I remember when I first started this Blog.
It was 2020. It was COVID-19 and there was no vaccine in sight. I lost one of my partners during this time, who was an avid horror fanatic. I remember wanting to continue our work through a journal we tentatively made on Blogger, but it just didn’t have the right inputs and intuitive elements I needed.
Originally, I chose WordPress because I already had a creative Blog on here — my Mythic Bios Blog. There were challenges even then. WordPress was already replacing the more intuitive writing page with Blocking, which I never fully got a good grasp on, something that would have left me spending more time trying to work out instead of actually writing — which was the whole point of wanting to make a Blog in the first place. I’ve gone into it a bit on Mythic Bios, but I feel The Horror Doctor needs something of its own. It earned it, and so have all of you.
The name, Horror Doctor, was only supposed to be a placeholder for another title I never got around to making. I’d planned to create the skeleton of this thing, and have it mutate over time. You can see the horror-themed categories that have nothing in them. I’d planned on interviews when I was networking a lot more online, and when Twitter hadn’t become the honest horror show that its remnants are now. I was going to rewrite Demon Wind. When they were still doing it, I wanted to work for a Silver Bolo Award from The Last Drive-In with the writings I was already making, and planning to do.
I had so many ideas, and I kept myself going with grief, a need to viscerally reach out, and a more than crazy amount of determination.
A lot went down since 2020. We got a vaccine. I started to go out more again. I even got to a live Joe Bob event in London, Ontario. The Toronto After Dark Film Festival started up again despite the death of its beloved founder and leader Adam Lopez. I used to watch so many films during this period, but eventually I went to more live events. I also saw that deep dives into film and creative works aren’t as popular or even as accessible as shorter reviews. Eventually, I wrote more of them on Letterboxd. I began to move away from writing as much online. I’ve always had a tendril in horror, but during 2020 I was immersed in it. I was frankly obsessed. And I still love it, but I also know I’m not as close to a sense of scene or community as I once was.
It’s always good to hang out and talk with people on The Lost Drive-In Discord. I’m grateful for being a Moderator there, but I feel in terms of the horror genre itself I’ve always been adjacent at best. But I had so much fun mashing together different films into fanfiction. I enjoyed relating so much to particular horror works. And I really loved saying more about some of the shows that are out there. Things like my analyses and insights into the Creepshow series, for example, still make me proud.
But I am not on here as much as I was, and I can’t really justify being on Premium anymore. So because I am not renewing Premium, I just want to let you know the website name might change. There might be more Ads creeping in again. Hopefully, this site won’t look broken and can be still be accessible.
I just loved writing about this genre, and being a part of it. I am not taking this site down and I have backed it up. And I might come back from time to time like some kind of wandering spectre reborn with the power of new and more creative nightmares. But horror I feel is a lot about change, or facing the echoes of what can’t be changed. Whether it kills you, or takes your soul, or makes you stronger is entirely up to you.
Thank you all for following The Horror Doctor. And to those of you who just found this place, I hope you enjoy what I have left behind. See you around, my fellow fiends.
— sincerely,
The Horror Doctor
The Horror Doctor
The Horror Doctor 