Talk:Lists of horror films

Untitled
I made a start to this list based on the content of Horror films and the corresponding category, but I'm sure many more can be added. -- RJH 21:02, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Re-arranging
I was looking at the list, and since it's getting complicated, would it be worth cleaning up mildly? I was thinking of arranging films like this perhaps, like in this example for 1964.

1964
Would this work? If it people like it, should there anything else be added to the list? or taken away, anything? Andrzejbanas 06:35, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

rv
I reverted the edit of adding Jaws 2 into the list, because the reason given was IMDB, and wikipedia does not accept that as a valid source. Thanks!! - Hair chr  m   04:13, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

About the last comment and the deleting of Jaws 2
I think that the users must be very careful when they revert the content of any page. First, the edit of adding Jaws 2 had a link to the wikipedia page Jaws 2, where there's plenty of information and sources (30 sources) about the movie, therefore the editing was incorrectliy reverted, against wikipedia principles. I recomend to read Contributing_to_Wikipedia, specially the part of “point out problems”, as wells as Help:Reverting, specially the part of “Don’t’s”.

Well, concerning to this page, I have not seen any editor that cites his o her sources (in the page o history page) in order to considerate a film as a “horror” film. I know the rules for citing sources, but there’s no chapter in the page to cite sources, and the “edit summary” must not be long (if that's the case, almost all the content is susceptible to being deleted). As the “horror” is not an “objective” element (for example: some people consider that some film is a horror film, but others consider it a sci fi or a thriller), the most accessible reference for the users is the IMDB (and other specialized pages) because has complete and neutral information about movies, regarding the particular view from the users. This is to observe the “neutral point of view”, one of the five pillars of wikipedia. Finally, if some wiki user o editor wants the sources about what kind of genre is the movie Jaws 2, and don't want to see the IMDB as a source, well, here they are (and I transcribe the "genre", as it appears):


 * Horror/Monster Film/Natural Horror  http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:25913
 * Action/Adventure and Suspense/Horror  http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1800082750/info
 * Thriller http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2000/07/14/jaws2_review.shtml Thriller
 * Horror/Susp  http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/jaws_2/
 * Horror/Susp http://crazy4cinema.com/Review/FilmsJ/f_jaws2.html
 * Horror Wikipedia page about Jaws 2

Good day. Omar1976 22:39, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Is Beetlejuice an horror movie?
Altough IMDB says it’s an Comedy / Fantasy / Horror (in third place), reviewers classified it as a comedy: a) Crazy4Cinema says it’s a Comedy/Afterlife; b) DVD Verdict, Comedy; c) AMG, Comedy/ Fantasy/Black Comedy; d) Rottentomatoes, Comedy.
 * It's got that Haunted House and spook vibe to it, but it's just more of a fantasy vibe to it. I wouldn't be against taking it off the list. Andrzejbanas 20:59, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you. While I have no problem with it being on the list, it doesn't really seem like a true horror film to me, and I wouldn't protest its removal. --Mears man 03:02, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Creepshow
A remake of this movie is on the list for both 2007 and 2008. I'm not sure which is correct, or if either of them are, so could somebody look into this? Also, I've noticed a lot of other things that may or may not be correct (ex. a movie titled "Wedding Slasher" that came out within the past couple years), and I think this article may need some clean-up. --Mears man 02:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Does Cheerleader Camp II (1990) exist?
Does Cheerleader Camp II exist? According to IMDB this sequel is also know as "Gory Graduation" or "Summerhouse Slaughter", but seems that those movies don't exist either. Omar1976 00:00, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
 * To my knowledge, it doesn't seem to exist from any seraches i've done.

New format
The list is getting long, and before it gets tagged with being a too long of an article. I've taken some attempt at creating a new style for the article.

An example of it is Here.

If no one is really against this, i'll start implanting it later, comments anyone? Andrzejbanas 09:05, 22 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, you started the page (an excellent decition), so I think you have the right to change the style. I agree. The new style looks fine. Omar1976 21:05, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Feel free to fill in any blanks, It still needs to be formatted over.Andrzejbanas 06:31, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Consistency
I have now finished most of the (current) large-scale edits to these lists, there are a few pages with Allmovie refs to convert and a couple with film titles which need bold-italic format.

I would like to improve the consistency of film list formats generally and I have been merging good features of other lists as I notice them. Please have a look at List of science-fiction films of the 1970s which has a lead setting the list contents in their context and a section of notes for awards etc. Such information looks like a useful addition to the horror lists too. The sections there conform (with empty sections omitted) to the common pattern of: See also MOS:APPENDIX. In order to make it easy for us to add notes as necessary, and to increase consistency among film lists generally, I will start renaming the current Notes sections References.
 * See also, for other relevant wikipedia articles
 * Notes, for additional information related to inline links
 * References, for references supporting article content related to inline links
 * Citations, for book etc citations used by short-form references
 * Further reading, for relevant books etc not part of an inline link
 * External links, for relevant online resources not part of an inline link

There is a new feature for notes: if we use, they get nice[a][b]... links. I've done this for several articles so far without problems and recommend this approach.

I will continue to add the full width navboxes at the end of the lists, now including the Horror fiction links which are already on this top-level list. It seems better to have a double blank line before these, to give some separation from preceding references. The first list with this most recent set of changes is List of horror films of 2002.

From now on I will post comments relevant to all the horror film lists on this talk page. --Mirokado (talk) 18:26, 5 August 2011 (UTC) (update) --Mirokado (talk) 21:03, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm late to the party, but great work on this list. It's nice to have someone work on these articles other than myself and uhh..random vandals! I agree with most items you are saying, and I'll try to expand and add citations as per stated. Andrzejbanas (talk) 05:04, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the positive feedback! I have started going through the lists again to iron out any inconsistencies arising from manual editing (these are inevitable, no criticism of anyone is implied, sorting such things out is what we have "little scripts" for). The only new updates will be: I'll also be making the display of book citations consistent as I go through. (I will leave that until later, it slows down the more routine changes). As last time, I will make these changes several pages at a time and I do not anticipate that this need interrupt changes anyone else may want to make. --Mirokado (talk) 15:18, 27 November 2011 (UTC) update --Mirokado (talk) 16:45, 27 November 2011 (UTC)
 * replacing by  because the article display is broken for table columns without a suitable fixed width
 * removing any spacing between flags since some have it, some do not and the display seems tidier without

Red Links
Thank you, Mirokado, for your efforts in cleaning up the horror film lists. However, I am confused about the reasoning behind the approach to red links on film titles. It seems as if we are keeping red links when they require disambiguation; for example, the movie Haunts (1977) has no WP page, but is red linked because Haunts sends the user to a page about places that might be haunted.

According to WP:Red link, a red link should only be left in place if a term could plausibly sustain an article. For old movies, in particular, this seems a difficult thing to determine. You could argue that any of them could plausibly become notable in the future and sustain an article, or you could argue that only those that satisfy the current notability criteria should be red linked. However, in the example given above, I don't see how the existence of a Haunts page has any bearing on the plausibility of an article for the unrelated film appearing.

For film titles that don't currently have WP pages, I think we should take the approach of either red linking all of them or none of them by default. If someone then wants to ascertain the notability of individual films and red-link them or remove their red links, they can do so. For actors and directors, I think we should avoid red-linking entirely because of the concerns noted in WP:Red link. Sp4cetiger (talk) 20:17, 7 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the kind comment! The criterion for the mass removal of red links was indeed "remove all unpiped red links". This is a criterion which can easily be evaluated automatically. We would probably retain a red link changed by a suffix too but I have not checked that. The main reason for retaining the remaining links was that the presence of the pipe indicates that someone has given some thought to the disposition of any article so I did not want to remove those semi-automatically. I've now started checking all the unlinked names (more or less, unlinked strings in the table delimited by cell boundaries, commas or ampersands). A few correspond to existing articles which I linked, some have no article which I left alone and there are a few corresponding to an unrelated article. It is certainly sensible to discuss how to deal with these:
 * Film titles


 * 1) film titles sometimes match an earlier film or original work: this in itself suggests that complete coverage of the previous art as a topic would require an article for the current film too, thus it is reasonable to provide the piped red link and creating the articles for those would improve coverage generally
 * 2) you are right to highlight Haunts as the weakest of the links I added!
 * 3) in a few cases it has taken some time to pick a reasonable disambiguating phrase, if we just remove those red links someone else would have to do that investigation again
 * 4) if the film does not deserve its own article, it is at least questionable whether it should appear in these lists. That is not an argument for making red links everywhere, but a few created for a consistent reason will do no harm.
 * People

For the above reasons, I would not support a wholesale removal of the remaining red links, would discourage the removal of piped links to people, but will not oppose well explained individual removals (which I would count as "normal edits to improve Wikipedia" rather than "reversions"). I will not link any more like Haunts unless we decide otherwise. --Mirokado (talk) 18:25, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) in the cases where a name corresponds to someone different, providing the piped link makes it clear that this is indeed someone different and any potential same-name confusion is some reason for creating a new article if possible. Since some of those appearing in these lists also appear in porn movies I would prefer to avoid any such confusion
 * 2) in the particular case of Melissa Newman, it looks as if there are two actresses with the same name (I always thought Equity forbade that, but it appears not or no longer). The piped link will prevent some well-meaning drive-by enthusiast linking the wrong one which might go unnoticed. In that particular case, I will try to create an article for the missing Miss Newman.
 * I see your point about the removal of red links (at least as far as the film titles go) and agree that they shouldn't be removed wholesale. However, if we wish to restrict this list to films that meet the notability criteria (this seems reasonable to me), it seems to me to that any of them could conceivably have their own page and can therefore be red-linked.  Removing those links seems to me more of a "reversion" simply because, the way it is now, we'll have to periodically check the unlinked titles for new Wikipedia entries.


 * Concerning individual persons with red links, I still think all such links should be removed, since many actors/directors have strong biases against horror movies (however miguided that may be) and might be upset about being wrongly associated with them. However, considering that the small number of such links on each page, it's probably not worth making a big issue of. - Sp4cetiger (talk) 22:28, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * If anyone else responds, consensus can form as normal. Otherwise I will leave the remaining redlinks to you as you are continuing to make substantial improvements to the lists. Once you have finished checking for films which need to be removed, and added any necessary piped links, I can go through all the lists adding plain links to the remaining titles, if you wish. Just post a request here. --Mirokado (talk) 20:18, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Headings
I very much like Mirokado's suggestion of including headings at the top of each horror film list. I suggest we take it a step further and coordinate the content with the horror film article, much as has been done with the science fiction film article, and include "See also" links at the heading of each history subsection of horror film. There is some ambiguity in the post-1950s, where the lists that have been split into individual years. I think having substantial text for each individual year would be overkill, so perhaps we should only have text headings in the decade index pages (like this one). - Sp4cetiger (talk) 22:17, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * You have made a good start with these introductions. Well done. I agree with keeping them at the decade level. --Mirokado (talk) 20:20, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Types of media to include
I've been going through the lists and removing entries that seem out of place. I have excluded the following types of media:

- I have excluded both TV serials and individual episodes of these serials. The former clearly don't belong on a list of "films" and the latter, although not terribly different from film shorts, would add far too much clutter to the lists to be useful.
 * Television Serials and Miniseries

- Although interesting for the progression of the genre, documentaries about horror don't qualify as horror films themselves.
 * Documentaries

- This is the most difficult one, as genre is a subjective thing and different sources give different genres for each movie. My general rule of thumb has been to look at all of the usual sources for general movie info (IMDb, Allrovi, and Rotten Tomatoes) and if none of them give horror as a genre, I just remove it from the list outright. If Allrovi lists it as horror, I leave it on the list and use that as a reference, otherwise I leave the reference blank until a more reliable source can be found. Any movie I've removed can of course be placed back in the list if a reliable source is found listing it as horror.
 * Non-horror Films

Media I have included on the list but which could be debatable include


 * Made-for-TV Movies

- These movies are numerous and often very low-impact, but there have been a handful (e.g. Stephen King's It) that are notable within the genre. At least one list has excluded these movies, so other opinions are welcome.


 * Direct-to-Video/DVD

- Again, these movies are numerous and generally low-impact. This often includes sequels to obviously-notable films, so it is not uncommon for them to have their own Wikipedia page. It is primarily for this reason that I have left them in.


 * Film shorts

- It's likely that many of these don't meet the Wikipedia notability criteria, but this is time-consuming and difficult to determine on a film-by-film basis. The main argument I can see for including them is that they were key to the very beginnings of the horror film genre, with such films as Le Manoir du diable (1896) and Frankenstein (1910). Not wanting to remove those films from the list, I decided to retain film shorts, but again there is room for debate.

Let me know if anyone has any objections to the above criteria, otherwise I think we should consider them general guidelines for the lists. - Sp4cetiger (talk) 04:07, 23 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Your criteria look fine to me and are leading to sensible decisions. It is perfectly reasonable to keep shorter films from the earliest decades for the reasons you state. --Mirokado (talk) 20:24, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Sourcing
As with any page, sources for movies in the list have to be reliable (WP:RS), but I haven't found any one source that can be the go-to for all movies that belong on this list. The closest is Allrovi (formerly allmovie), which has a huge database of movie info and has been deemed reliable by the Wikipedia community. If that fails, some online alternatives include the American Film Institute, DVD Verdict, and Bloody Disgusting, all of which are considered reliable on WP. IMDb certainly has the largest database of all, but is largely user-generated and cannot be considered reliable. The general procedure I've been following for sourcing is detailed below:


 * Films without existing Wikipedia pages

If there is an Allrovi entry that includes at least the title, year, and genre (horror), I will use it as a reference. If any of the other info (cast, director, country of origin) is missing from the Allrovi entry, I blank those fields in the table and wait for a second source to be added. If the film was entered in a year that disagrees with the Allrovi entry, I move it to the appropriate year (even if IMDb disagrees). If/when the film gets its own Wikipedia page, detailed discussions about the appropriate film year should take place there and later be implemented on the list.

A lot of the films that have previously been entered on the list would be unlikely to be recognized as notable by the Wikipedia community and therefore don't belong on the list. I try to get a rough sense of this from the IMDb entry, looking primarily at the number of critical reviews that are linked there. If the film is getting minimal critical attention and I can't find a reliable source for the listing, I remove it. I won't object to anyone who replaces such a film, so long as they provide a reliable source to accompany the listing.


 * Films with existing Wikipedia pages

The main difference here is that I strive for internal consistency as to the film year. Whatever year is listed in the article, I try to find a source that matches that year. As I mention above, I think the appropriate place for such discussions is within the film article. In the rare circumstance that I can't find a source that agrees with the year given in the article, I will go in and change the article, accompanying the change with a source.

Comments/suggestions are of course welcome. Sp4cetiger (talk) 10:07, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

2010s split
It looks about time to split the list of horror films of the 2010s list into separate lists for each year. Should be fairly quick after the practice with earlier decades. I will post progress updates here as for other systematic changes. --Mirokado (talk) 16:12, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I was thinking the same thing. The lists were getting a bit long again. Andrzejbanas (talk) 16:57, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Finished the split for 2010 and 2011 now.
 * We should consider when to split 2012. I think there is no point in doing it too soon: new page patrollers will just waste our time with deletion requests. On the other hand, it would be preferable to have the page history mostly in the right place. How about waiting until half a dozen or so 2012 films have been on general release for a while so there is some substantial content for the new list? We can leave a table in the 2010s list for firmly announced release dates for the next year so that editors have a home for their end-of-year updates... --Mirokado (talk) 17:26, 7 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I've now split the 2012 table. --Mirokado (talk) 20:12, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Sortable tables
I have recently added sort keys to the title/name column of List of longest films by running time and List of dance companies. This works quite nicely and it is only necessary to add the key to titles which start with something like "The". If we do this to these lists we could make them sortable too. Clearly that would be a substantial set of edits which should be done consistently, so I would update my "little script" to do the hard work, but I don't want to start if other editors prefer unsortable lists anyway. Please respond here to say whether you would like this change or not. --Mirokado (talk) 17:01, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
 * This would be helpful for articles that are single year, but could mess up with films that are the full decades. I'm for it for the articles on the individual year articles. Andrzejbanas (talk) 23:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, I will do that when convenient (probably not for a while now, but it is not urgent...) --Mirokado (talk) 10:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I've updated List of horror films of 2011 to be sortable with sort keys for the titles, but I'm not sure how useful this would be without more work. The director and cast columns sort by first names which makes the sorting not very useful (a bit easier to see if more than one film has the same first director or actor I suppose). The country column does not sort as each line has just an icon, no text. In the notes it may be useful to be able to group similar notes by sorting. It is of course possible to add keys to the other columns (last name of first person, first country name), but that would mean adding several keys to each line which, although possible and perfectly easy by script, would make normal manual updates rather burdensome. I will leave things as they are for now and await comments from other editors. (Adding the keys for the titles is less obtrusive as many titles do not need an extra key). --Mirokado (talk) 21:52, 8 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I've just noticed a template,, which manages the keys better than the raw code I was using (see updates to the other lists mentioned above). However, there is not much benefit in having just one column sortable and adding sortability to the other columns for these particular tables would be too obtrusive, so I will revert the current sortability changes, it will only affect two or three pages. --Mirokado (talk) 21:53, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Accessibility, MOS compliance
I will be making some table source updates to List of horror films of the 1920s (not too long, currently stable) to improve WP:ACCESSIBILITY and WP:MOS compliance. Please pay attention to the format of the rows if updating the content. Once (if) we are happy with these changes I will roll them out to all the lists with the help of a "little script" as before. I will post any progress reports here and of course comments here also welcome. --Mirokado (talk) 12:25, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

I've finished the initial changes now: This is a substantial change to the article source, just the background change to the current visual presentation and I hope a significant improvement for users of screen readers or similar. This or something similar is essential to comply with various Wikipedia norms (see the links above and WP:DTT for information about tables in particular). I would really like editors watching this page to comment, even if only to say "yeah, yeah, that's OK". --Mirokado (talk) 17:29, 18 May 2012 (UTC) updated Mirokado (talk) 00:48, 19 May 2012 (UTC) Well, no objections so I will carry on as time permits. Stages will be: I'll start one or two at a time at least until the routine is established. --Mirokado (talk) 21:26, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
 * What would eventually be a new template generating each table element is embedded in the article, just while we discuss it, so we can decide what to call it and the scope of its functionality. The template invocations will look a bit tidier once they start with just a template name.
 * Once the tables are defined by a template like this, subsequent reformatting becomes easier as just the template can be changed.
 * The table has a caption, which is used by assistive technology to explain the structure and meaning of the subsequent information. With the very brief lead paragraph it seems a bit clumsy just to repeat the same text. A better lead would help here...
 * The column header cells have column scope.
 * The year separator header now has row-scope, so that assistive technology can recognise the correct scope of the column headings.
 * The background for the year separator is a bit too dark, I will tweak the corresponding template later...
 * (update) now set to #e9e9e9, see Template talk:Year header for further details.
 * (update) the explicit bolding for the year link is unnecessary when the containing cells is a table header
 * The title cell in each row is now a row-scope header, thus enabling assistive technology to describe each row meaningfully.
 * Default text formatting for a table header cell is bold, so the bold film titles are WP:MOS conformant.
 * create a template for the table row definitions and update the 1920s list
 * update the other decade-at-a-time lists
 * update the lists for the remaining decades

I've updated the 1920s page again, with a simpler implementation which uses new template code for the left-aligned row header definition, similar to the existing year header template. Although I built in support for defining the first two columns in the template so a table row could still be one line of code, I have also implemented the 1928 rows with a separate line for the film title. As well as being much more analogous to the usage of the year header template this makes the source less idiosyncratic and, having seen it, I think it will be easier to edit the tables with the film title on a separate line. Thus in the absence of any objections here I will carry on with the 1928 row format for subsequent updates.

I have also discovered that, while the use of a template embedded in the source for initial development would be fine in a sandbox, it is not a good idea for a real page because old versions using the embedded code don't display properly once it is removed. So I will fairly soon create the real template. --Mirokado (talk) 22:42, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

1920s list updated to use the new template. --Mirokado (talk) 11:24, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

These changes now finished. --Mirokado (talk) 22:51, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Latest changes
I have just gone through the lists making a few updates along the way, in particular making the allrovi (earlier lists) and allmovie (current lists) urls consistent. I will update the 2012 list correspondingly once it has settled down next year. I clearly stopped paying attention with the last couple of edits, with incorrect edit summaries and an unintended trivial change for the 2012 list. Sorry.

Allrovi/Allmovie re-rebranded their site as Allmovie a year or two ago. The current lists are using the allmovie url, earlier lists continue to use allrovi. --Mirokado (talk) 12:34, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

WorldCat Genres
Maximilianklein (talk) 23:33, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I missed this while taking a little wikibreak. That looks to be the case: do we want to do anything as a result? Ext link? --Mirokado (talk) 17:15, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT, cats
I have just noticed that one of the sublists was updated to define DEFAULTSORT and manage the categorisation better, see List of horror films of 2010. I will apply the change consistently "soon" but not just immediately. --Mirokado (talk) 17:13, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Now done for 1960–2013. Earlier list are by decade and not affected. --Mirokado (talk) 23:59, 14 July 2013 (UTC)