About watchdarkly

watchdarkly is a horror-only film catalog built around one idea: horror deserves to be rated and discussed on its own terms. Mainstream review sites score horror against comedies and dramas, so a 6.5 could mean almost anything. Here every film is rated separately on Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, and an overall score — so you know what kind of horror you're walking into.

The site is built and maintained by Alan Willey. It's an indie project, not a media company. See Contact for how to reach out.

How the site is built

Everything you read on watchdarkly is written by humans or sourced from TMDB.

• Scores— Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, and Overall — are submitted by curators and registered users. The site averages submitted ratings; curator scores carry a heavier weight. No score is algorithmically generated.
• Reviews are written by the person who rated the film.
• Subgenre guides, ranked lists, and editorial articles are written by Alan Willey. Each piece carries a byline.
• Tags, content warnings, and curation choices— which films enter the catalog, which subgenre they belong to, what mood they hit — are decided by hand.
• Plot summaries and taglines on each film page come from TMDB under their API terms, with attribution. We chose this over writing summaries ourselves because the premise of a film is utility text — the same kind of paragraph IMDB, Wikipedia, and Letterboxd all license or aggregate — and our editorial voice lives in the guides, lists, and articles, not in per-film blurbs.

If you spot a plot detail that's wrong in a TMDB-sourced summary, email support@watchdarkly.com— we can flag it back to TMDB and override it locally for our catalog.

Have a question?

See the Contact page for catalog suggestions, scoring questions, abuse reports, and anything else.