#gore

#gore

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate's Scaredy Scale is here to help. We've put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things-some viewers can't stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can't stomach arterial spurts-

Considering the oeuvre of Stuart Gordon, "restraint" is rarely a word that comes to mind. From the bloody extremes of Re-Animator to the farcical comedy of Stuck, Gordon was the master of, as Roger Ebert put it when reviewing Dolls, "glorious exercises in bad taste, wretched excess, and blood-soaked horrors." If Ebert was unconvinced by the "more elegant, civilized, artistic and clever" Dolls, it did lay the groundwork for a movie that gels Gordon's bloody best with his unerring desire to understand who we are, deep down, which pervades all his films-even if often obscured by buckets of blood.

Shortly after last month's Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle confirmed last weekend as the highest-grossing anime feature of all time a big-screen outing for a movie adaptation of what, in manga terms, is a relative upstart: Tatsuki Fujimoto's gore-soaked coming-of-age saga, first serialised in 2018. Standard critical guidance applies: what will doubtless be catnip for fans is likely to prove varyingly baffling for newcomers, arriving late to a frenetic game offering few chances for catchup.

I have well established, for those with even a pittance of interest, that my taste in horror is not aligned with the mainstream. I mostly don't respond to allegory, and I need the images to do more than flash and provide the gore, which I also like plenty. In other words, I have never met another critic who likes either of the two movies I'm rhapsodizing today, the 2019 remake of "The Grudge" and Leigh Whannell's 2025 take on "Wolf Man": gory, widescreen odysseys about desperate people pushed into extranatural mysteries, breaking the chains of torment.