Discussing the Scurry Tails ‘Scare Rating’

By Jeffrey Bishop

The Scare Rating and the Tell Time are a couple of proprietary features that we’ve employed on this site from the start that we think add significant value to our readers. Each is fairly self-explanatory; the Scare Rating is designed to give a sense, on a scale from 1 to 5, how scary a story might be to an average youth audience, and the Tell Time is designed to give readers a sense for how long it might take an average reader to tell the story to others.

With this post, we want to take on just one of the features — the Scare Rating — and further explain what it’s for and how it works, while seeking feedback from our readers on how we might employ the feature better (Tell Time was covered in a separate post).

Scare Rating helps readers select appropriate stories to read or to tell based on how scary the story is. The higher the number, the more spooky the tale.
All Scurry Tails works of fiction are spooky in some way — even the humorous scary stories, although these tend to be slightly less creepy than others.
All content on Scurry Tails is kid-safe. This speaks to appropriate content, but in regards to the Scare Rating, it also means you won’t find anything too creepy here. There are plenty of other sites for darker, more gory or horrific tales.
The Scare Rating is our best guess at how creepy a story is; our accuracy depends on the individual tastes and temperaments of our readers.
The target audience for this site is boys and girls from about 8 to about 15. The Scare Rating is calibrated relative to that age group; however, age is not always the best indicator of temperament — meaning: don’t assume that every 15-year-old can necessarily stomach a story with a 5 Ghosts Scare Rating (but most can).

Is the Scare Rating a useful feature to you? Do you consider the Scare Rating when deciding whether to read a story or not? Would you rather be surprised by how spooky a story might be and not be informed up front? Let us know what you’d like to see!