Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
Horror in the High Desert
Scored from 149 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
Presented as a mockumentary, the film investigates the disappearance of Gary Hinge, an experienced outdoorsman and survivalist who vanished during a solo hiking trip in the Nevada desert. Through interviews with his sister, roommate, and a private investigator, the story pieces together Gary's final blog post about an unsettling cabin he encountered, and the disturbing footage later recovered from his camera.
Released in 2021, Horror in the High Desert is a horror and thriller film.
The calibrated figure is built from 149 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 159 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 23 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 Horror in the High Desert 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 149.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
