Search Tips

If you didn't find what you were looking for, consider the following...

Searches are performed in the following manner. For each movie in the database, a list of key words is compiled, consisting of the name of the movie, the name of the book or story, the name of the author, any notes about the movie or the source, and the various dates. A movie is considered to match your search if every word in your search phrase matches a keyword for the movie. Typically, a search word four characters or longer must match exactly, while words shorter than this need only match the beginning of the key word, but if you request a "relaxed search", then every search word need only match the beginning of a key word.

I'm sure this is a little confusing, so I'll give some examples:

If you do a normal search for "William", you will get movies based on the works of William Golding (among others).
If you do a normal (not relaxed) search for "Will" (four letters long), you will get no matches, because there is nothing in the database that is spelled exactly that way.
If you search for "Wil" (three letters long), you will find not only movies based on the works of William Golding and Oscar Wilde (among others) but also the movies Willard, The Wind in the Willows, and Le Monde tremblera (translated as The World Will Shake).
A relaxed search for "Will" will find all of these, except the Oscar Wilde matches.

The list only contains science fiction, fantasy and horror movies. There are a many movies in other genres that were based on a work of fiction not listed here.

You can explicitly exclude words by prefixing them with a minus sign, so "Wil -Wilde" will find everything with "Wil", but disregard things with "Wilde" (in this case, all the movies based on books by Oscar Wilde).

This list has absolutely no information about who starred in, produced, directed or catered the movie, so "Wil" is not going to find you any Bruce Willis movies. Similarly, there's no plot summaries, character names, quotes, soundtrack information, etc. There is exactly what's listed two paragraphs up, and no more.

There is also no "natural language" capability so all of you who have searched for things like "top fifty grossing SF movies" or "best science fiction into film" or "first 3D movie made" or "all horror movies" (all actual searches that people have tried) were wasting your time. I do account for common spelling errors, and I intend to add a little bit more intelligence to pick up on some other common mistakes.

For those of you who haven't quite grasped the concept, this list only includes films that were based on books. Thus, whoever searched for "books that have become movies" clearly wasn't thinking straight, and all you people looking for "Star Wars", it wasn't based on a book! (The book was written later, based on the movie, and that's something entirely different.)

Also, consider these tips...

Try using less words in your search (especially, leave out A, The, Of, and similar words; I'm likely to do this automatically for you at some point). Often, one word is enough. At worst you may get a few matches you didn't want.
If you're not positive about the spelling, try a different spelling or use just the first few letters of the word.
If you are searching for an author, try just using the last name.
Capitalization is unimportant (the search is case-insensitive).