About

goreledger is a horror film database and magazine. It covers the whole genre, from the 1931 Universal cycle through the DPP video nasties to whatever came out last month, and it is written by hand rather than scraped.

What it is for

Deciding what to watch tonight. Most film databases are built for cataloguing, which is a different job. The five axes here (dread, gore, atmosphere, rewatchability and disturb factor) exist because those are the questions horror viewers actually ask, and because "7.4 out of 10" answers none of them. A film can be drenched in blood and forgettable, or nearly bloodless and ruin your week.

Blurbs are pitches

Every entry tells you why to bother or why not. None of them recap the plot. If you want to know what happens in act two, that is what the film is for.

Alternate titles

Horror films were renamed constantly, and every other database makes you already know the "correct" title before it will help you. Search here for Twitch of the Death Nerve, Carnage or Bay of Blood and you land on the same page. That is a small thing that took a schema decision and it is one of the reasons this site exists.

The editorial stance

This site says plainly when a film is racist, when it is cruel to animals, or when it is built on footage that should not exist. It does not file those things under "of its time" and it does not pretend they are not there.

It also does not moralise. Stating that six animals were killed on camera is information you want before pressing play. Announcing that a film should not have been made is a sermon, and there are better places to read one. The material is documented because it is part of the history of the genre, and the reader is treated as capable of deciding what to do with that.

Legal sources only

Where-to-watch data covers streaming, rental and disc from legitimate services. A site that documents films seized by police does not also hand out torrents.

Where the facts come from

Metadata (year, country, runtime, director, alternate titles) comes from Wikidata. Artwork and trailer data come from TMDB. Prosecution history for the DPP entries is sourced individually and is the part most likely to contain an error, so if you can improve one, say so.

This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

The sister site

reelscum.com is the other half of this. It covers the grindhouse and exploitation circuit broadly: giallo, mondo, women in prison, nunsploitation, biker pictures, the whole disreputable shelf.

The two overlap on purpose. A film like Cannibal Holocaust or I Spit on Your Grave belongs on both, and it is filed differently on each because the question each site asks about it is different. Same builder, same rules about hand-written entries and no moralising.

Who

One person, writing it slowly. New entries go in complete or they do not go in. Articles land every week or two.