About
What is Horror of the Year?
Horror of the Year (HOTY) is a website that aggregates horror movie reviews from over 10 sources to come up with a summarized score called Rot Score.
While the HOTY team (the founder Mig and Satan's Boardroom) provide their own reviews for select films, the rankings mostly rely on the most established genre and mainstream sites (see below for our sources).
Because a lot of the mainstream sites don't get horror all of the time, we made the scoring formula lean heavily on the genre sites and horror fans (ex: Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, The Daily Dead, etc + the HOTY team).
The mainstream sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, IMDb, etc are still a big part of the scoring, but under 50% of the total.
We hope the horror community finds this site as a valuable resource for discovering new films. The site is still young (writing this on June 16 2026), so let us know what tweaks we should make. Or if you love it as is, let us know!
What is Rot Score?
Rot Score is a 0–100 composite index. Every film receives a score and a grade. Scores are calculated from three weighted buckets. If any bucket is unavailable, its weight is redistributed proportionally across the remaining buckets so the score always sums correctly.
The Formula
ROT SCORE
Satan's Boardroom avg × 0.10
+
Genre Sites avg × 0.50
+
Mainstream Sites avg × 0.40
Proportional redistribution
If any bucket is missing, its weight is split proportionally across the available buckets. A film with only two buckets still produces a valid score — the weights simply rescale to sum to 100%.
Broad Excellence Bonus
Straight averaging has a flaw: a film that's strong across all three buckets gets dragged toward the middle of three imperfect-but-strong numbers, while a thinly-reviewed film with one glowing bucket can float above it unchallenged. When two or more buckets are populated, we add a bonus based on the same weighted average as the formula itself (10% / 50% / 40%) — not a flat average across buckets. That means a middling Satan's Boardroom score, worth only 10% of the total, can't single- handedly cancel the bonus a film has earned from strong Genre and Mainstream numbers. A genuinely weak Genre or Mainstream bucket still pulls the weighted average down and suppresses the bonus, since those carry real weight.
Ceiling Compression
A flat cap has a problem: once a film reaches it, there's nowhere left to put something even better — everything great gets flattened to the same number. Above a raw score of 90, Rot Score instead eases asymptotically toward 100 instead of clipping flat. A film that's genuinely more dominant than today's best still ranks higher, with real room left above it. Nothing reaches a perfect 100.
Sources & Weights
Satan's Boardroom — 10% of Rot Score
The Satan's Boardroom bucket is an equal-weight average of every individual board member's score plus Mig's personal score — one member, one vote. Mig's Score is also displayed separately on each film's page.
| Source | Raw Scale | Normalization |
|---|---|---|
| Board Scoreone row per board member | /10 | × 10 |
| Mig's Scorefounder's score | 0 – 100 | direct |
Genre Sites — 50% of Rot Score
All genre outlets have equal weight within this bucket.
| Outlet | Raw Scale | Normalization | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bloody Disgusting | /5 | × 20 | equal |
| Dread Central | /5 | × 20 | equal |
| Daily Dead | /5 | × 20 | equal |
| Nightmare on Film Street | 0–100 | direct | equal |
| Certified Forgotten | /5 | × 20 | equal |
| Bloody Flicks | /5 | × 20 | equal |
Mainstream Sites — 40% of Rot Score
RT Critic and RT Audience are averaged together and count as 50% of this bucket. All other mainstream sources share the remaining 50% equally.
RT Scores — 50% of Mainstream bucket
| Source | Raw Scale | Normalization |
|---|---|---|
| RT Critic | % | direct |
| RT Audience | % | direct |
Other Sources — 50% of Mainstream bucket, equal weight
| Source | Raw Scale | Normalization |
|---|---|---|
| Letterboxd | /5 | × 20 |
| IMDb | /10 | × 10 |
| Metacritic Critic | 0–100 | direct |
| Metacritic User | /10 | × 10 |
| Slash Film | /10 | × 10 |
| IGN | /10 | × 10 |
| The Film Stage | 0–100 | direct |
| Collider | /10 | × 10 |
Reddit Sentiment (not yet scored)
We still read a film's Reddit discussion thread and log a 1–5 sentiment read — are reactions mostly positive, mostly negative, or split? How strongly are people expressing praise or criticism? Is the conversation driven by genuine enthusiasm, disappointment, confusion, or hype bleeding over from before release?
That number no longer factors into Rot Score. It was previously a small, capped slice of the Genre Sites bucket, but a single person reading one thread isn't a real consensus, and folding it into an averaged bucket buried more than it added. We're holding onto the data — and the thread links — to give Reddit its own proper weight once we've got a better way to score it.
Grade Scale
