Who makes VHSCREAM, and what that means for the scores
VHSCREAM scores horror on six continuous axes of fear — 105 works and 630 scores so far. Every number is one human's judgment against a written rubric. Not an average of votes, not derived from any third-party rating, and published as a dataset so you can check it.
Who writes this
Everything here is currently published under the VHSCREAM name rather than a personal byline. That is a real limitation and worth stating plainly rather than dressing up: criticism is a person-branded field, and a reader deciding whether to trust a score is entitled to know whose eye it is. The byline goes on when there is a person willing to put their name against every number, not before.
What one scoring eye costs you
A single scorer is the only reason the numbers mean anything: a consistent eye produces a scale where 030 on one page is the same 030 on another, which is exactly what an aggregate of strangers cannot give you. It is also the honest weakness of the whole project. One person's blind spots are in the data, and the map documents two of them being found and corrected — a missing corner of mainstream jump-scare horror, and its mirror image in the multiplex splatter the index had skipped.
Two rules follow from that, and they are enforced by the build rather than promised. No vector, no page — nothing publishes without a human score. And a score is labelled a draft on its own page until a human has confirmed it against the rubric a second time, with the date shown.
What we do not do
No star ratings, ours or anyone else's. No third-party rating appears anywhere on this site and the build fails if one does. The axes are measurements and not verdicts: 008 on tone means a work is bleak, not that it is bad, and low is not worse anywhere on any axis.
Cover art, trailers and streaming availability come from TMDB, Open Library and MusicBrainz. The scores are ours.
How to argue with a number
Every axis on every work page has a control to challenge the score. Votes do not move the numbers — they decide what a human looks at first. A score that people keep disputing goes to the top of the re-scoring queue, which is the only sensible thing to do with a disagreement about a judgment.