Updates

Type a forward slash in the search box and it lists every way to narrow what you are looking at — by director, actor, studio, keyword, country, award, runtime, critic score, and twenty-odd more. Keep typing to filter the list, then press Tab to take one and it writes the rest for you.

None of this is new to the search itself; there was simply no way to discover it without already knowing it was there. The full reference is still a click away under View search tips.

Reviews written with basic HTML now render the way they were meant to. Use <i> around a film title or <b> for emphasis and you get italics and bold, not the tags themselves. Links work too.

This matters most if you brought your library across from Letterboxd, where reviews are written that way — about three in five of the reviews already here were showing their markup as plain text. The change applies everywhere a review appears: film pages, your log, profiles and the activity feed.

The search box now helps you build a query. Type dir and it offers director: — press Tab to take it, and it switches to suggesting the people who fit: carp becomes John Carpenter · 22 films. The same works for actors, writers, composers, cinematographers, editors, studios, keywords, collections, awards and every other way the search can be narrowed.

Names with spaces are handled for you, and you can name several at once — actor:"tim curry, susan sarandon" finds films with either. Finished terms show as chips inside the box, so a long query stays readable.

You can now follow The Horror Codex on Bluesky. The link sits in the footer alongside Discord, Letterboxd, X, Instagram and YouTube.

The about page has been rewritten around what this place is actually for — a community of people who take horror seriously — and it now carries our Instagram feed at the bottom. That feed is self-hosted rather than an embed, which is a deliberate choice: every drop-in widget loads third-party scripts and sets cookies, and we would rather keep the promise that this site uses no tracking cookies at all.

Six themed, time-boxed list challenges now run through the year at /challenge — Love Hurts in February, The Old Ways in May, Summer Vacation in July, The Witching Season through October, and Twelve Days of Xmas in December. Entering is just making a list and tagging it with the challenge keyword. Each challenge page shows every entry, plus a most entered row once enough people have taken part, so you can see what the community keeps coming back to.

Your profile now lives at horrorcodex.com/@yourhandle, and your lists at @yourhandle/lists/…. Every URL that was ever public still resolves, so nothing you have shared is broken. We also opened a members directory — brands and curators are browsable there, and everyone else is reachable by search only, because nobody should be listed in a directory they never opted into.

The notes section on each film is now a proper board: start a titled topic, reply in a flat thread, quote someone directly, and mark spoilers with ||double pipes||. It is the per-film conversation the old IMDb boards used to be, and it lives on every one of the 65,000+ film pages.

You can now log a film every time you watch it, with the date, whether it was a rewatch, and a review of any length. Your watch log is the full history rather than a single seen flag, and reviews show up on the film page and on your profile. Importing from Letterboxd now brings your diary and your reviews across too — drop in the whole .zip and we will sort it out.

The search page now understands plain English. Click the sparkle in the search bar and describe what you’re after — “japanese found footage on shudder”, “slashers set at summer camp”, “Tom Savini make-up effects from the 80s” — and we’ll translate it into the right filters and run the search. It’s a smarter front door to the same catalog, and it always shows you exactly how it read your request so you can adjust from there.

A new release calendar lists every upcoming horror film with a confirmed date for the next twelve months, grouped by month. The homepage now also surfaces what’s in theaters now, what’s newly arrived on streaming, and what’s coming soon — so you can always see what’s worth watching this week.

We started a Discord server — come ask questions, suggest films, flag anything broken, or just talk horror. There’s a bot in there too: type /film to pull up any film’s details without leaving the chat.

Search results are now ordered by our own community’s ratings by default, rather than critic scores alone — and the ranking sharpens as more members rate films. You can still sort by Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, popularity, or newest whenever you like.

A new kind of list that members build together. The Horror Codex starts a Community List around a theme — time-loop films, folk horror, killer cars — and any signed-in member can add films that fit. Every addition is credited to whoever made it and counts toward the contributor leaderboard. Look for the Community filter on the lists page.

Creating and editing your own lists is far smoother now. The editor is a single page with click-to-edit title and description, drag-to-reorder posters, per-film notes, and one-click adding — from a search box or straight from your watchlist, seen, and rated films.

There’s now a leaderboard recognizing the people who build out the Codex — the films rated, lists published, notes written, and edits that sharpen the catalog. Each board can be viewed all-time or for the current month.

Your Seen list now opens a preview panel when you click a poster — the same one you get on the search page — so you can rate a film’s intensity without leaving the page. There’s also a new My Intensity sort to order your watched films up most to least extreme.

Every film now has a second rating beside the usual stars: intensity. It measures how intense or punishing a film’s content is — from gateway horror to the genuinely extreme — and is kept completely separate from how good the film is. Look for the scream-face control on any film page and rate what you’ve watched.

You can now follow other people on the site. Your homepage and the new activity feed surface the films the people you follow have recently rated, watched, added to a list, or written about. This is the basis of a new layer of social interaction on the site, but these features will be based around film discovery, rather than user clout.

Notes on films can now be reacted to with a small set of emoji, and curated lists have their own comment threads. This enables discussion and recommendations.

We launched a weekly newsletter covering new horror in theaters and on streaming, a video of the week, and an editor’s pick. Sign up in the footer, or read past issues in the archive.

Directors, actors, writers, and crew now have their own pages that collect their full horror filmography. Click any name on a film to see everything they’ve worked on in the genre.

The editorial content on the genre, decade, country, and format pages has been substantially rewritten and expanded. Each page now carries a deeper history text, a longer list of essential films, and refined key filmmakers and actors lists — all cross-linked so you can follow a thread from one corner of the genre to the next.