Film · 1981 · Films · 1980s
Ghost Story
Scored from 120 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In a small New England town, four elderly friends known as the Chowder Society are haunted by a shared secret from their youth involving a mysterious woman. When one of their sons returns home after his twin brother's strange death, long-buried guilt resurfaces and a vengeful presence begins to close in on them.
Ghost Story is a 1981 drama, horror and thriller film.
3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 120 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 121 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 225 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Ghost Story lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 120.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
