It’s been two years since I started The Horror Doctor.

I wasn’t sure what I was attempting to make here exactly: if The Horror Doctor was going to be something of a horror host moniker for myself, or a placeholder until I came up with a better name. It just … pretty much stuck, you know? It was going to be the blog’s prototype name: some dissected skeleton with sinew and nerve-endings that would eventually have a fleshly descendant. 

But I suppose what I made, at the time, was less a ghoul from Night of the Living Dead to be replaced with vastly more improved Savini zombies, and more an abomination from Return of the Living Dead that simply can’t die, but can only be stopped through containment and neglect. 

My other pastimes aside, it’s been a long road through Hell. Like most horror franchises, the origins of my love of horror and even the creation of this blog can differ. I’ve thought about it today, independently, completely forgetting that this is the anniversary of the day when it officially began. 

I’ve mentioned before that my partner had passed away earlier the same month I eventually came back to The Last Drive-In: this time more permanently than the Halloween Special with which I visited on Shudder TV, and Twitter back in 2019. I’ve not always been good with time in the best of moments, and it kind of sank in that I found this series again, and the community around it, not long after she was gone: literally weeks. 

I know I wasn’t sure how long I was going to stick around, but I needed something stable during this period of loss, sickness, and quarantine. I’d found Darcy, or Diana Prince, on her Twitter about a year ago after the platform had put her into jail for a horror burlesque photograph far tamer than the other stuff I’d seen on there, and we Followed each other after talking about how ridiculous that had been. But I wasn’t sure how long the Drive-In was, or even when I realized it was five hours if I could sit through all of it. The first episode of Season Two was rough for me, though I loved the spectacle of Chopping Mall. It really is a commitment to watch something for that long, but it also got my mind off of the hell of the real world, and put me into a place of ridiculous and entertaining films not unlike those independent films shown at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. I think that was the key thing for me: that the event that Kaarina and I went to every year was canceled after her death and the Pandemic, and I wanted to celebrate it for the two of us.

I also remembered what my partner said about my writing, and she believed I could write something about horror films and that I had something important to say. You have to understand that before this point, I was writing my thoughts on Facebook, but also Twitter, and I was reaching out to the creators of these films so they could get that feedback. Sometimes, like Impossible Horror, I even wrote homages or fanfiction for them. And once I began really watching the Creepshow series, I wanted people to see my thoughts in a place that wasn’t the black gap into emptiness that is the Shudder comments section. 

I’d been thinking about making something like the Horror Doctor for a while, and began making the thematics behind it. I was considering creating something that would stand out: that would be unique. I seriously wanted to rewrite Demon Wind, to the point where I have notes on what I would do differently. I was going to transmute it from a script into a story, and post it serially on this blog. The reviews were something that would happen every once and a while, along with insights into my writing process to buttress this experiment while the real work occurred.

That didn’t happen, of course. The reviews, the deep-dives, the grave-digging began to take more precedent along with my smaller fanfiction experiments. It was between the Drive-In’s showing of The Exorcist III and Deadbeat at Dawn, and Dead Heat and Cannibal Holocaust that I launched the Horror Doctor. I even posted it on Twitter where Darcy took note of it, and wished me luck in my endeavours. One of my new partners at the time had encouraged me to do all of this.

The Horror Doctor was a strange hybrid. At first, it was a place to hone my horror writing again past my original online writing: to perhaps one day pitch and submit something to Fangoria. Certainly, I took the opportunity to have the Blog featured after buying a spot for its showcase on Fangoria: even if I had very little content on it at the time. But The Horror Doctor was definitely a space where I wanted to have a place where I could be seen. Where I could be heard. I wanted people, like Darcy and others, to see I was intelligent and I had something to add to the discourse on horror and exploitation and the weird. It also didn’t hurt that by Season Three, I wanted to be a contender for a Silver Bolo Award, and I am big enough to admit it. 

And it made me engage more with horror people on Twitter. It made me think more about horror and franchises and mythologies. But more than that, The Horror Doctor was a place where I could talk about weird shit without it being overshadowed by my other writing elsewhere. The Horror Doctor is pretty much my weird place here, or so it was for some time.

A lot went down since I made this blog. I participated in the Iron Mutant Citation Challenge for VHS Appreciation Night: the certificate of which I am still waiting to get in the mail to this very day. I met TheDude and Mia Chainsaw, the incredible horror couple whose endeavours attracted me as part of the MutantFam, and I have stayed with them ever since. I made more friends. I found The Lost Drive-In Patreon, and then the Discord where I got to know many more Mutants – including the brilliant Magi Savage who got me involved in a film roulette challenge, and made me a Moderator. I started some conversations on Moon Knight, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And because of Magi, I also realized that Letterboxd is basically Goodreads for film. That is one reason I don’t write on here as much anymore. I find that I like to just get to the heart and meat of something that I like, or I don’t – and many of the articles I write here, while I am proud of them, they take a lot of time and actual reading and research at times to make something approachably good.

It’s a strange thing: to be on that line between wanting to be recognized as a professional, and a fan. You know there are connotations to both, though I would love to be called an amateur or, if you will, a student of horror as the only thing that is missing is the established recognition. To have the skill, and the will, and the passion is what is often enough for me. 

But I came a long way. To think that two of the actresses in Chopping Mall, Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton not only Follow me on Twitter because of some of the work I’ve written on the films they’ve had roles in, but that sometimes we interact, really puts it full circle. Yet I value the rest of it as well: the Fear Street films Mia Chainsaw, TheDude, and the rest of our friends have watched, The Lost Drive-In events that you too can be a part of should you want to become a Patron Saint on the Patreon, watching all the films with Magi Savage to become a better cinephile.

I know I’ve slowed down a bit, but only because I have gotten more social in these aspects. Perhaps it’s because of my Blog, and its part in getting me to put more of my stuff out there, and interact. Or maybe I did this more in lieu of those exchanges until those conversations began to happen. I don’t really know. It’s not always easy. Quarantines seem to be over, for now, and inoculations keep happening. There is a space of two years where so much loss occurred, but in all of that, I gained this, and that is more than nothing. 

So I don’t know how long The Horror Doctor will continue. It has changed over time, along with my focus, but I have one or two articles I still feel belong here, and that I want to share with all of you. Thank you for following me, so far, into the darkness with all of its twisting roads, explosions, and blood and breasts and beasts.

I dedicate this day: to the fiends that I’ve made along the way.