Introducing Ghost Guide

The Streaming Horror and Science Fiction Guide

I’ve long believed that the act of discovery is missing from digital media.

We’re missing the things that the older of us used to take for granted: community, physical locations like stores, physical media, browsing, the joy of finding cool shit.

As digital media has overtaken physical, as the comfort of our couches has overtaken the public shops and venues we used to gather, I fear that finding cool new stuff will be at the whims of the platforms that proffer it to us. And we pay them for the privilege.

I wanted to make something that would actually return the joy of browsing to online media.

25 Years in the Making

I’ve been working on ideas like this for over 25 years—from Listen.com (later renamed Rhapsody, then Napster) to BitTorrent (where we built a shop you could download legally sanctioned movies from with compensation for rightsholders), to my last big endeavor, Otter Network.

Otter was intended to be the Otter Guide: the ultimate TV guide to all streaming media. But multi-camera streaming took our focus elsewhere.

Now, with new technologies, I’ve taken this idea a step further. As one person, trying to build the ultimate TV guide to every streaming channel seemed an onerous task. So I thought: let’s just do this for the things I love the most.

Let’s make the ultimate TV guide for horror and science fiction.

What Ghost Guide Does

Ghost Guide is a curated streaming guide dedicated to horror and science fiction. Here’s what’s in today’s launch:

• 13,000+ movies — horror and sci-fi titles with poster images and metadata

• Streaming availability — see where each title is available and link directly to watch

• Watch immediately — click a link and you’re watching the movie

• Browse and discover — filter, sort, and explore the catalog like you’re flipping through shelves at a video store

• Curated guides — director collections (Romero, Carpenter), movements (cosmic horror, British folk-horror), and themes (big bug movies, animal attacks). Expect lots of curation and discovery to happen here.

OK, So How Did I Do This?

You’ve read about Claude Code, probably. It essentially turns your terminal — that scary black screen where people smarter than me write code — into your partner.

So something that I’ve wanted to build for 25 years is suddenly within reach.

I really believe this is a new model for media.

I was able, with a lot of time, planning, thought, and then some marathon coding and debugging sessions, to crank through an application that would have taken tens of thousands of dollars and months a year ago.

For the NERDS:
Prototyped in Replit, devised product definitions with the help of ChatGPT, edited in Word like the old man I am, devised technical guidance with the help of Claude.ai, found data sources and APIs with Google and calling a bunch of people, tested prototype, revised product parameters again, created a coding plan and roadmap with Claude, then sat with Claude Code for a few days and worked through the plan piece by piece. It’s a Next.js app with Supabase database, styled with Tailwind, and it gets data from Watchmode, OMDB, TMDb, IMDB, YouTube, and my brain. Hosted on Vercel.

The whole process to get to this stage took about two-three months to work through. With that whole 25 years of planning, plotting and thinking, of course.

Launch: Free and Open

For a limited window, Ghost Guide is completely free and open to everyone. This is a BETA version of the app. Yes, you’ll encounter bugs, that’s part of the fun! But hopefully you’ll find it useful!

Try it now:

https://ghostguide.co

What’s Coming

I’ll be building out a ton of features: I’ve started to add trailers, community tools, deep-dive discovery features that make this as much fun as a trip to the record store in 1987. (Did they have “community tools” in 1987?)

Poster images are still filling in, but the database is growing daily.

Let me know what you think. You can reach me at nicholas@ghostguide.co

Support Ghost Guide

This is an enormous outlay of time and money on my part. I don’t have investors or partners, it’s just me and my computer and my damn brain. And some expensive software and licenses. If you’d like to support this project, there are two ways to contribute:

• Donate directly via DonorBox — this is entirely run out of my home office and pocketbook. I have no investors or partners, so your support will keep this alive.

• Become a paid subscriber to my Substack newsletter, Ghosts in the Machine

Founding members get Ghost Guide ad-free for life.

If you love this, please share it. I’m still figuring out what, if any, business might be behind this, so for now it’s soft launched and in your hands.

An exhortation: this is something I’ve worked on for much of my adult life! So it means a lot to me if you’d consider supporting it, whether that means contributing, subscribing or sharing it with like-minded folks. Thanks so much for being here and for being interested.

I’d love your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions.

— NT