Tag: The Lost Drive-In

Monstrous Achievements: Lost Drive-Ins, Terror Teletypes, and Killer Shorts

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Greetings, fiends.

It has been some time since my last experiment here, a dissection of another thing that I’d come to love.

 I’ve maintained The Horror Doctor for over two years. It began as the alchemical child of the Pandemic and personal grief. Then it became something else.

I originally was going to use this as a platform, or medium to rewrite horror films into short stories the way I envisioned them in my head – the way I would have written them – hell, Demon Wind was going to be my crowning revised masterpiece. But again, it changed into another thing.

I’ve even mentioned before how I would only focus on reviewing obscure, or more quiet films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and leave the mainstream horror and weird films to their own devices. But my Blog had other plans. And The Horror Doctor, that was just a working title before I would call it something else, a placeholder for what I was grasping at: finding my voice, and collecting my thoughts in this bizarre and amorphous genre crossing different media. 

But The Horror Doctor has stayed.

And yet, I’m going to just say that The Horror Doctor is going to go on something of a witch’s sabbatical. 

Like my Mythis Bios Blog before it, I haven’t been writing here as often as I once did. Letterboxd really got me to write shorter and more concise, or just stream of consciousness and note-based reviews. My analyses, and syntheses, take time and commitment in which my brain doesn’t always find itself as much these nights. Between going out more now, and my other new activities, I am not in that mindset in the same way as I was when I was here for about two years along with most other people. 

I am not abandoning this Blog, even if WordPress itself has made itself less user-friendly. There are still some Lovecraft films I want to compare to their source material. I also plan to write something about Barbara Crampton’s upcoming adaptation of “The Thing at the Doorstep,” which will have more exploration of sex and identity. You bet your soul I will be back here to deal with that. I know I will find a film I really want to talk about, or reminisce over a story. And hell, I might want to create and cross-post more weird and horror fanfiction. 

This year is almost up, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything about this trajectory or just leave Ray Bradbury here before me talking about a normal child being adopted by monsters, and wishing that he wasn’t human. But I am a monster, in that I have accomplished a lot, and while it is my natural impulse to say that it isn’t nearly enough I want to spend a bit of time telling you what I’ve done before Father Time comes in with his scythe much to the second-hand embarrassment of Death of the Endless whose sense of zen can only be peachy-keen for so long. 

I am a Moderator for the Lost Drive-In Patreon. I did a podcast on Elevated Horror with the Lost Drive-In Discord server’s administrator Magi Savage, and Critically Optimistic: Movie Reviews. Magi is responsible for me having done, and doing, both things. When I wasn’t brushing up on some Eli Roth’s History of Horror to say something intelligent on the horror equivalent to the comics industry marketing their sequential works as “graphic novels,” I make Spoiler Discussion channels, and generally hang out on the Discord while Joe Bob and Darcy the Mailgirl comment on a movie we are streaming: and just in general. The Lost Drive-In Patreon is great, by the way. I never intended to stay so long, and I came for the DVDs of Drive-In Theater and MonsterVision, but I stayed for the mugs and hoodies, and the excellent company in the Patreon Saints server. Darcy created the Patreon to restore and preserve all of Joe Bob Briggs’ commentaries throughout the years, along with other media: as part of Drive-In history, and it is something to definitely check out if you find yourself interested.

Then, I sent a letter into Fangoria responding to its Editor in Chief Phil Nobile Jr.’s Monstrous Musings column on the Terror Teletype newsletter. It specifically focused on Halloween Ends. Phil decided to publish that letter as a Monstrous Musing itself, for which I am grateful. Did you know that two years ago, when this Blog started, The Horror Doctor was featured as a link on Fangoria’s website? It’s true, and now there is much more content on here than there was last. And it was an honour to have something I wrote in the newsletter. Unfortunately, it only exists on email to subscribers but it was great having my name featured under a Fangoria logo: something that I hope will happen again. If you want to see the contents of what I wrote about Halloween Ends, let me know and I will show it on this Blog. I was told by Barbara Crampton herself that she told Phil that I was a good writer. I have the Tweet preserved, for posterity even now: right along with actual praise from Jerry Smith on that same platform. I wish I could convey what that means to me, but I think it speaks for itself.

But I did something else as well. As of this writing, I created my first ever short film screenplay: a horror film adapted from a short story I made years back. And I entered it into a contest called Killer Shorts: whose judges include Joe Bob, as well as Barbara, and Kane Hodder. I meant to apply to it a year or so before, but I didn’t have a screenplay.

Until now.

It is my first attempt. A prototype. The short story I wrote, that I adapted this monstrosity from, had a tough critique from Strange Horizons, and it was only the first of several stories in the series I made before life and the Pandemic distracted me from continuing them. I am trying to be realistic about my chances in advancing through the rounds, but the mere fact that I made this happen, that I experienced and questioned aspects of my story when I switched from the medium lens of prose to film, and that I will get feedback from some professionals I’ve grown to respect and admire, and that I sent in what I did is an achievement. 

I want to thank my friend Miriam for reminding me of Killer Shorts, and also Killer Shorts Top Ten FInalist and Hollywood HorrorFest Best of Fest winner Phillip Dishon for being interested in my work, and taking a look at what I’ve made after my submission. It is probably too late to format my work properly for Killer Shorts, but he has offered to give me guidance for other film festivals. And as I’m going over this invaluable feedback, I realize there is still a lot for me to learn. 

I am still not where I need to be, I feel, but I am slowly getting to where I want to be. And that is a lot of places. I’ve learned, over these past couple of years, that it isn’t a straight path but several crooked ones that meander and branch off, and that sometimes you need to mentally split up and cover more ground just as much as you should stay together. I wanted to share these triumphs with you as the uncertainties of another year encroach along because you’ve been here, or you just got here and you are interested in what I’m doing.

I’m glad I did this. All of it. And I am thinking of making more screenplays with more of the knowledge and insight that I hope to gain. Who knows: maybe one day there might be a remake of Demon Wind in the works … or something based on that as a monster of my own design. In the end, one of the major reasons I am stepping away a bit from this Blog is to write less about other people’s works, and to make more of my own original creations: or at least more creative endeavours. 

I do plan to earn that Silver Bolo one day. But if I don’t, that is all right too. I just want to construct a monster to be proud of. Happy New Fears, my fiends – from a student of horror.

How is The Horror Doctor?

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

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.