When you rate a movie one to five or one to ten, you start with unwatchable and you end with perfect cinematic achievement. This tends to put sweeping dramas in the top tier, low budget sci-fi and horror in the bottom tier, and passable indies in the middle. What happens to movies that are objectively bad, but incredibly entertaining? The charming, yet awful? The spectacles of failure that we watch ten times more often than our "favorite" movie?

This is why we use our own rating system. It was developed specifically for horror movies, but we've found it works well with all genres and can (and should) replace whichever rating system you currently use. We punish mediocrity over failure, so our scale goes from positive three to negative three. The positive spectrum is for good-good movies, the negative spectrum is for good-bad movies, and zero is for movies so unremarkable as to be unnecessary.  

This is the best possible rating. It's also the rarest rating, especially within the horror genre, as a "+3" must be objectively and subjectively great. Style, consistency, story, sound, acting, directing, and editing must come together to make a remarkable experience. You should walk away traumatized.

A "+2" rating is for all those good movies out there. Actually good movies. We're still dealing with the positive spectrum of the rating system, so quality and acclaim are determining factors. Not perfect, but worth owning, worth rewatching, and most importantly, worth recommending.

To whom is a "+1" satisfactory? You, that's whom. You wouldn't recommend it to anyone, because it has some major issues, but there's a subtle quality you like. Maybe most people couldn't care less, but you find yourself unwilling to simply dismiss it. It's good enough.

The worst possible rating. This doesn't mean the movie is bad, per se. It could even be relatively competent, but it's boring and lazy. Mediocre. Forgettable. No twist, no risk, no success, or worse, no failure. Completely and offensively unnecessary.

Let's face it: the movie is bad. Maybe even painfully bad at parts, but it's mild incompetency reflects an attempt at creation. The critics didn't like it and the user reviews are  passive-aggressive, but you don't care. This silly little failure makes you smile.

What many refer to as good-bad. The movie's failure is absurd enough or hilarious enough that you revel in sharing it with your friends on a drunken party night. It's quotable, anti-charming, and the quintessential embodiment of a cult classic. You probably already have a favorite "-2" in your group.

This one is for the insanely bad-acted, the outrageously gory, and the intolerably low-budgeted. You share a "-2" for fun. You share a "-3" for shock. When you need to win an argument about crazy movies, this is it. It's as rare a rating as its positive counterpart, needing to meet specific characteristics of lunacy, because it's a steep slope from here into an unwatchable mess.