I find that I keep on reinventing my horror origin story.

As of this date, the Horror Doctor is a year old. Not me, of course unless you want to be existential about it, but this whole blog. 

I don’t think I ever really knew what it was going to become. Oh, I definitely had a plan. I was going to take a particular film and rewrite it on here in installments for my “Reanimation Station,” but for the most part I’ve written “Strains and Mutations” for my horror mashup fictions and homages (read: fanfiction), a whole lot of focus on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and vampires, and — really — my “Dissections and Speculatives”: you know, my reviews. 

A lot of my horror reviews focus on films, even though originally I toyed with looking at short stories, written narratives in general, plays, and even games. Sometimes I’ve done some “Behind the Screams,” which is an embarrassing label as it is anything other than original, though I got to write about my reasoning behind creating some of my fictional homages, so that was all fun. 

Mostly, my Horror Doctor blog reviews, takes apart, and sometimes puts together in different forms horror movies. A long time ago, I wanted to focus on lesser known movies too, but once I saw Cannibal Holocaust it was all over. I’d like to think that somewhere, in the Dark Multiverse that probably wasn’t created by Universal Studios, that the original version of my horror blog — a work displaying a long-form horror film rewrite, along with some smaller fictional experiments, and reviews of films most people don’t look at — does exist. And maybe, it might at some point anyway in this hellish timeline. 

A long time ago, my non-fictional writing mostly focused on the comics medium, and popular geek culture. I wrote for two other online publications, and a whole ton of fanfiction along with my mainline Writer’s Blog Mythic Bios: where I’d post a lot of writing experiments, which included horror. 

One problem I have is that sometimes I try to be too clever. I’m a perfectionist and it creates a cycle where I agonize over something, and it either causes great anxiety and I overwork myself, or more anxiety and it just doesn’t happen. Before really delving into horror in a focused way, I used to be even more exacting, and serious: I took myself and what I would see or watch very seriously. Horror, back in the day for me — before the Year From Hell, and you know exactly what I mean by that — was something I was afraid of as a child, kept away from the mainline Eighties and Nineties films by my parents, and something I came at surreptitiously from the corners of my youth. I would go into Hollywood Movies and look at the box art and descriptions of the films either my family wouldn’t let me sneak past, or my own fear kept me away from. 

But I read abridged folktales and classics, and eventually went to the Toronto Public Library and read Christopher Pike, and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series. I saw the Poltergeist: The Legacy series as I got older later at night, already watched Are You Afraid of the Dark, and the Goosebumps shows, and occasionally managed to get some Tales From the Crypt, when not also watching shows like Psi Factor, and Outer Limits, and your good old X-Files if you want to branch out into multi-genre classing. 

And I saw some movies, especially when the 300s became available on Cable. I was always there, on the periphery but I missed out the mainline slashers and contemporary monsters of — again — the Eighties and Nineties until much later, and I’m still catching up on them: which isn’t a bad thing as I’m doing so with the Mutant Fam of The Last Drive-In. I could seriously do worse than discover old and new films with Joe Bob and Darcy, and Fangoria Magazine as well. 

It really culminated when my late partner got me into the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, and when I started going and checking out films from the late and lamented physical manifestation of Toronto’s Suspect Video store and sometimes I wish I could go back in time — for a variety of reasons — to talk about the things I learned. And I would just make these comments on Shudder when I discovered it on the movies I watched, or on Twitter after I saw something at the After Dark. 

Then the Pandemic struck. And, like I mentioned in other places I’m sure, I looked at an old Blogger journal my partner and I were going to make together back in 2011 that never happened. I was going to make The Horror Doctor — still a working title — there, but the platform wasn’t sophisticated enough and I went with WordPress, only for it to change its own format in the process too. 

But I needed a place to write my thoughts on horror that was more than just on other online magazines, or even Mythic Bios. I needed something focused. Something clearer. Like a dark blade. 

I have been writing this blog for a year. I learned a lot. I write my entries in Google Docs now and paste them into the format that WordPress has basically enforced, after a lot of complaining on my part. I finally made a place, too, for my collected Creepshow Commentaries. It’s funny. My Mythic Bios blog, that I haven’t really updated in a while, was the result of me needing a place to talk about geekery that my Reviews on Amazon just couldn’t cut, and then I went into GeekPr0n and Sequart from there. And it was a similar, but parallel evolution here on The Horror Doctor: from Shudder Reviews and Twitter streams of consciousness, to this. 

I’m sure this is all fairly interesting retrospective stuff. Sometimes, even with all of this I wonder how it all happened, and if it’s going to go anywhere. I’ve worked on this a lot, perhaps in a fairly obsessive manner. I wonder, sometimes, when that sliver of doubt happens if I can use this writing to lead me to a place where I can write professionally again: or in general really. Sometimes I wonder if I am just wasting my time. 

But this has been a transformative experience too. Not only has this space allowed me to engage with horror media in a critical and creative manner — more expansively than before — but I got to review new films based on classic horror film stars, and interact with them on social media. I can’t even begin to tell you how it feels to realize that I’ve talked with Kelli Maroney, and Barbara Crampton. I have difficulty trying to describe just having a casual conversation with Diana Prince (Darcy the Mailgirl), or even getting a DM from Joe Bob one day. It’s hard to explain the coolness of chatting with Anna Biller on Twitter about Viva and The Love Witch, not to mention Barbara Crampton and her role in Sacrifice. I have a whole section on “Dialogues” on The Horror Doctor that was reserved for Interviews with horror personages I might have, and some of those discussions could have made it on there if they were a bit more formal, and if of course I had permission to post them. 

But also having Kelli Maroney, Barbara Crampton, Diana Prince, and even directors like Travis Stevens, and Tate Steinsiek, a writer like Kathy Charles, and so many others comment positively on my articles is just something that made this year for me. 

The fact is, like many people during this time, I lost a lot this year, but I gained something else. I don’t always know what it is, or where it will lead, but I want to keep going with it. I have to be careful to pace myself. I’d been flirting with burn-out for a while. It helped to take a break for a while. Breaks are good. Breaks let you take stock, watch other things, do other things, perhaps see the difference between not giving up on something and letting something old tired go, and going back with perhaps more of a game plan. 

It’s been a hell of a year. But I accomplished a lot. And even if this blog ends sooner rather than later, I did this. I made this, and put it all on social media, and curated what I could, and did the best I was capable of doing. And whatever happens, nothing can take those achievements away from me. 

It’s been a ride. And hopefully, we can have more of them together. Technically, today is not the first day of the Blog — that would be the 29th because that is the first post I made — but this was one year anniversary of the first time I made this “About” section, and cursed at WordPress in trying toggle their weird Word Block formats in setting this basic structure up. 

And I’m so glad that you long-time readers have continued to deign to join me here in this organized house of horrors, and I am equally appreciative of those of you newcomers who want to see my black blade at work on these bloody building blocks of storytelling.

So take care everyone and remember, while I am not an actual doctor or a master of this genre, I am definitely still continuing to be one of its students, and perhaps we can continue the experiment together along the way.