounded average of everyone's votes. A report that says “none” counts, because knowing something is absent is half the point. There are 0 reports so far.
  • Editorial baseline. 110 well-known films were written up by hand to seed the site. The baseline counts as two votes, so a handful of community reports can move it.
  • Keyword inference. Every movie in the catalogue (11,364 of them so far) gets provisional tags from its TMDB keywords: “rape” becomes a heavy sexual-assault tag, “dog” becomes nothing because a dog being present does not mean a dog gets hurt. These are marked as inferred and are replaced as soon as a person reports.

Dealbreakers

Your dealbreakers live in your browser (a cookie and local storage; no account). With them set, the browse page hides anything that crosses the line, and every movie page opens with a verdict. “Never” means intensity above none; “Brief is OK” means intensity above brief.

What this is not

A guarantee. A movie with no tags has usually just not been looked at by anyone. The verdict box says “not yet checked” when that is the case. If you watch something and it surprised you, please go back and report it so the next person is not surprised.