The VHSCREAM fear-axis dataset

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What is in it

One row per work. Columns: catalogue code, title, year, medium, creator, the six axis scores as integers from 0 to 100, tags, and the canonical URL. The JSON carries the same rows plus a machine-readable description of what 0 and 100 mean on each axis.

What the six axes measure

Pace Of Fear — 0 is slow-burn dread, 100 is relentless shock. The Threat — 0 is a supernatural threat, 100 is human monsters. Viscera — 0 is restraint over gore, 100 is explicit viscera. Era Bias — 0 is analog-era texture, 100 is modern craft. Tone — 0 is a bleak, unforgiving tone, 100 is gleeful black comedy. Reality Anchor — 0 is grounded realism, 100 is dream logic.

How the scores were made

Each score is one person's judgment against a written rubric, not an average of votes and not derived from any third-party rating. That is the point of it and also its main limitation: it is a consistent eye rather than a consensus. The rubric is public so you can disagree with a specific number rather than with the idea.

What we do not claim

This is not a quality ranking. A score of 008 on tone does not mean a work is bad; it means it is bleak. Low is not worse anywhere on any axis, which is why these numbers are published as measurements and never as a star rating.

The correlation reported on the map — that pace predicts how much is shown in slow horror but not in fast horror — rests on roughly fifty works per group. That is fragile. A handful of additions could move it, and we expect to revise it. The dataset is published so you can check it rather than take it.

Citing it

VHSCREAM, Fear-axis scores for 105 horror works, version 1.0, 4 October 2026. vhscream.com/data

Changelog

v1.0 (4 October 2026) — first release, 105 works, six axes. Scores are drafts pending a second human pass unless a work's page says otherwise.