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Slasher is a horror social media website, it is an algorithm-free social networking website for horror fans that aims to support horror in ways that don’t exist on mainstream social networks.

Finding a project like this website kind of rekindled my old (circa late 2010) enthusiasm for social networks, especially because of how to the point the site’s structure is designed.

A social networking portal for horror fans that supports not only core social networking features, but also many of the features of specific social media sites support, and then some more.

Horror groups on social media websites, and horror blogs and phlogs in sites are all fine and dandy, but you can’t beat a whole social networking site (in the vein of Facebook, or even LinkedIn) like Slasher when you are a horror fan.

You just can’t. The social features of the site make the site and its community of users something more than merely joining a horror group on a generalist social media website.

I think it’s important to at least try all web platforms where horror fans get together. Once you try the horror communities on those platforms, you get an idea of which ones are for you and which ones aren’t.

Some horror fans like me, who always feel a determined level of FOMO on the horror genre may need to dig deep and know the communities in every site that has a horror genre community presence.

But in case you aren’t like that, or would like to be like that but don’t have the time to spare, and you want to pick only one horror social media site then I recommend you to give Slasher a try.

The Birth of Slasher.tv

Slasher, which launched in May 2019, touts itself as “The Social Network for Horror”. In 2020, when I discovered it, I had already gone through ten years on Facebook and two years of using Facebook and other social networks to connect with horror fans.

It was a great time, but it was too much to handle, not just the deluge of horror content from the groups I joined, in FB’s cloister-like environment.

It also was the need to break out in all the other horror communities on platforms other than FB. It was way too much, and more than half a decade later I’m still working on it.

So Slasher obviously was a very happy find, even though it took me to specifically search for ‘horror networking sites’ to find it. I’d say having found it six months to a year after its launch was better than never.

Damon Della Greca, Slasher’s owner, tells the story of how he decided to create the website on Slasher’s one-year anniversary update page.

That page had a very positive effect on me, especially this passage when he talks about meeting other horror fans at horror conventions:

“What I didn’t count on was that the conventions would also have an amazing side-effect. They helped me break out of my shell and learn to talk to people more easily than ever. That was always a struggle for me because I often kept to myself and had a relatively small circle of close friends. It wasn’t until I was taken in by the horror community that I felt compelled to be more social. I loved to hear the stories and experiences of others, to share mine with them, and to just connect with people I had a kinship with – it finally felt right. In my decades of existence, being around those people made me happiest. I miss the conventions and seeing all of the friends I’ve made along the way.”

For me, the most unique takeaways of Damon’s vision for the site are:

To make Slasher a social networking site dedicated to horror
A less-censored environment through R rating, 17+
A response to the horror genre’s marginalization in social networks

Another part of the first-anniversary update that connected with me was the section where he talks about the technical challenges due to usage overloads.

Those are things that are always near the top of a webmaster’s improvement list of things to do.

If a high percentage of your motivation for a website you own is the passion you feel for the subject treated on the website.

You may forget to have a scaling plan in place, and having to come up with one in a hurry, when usage exceeds your website’s hosting capabilities may prove a very stressful situation, regardless of the usage surge being a good sign.

A Look Inside: Features & More

Back in 2020, I expected Slasher to be more feature-creepy (pun not intended), but it surprised me that it gave me more of a brotherly love and a horror human capital feel, pushing tech features aside.

Not a lot of features for horror lovers as I expected, but the human element compensated for it, and with flying colors.

I’m talking about Slasher’s very friendly community that will add you en-masse as a friend. From day one. If you used Slasher.tv you know what I mean.

Besides, it fits the love of horror feeling that you want to connect with as many as possible other horror fans like you, as fast as possible, for a myriad of different reasons related to horror fandom.

Naturally, horror colonized all the different social media sites a long time ago. Most super-node social media sites/apps (FB, IG, LI) have a big presence in the horror community.

I don’t know you, but I surely appreciate an actual social networking service like Slasher purely for horror, that cuts through all the other social media noise unrelated to the genre.

Slasher incorporates the functionality of a list of different types of sites, I’d say it integrates the features of generalist social media sites like:

Social horror book cataloging

The site has a books section where you can add to a wish list, read a brief overview, write your review, show that you already read it, rate, share, favorite, and even buy any horror book.

Online horror movie database

The horror movies database on Slasher has sort, wish list, watched, favorite, rate (two separate ratings: by user rating and gore factor), review, share, and buy features.

Of course, you can add movies yourself, and write your own review of any of the horror movies in the database.

Horror podcast list

Although Slasher has a section for podcasts, I could list more than 430, the list is just a list of podcast names. For someone who is a tyro in horror podcast like me, this is valuable anyway.

If they made their way to a horror portal like Slasher something that calls my attention at the name level should be investigated further.

Horror Music Acts List

It has the same format as the podcast list. Just names, no other columns or anything clickable.

Just pick names that attract you, or even better, upload them to an artificial intelligence chatbot and make the bot make sense of it as related to your personal taste in horror music.

Horror art

Another list. I wonder if these last three features of the site will be further developed.

But, again, by copying the list and uploading it to an A.I. chatbot you can make all kind of data mining that makes sense to you.

An example chatbot prompt would be:

Of the list I just uploaded what horror bands are horror punk?

…and the artificial intelligence bot then tells you which ones to pick.

Horror News

I let the last extra feature on Slasher because it was the most obvious solution to a problem I had which this website showed me.

Namely, the horror news problem.

It’s easier and less of a hassle to browse horror news from several horror news sources on a single site than having a group of tabs in your browser and having to load them and switch between them.

So offering syndicated horror news on a single page gets a thumbs up from me.

You can always receive horror daily news by email, or do the tabs method, but hosting horror news from a selection of sites on the site makes it more convenient.

Events Calendar

This is a kind of feature that I think people do overlook, and that those who need to promote time-locked stuff must take advantage of especially if it is free, as it is on Slasher.

If you are the other case, a horror fan who wants to know what horror events are coming, Slasher’s horror events calendar is another place to check.

Anyone can add events, so probably a portion of the horror-related events in the calendar are user-generated.

If I was the organizer of a horror event I would use this feature each time I had to promote something.

Ease of Use

In the user experience department, Slasher has an easy-to-understand, yet effective design.

You see the users’ updates in a main feed, and all engagement options work similarly to other social networking sites.

Don’t forget the apparently gimmicky, but interesting and original if you think of it, aspect of making site’s the main feed (which is called the Timeline on Slasher) not mediated by an algorithm.

I appreciate this feature.

I wouldn’t write more than one or two sentences about why I think this is good, so here it goes: to have a piece of software decide what I should be shown and what I shouldn’t, or who will or will not see the thing I share is a micromanagement and kind of arbitrary just for the sake of being arbitrary.

Well, Slasher doesn’t have such a mechanic in place.

Website Core Structure

All the functionality items (features) I listed before are arranged on a sidebar on the left side of the page, and the main social networking features are in the main menu at the top.

What about the legal pages of the site? They are top-notch transparent, and being a webmaster myself, I like that. I like to know what trackers are involved when I’m visiting a site like this.

All of the website’s cookie policies are exhaustively disclosed on the Privacy Policy page.

Slasher is a love letter not only to horror, but also to the KISS rule of design and, as with the choice of not making an algorithm mediate the timeline, its design goes against other social networking site trends, like sensory overload or feature creep.

Slasher’s Search Feature

The design of the site’s search feature is very simple, still I think I know why it was implemented this way.

I guess it’s to rely only on a classic social media method of content classification and discovery: hashtags.

Hashtags work, hashtags are elegant, so why not?

Why Horror Fans Love Slasher.tv

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Here are several testimonials of why Slasher users love the website, including my own.

Scarewolf

“I like Slasher because it is a real community. I’ve watched movies, bought books, and have been introduced to YouTube channels, and podcasts all ran/made by other members of the community.”

Who_Invited_You_Trevor

“Slasher has become like a second home to me. I’ve hardly ever had any bad experiences with people on here. It’s where ‘Just Be Yourself’ Actually means something. It’s like one big bloody family… Literally and figuratively.”

Myself

For a lifetime horror fan like me, it’s a feeling you can’t replicate on any other social networking sites. A community where everything is shared or volunteered by other horror fans.

Like I wrote above, I discovered Slasher in 2020. At that moment the site didn’t have a web version. It was an app you needed to download from Google Play or Apple’s App Store.

When the site’s web access launched, around April 2023, I was more than twenty months already into a vacation from all social networks.

That time away from social interactions on the web made me see Slasher for what it is worth. Meaning I decided to spend more time on it, instead of other horror communities on other social media sites.

Similar feelings of brotherly love are possible in the horror groups of other communities, but not as focused and concentrated as it feels in Slasher.

Slasher Compared to Other Social Media

Not a fan of making comparisons, but here’s what I think.

The fact that Slasher existing and being what it is deserves more care and use from a horror fan. It deserves more dedication than any other social network.

Right now I’m reorganizing my use of social media after more than three years of taking a hiatus. And yes, you guessed it, Slasher was the one I picked first.

I will assess how much weekly time I think I will allot to it and will devise a schedule with time allotment that will be greater in proportion to other social media sites.

It’s sad to admit it, but in the last years of my first decade of social media use (years ten and eleven) I started to feel kind of overwhelmed and tired of it all.

It took a lot of dedication and time investment to keep up with the constant updating of my offline life friends on Facebook (and I definitely didn’t catch up to see everything my friends shared), and elsewhere I was subscribed (even horror communities).

Still, I felt I couldn’t connect too much with others.

Maybe it’s not as simple as this, but this is what I think: just a mismatch of content (my hardcore horror fan personality) with the context of a generalist environment.

General variations of digital environments populated by average Joes and Janes who don’t have my desire to network with others sharing horror as the common denominator.

The Future of Slasher.tv

Upcoming Horror Social Media Features

I sent a message to Damon to ask him about upcoming features on Slasher.

This is what he replied:

“…the entire app is going to start getting new features that will make it easier to find things of interest, plus more ways/reasons to connect with others. It’s also going to get layout updates and look so much nicer.”

Damon, that rocks, brother. Keep the good features rolling in!

Challenges of Sustaining a Niche Horror Social Network

Slasher shows a healthy commitment from Slasher Corp to make it work. I can talk from personal experience.

In my experience, neither a horror site with a few social features, nor a full-fledged social networking site made by a single person, at a snail’s development pace and relying only on organic traffic, by not investing in any kind of 3rd party advertising mechanism, is going to work.

But Slasher not only fulfills a need that was a for long while unattended, it also shows, by the size of its community, that not just passion and effort for horror are needed in such a project.

A monetary investment for the love of reaching as many horror fans as possible through promotion is required, too.

Even though I am into the advertising industry at different levels, I mostly use ad blockers on the web browsers I use, but Slasher is one example where I would purposely disable it.

Not just to support the site on that channel of their monetization plan. Also because I am somewhat thrilled to see what ads the ads networks dispense to a horror fan like me, while I’m in a horror environment like Slasher.

In my opinion, owning a web property for a passion project, much more if it is something that is not just popular but also niche (excuse me the oxymoron) like horror, needs a monetary investment in a mix of advertising, promotion, and even PR.

And I’m just touching the tip of the iceberg here in what investments you need to make for a healthy social networking site like Slasher to succeed.

Role of Horror Platforms

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I’m very happy that Slasher exists. Only God knows how many persons, due to their personal apprehension, prejudgments, taboos, or unnatural mental structures may feel an aversion to horror, and not have the need to know it.

That fact makes horror a relatively exclusive genre, but paradoxically it’s also a very popular genre.

We may say that the dual aspect of horror may be one of the reasons why it took time for a social networking site for horror fans to appear.

But the need for horror fans to connect with others will always exist, as in any other cultural tribe. There are specific places you can go as a horror fan, where to connect with others, to share a specific horror niche.

Examples would be Blogger and Tumblr for horror bloggers, Instagram and Flickr for phloggers, YouTube for Vloggers, Moviechat or Facebook for those who want to have meaningful conversations about horror, Pinterest and, DeviantArt for horror artists, and the list goes on and on.

Slasher is something great since by its nature as a generalist horror social networking site it can address all those channels of content without narrowing to a single one, but with its added value of segmenting the user base to horror fans alone.

And I’ll tell you why it’s great: in the artistic genres world, there is something bad when it comes to art, and it’s called overlapping of flavor. This is a concept of Indian aesthetics, essentially “the ideal performance should convey a single, clear emotional experience to the audience”.

When you are mixing horror with everything else on a site like Facebook, the experience may feel misleading, misfired, or distorted.

Overlapping feelings, like it happens when everything comes up mixed in a social networking feed dilute each other, and doesn’t allow you to experience a clear emotional response.

Conclusion

Slasher is indispensable for horror fans for its nature of community-driven, horror space. It’s a tight-knit community where horror fans can interact with like-minded people.

It’s said that feelings are best shared among equals, so this is the perfect place for horror fans who want to socially network with others of similar sensibilities, without mixing enthusiasm about horror with anything else.

Besides its main objective of providing a social networking platform, Slasher also can function as a comprehensive horror hub where all the different horror artistic expressions have their place.

That aspect of the site is a valuable tool for independent horror creators.

Still, we mustn’t forget the human content of the site, making it a space where you can be among equals and develop positive relationships.

If you’re a fan of horror in any of its formats, and if you think you would like to join a horror social networking website, I sincerely recommend you to join Slasher.

Hopefully, I gave you an idea of how Slasher looks in general, but your experience may be way different than the one I had, and currently having.

I hope you’ll find whatever you are searching for as related to horror on Slasher.

Be it a group of friends, a support system, people with whom you can have meaningful conversations, share your thoughts on horror (or anything else, depending on the case) or even an audience for your horror creations, or people who will help you solve your problems to the best of their abilities.

See you on the website!

The Birth of Slasher.tv