So today marks the 5th anniversary of me beginning this little thing I do right here. I'd been casting around for some kind of non-work-related writing project, but was having trouble thinking of something worth doing above and beyond just "hey, more random musings on life from yet another college-educated white man!" The Internet has plenty - more than plenty - of that. But I started thinking about how irritated and frustrated I got with the quality of most horror website movie reviews (and the always-fun "will it be thoughtful or condescending?" roulette you play with mainstream sites), and how much fun I'd had writing briefly about horror films for another blog, and put that together with yet another blog I enjoyed reading, that treated similarly marginalized creative work thoughtfully, and I was all "hey, I'll write a blog about horror movies, and I will try not to treat my audience like idiots, or treat the movies like disposable entertainment!"
So here I am. I try to focus on the movies, to the exclusion of the personalities surrounding the movies (mostly), and to the exclusion of other media related to horror. I try to go into the movies willing to take them seriously, to watch them as much as I can without prejudgment or ironic distance, and gauge how well I think they work both as horror and as film in general. Maybe you agree with my assessments, maybe you don't. That's fine either way. Hopefully, though, I'm giving them more thought than they get from many other outlets, and hopefully I'm providing a voice that I've had trouble finding for myself (and if you have tips on other similar horror blogs, please send them to me). Thanks for reading, I hope you keep reading, and I'll keep trying to do this thing for as long as I can.
To that end, here are a sort-of Top Ten of posts since I started writing. These aren't necessarily the most popular posts, just ones where I felt like I did what I was trying to do in that post or like I was doing what I intend to do with this blog in general. If you don't feel like digging back through five years(!) worth of posts, I understand. Click on these - about half are from the first year of the blog as it is. It's not that I think I've gotten worse as time goes on or anything, but I think I made a lot of Big Statements toward the beginning that I think are sort of seminal to why I do this, and a lot of what I've done since has been just iterating on those. But enough of my yapping. Check this shit out...
On Torture Porn (I think it's a fake idea.)
What We Like - The Difference Between "Horror Movies" and "Thrillers" (I also think this is a fake idea.)
The Killing Room (A really good example of the "deadly experiment" movie.)
Martyrs (Not much to say - it's one of my favorite movies of this century.)
8mm (One of the first movies that got me to expand my idea of what constitutes horror.)
On Sequels, And the Narrative Problems of the Franchise (a/k/a "the one where I bitch about the Saw movies.")
Kill Theory (A really bad example of the "deadly experiment" movie.)
Reconsidered: The Village (This was one of the first scary movies I ever found myself deconstructing.)
Snowtown (Horror as art without compromising horror a single tiny bit.)
Vinyan (I just really liked the way this one turned out in general.)
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