So what is all this?

Welcome to Lost in the Horror Section! Hello, my name is CJ, and I like horror films. I have liked horror films since I was a tiny child, which explains a lot. It’s fine, it was the 80s. I had older sisters who like scary movies and we had a couch in the living room that I could hide behind and, if I wanted to, could still watch the film in the wavy reflection of the stereo system’s glassdoor. 

Lost in the Horror Section is a blog about horror films. The title is from a shared pastime activity a decent chunk of horror fans took part in when they were first dipping their toes into the spooky film world: spending far too much time in a video rental store staring at the box art for horror films. It’s a past time that doesn’t quite exist now. Sure you can still get a sense of this as you flip through the selections on whatever streaming service you enjoy, but it’s not quite the same as being in close, physical contact with the video cassette case of Creepers (aka Phenomena. 1985). I miss it as much as I have missed writing about things.

For a while I have wanted to do some form of writing on horror movies. I have started and stopped multiple times not knowing exactly how I wanted to approach writing on genres. I love academic analysis on films, but I also like not taking things too seriously. I went to Tisch at NYU for grad school to work on a Performance Studies degree almost a lifetime ago. While there I realized the best way for me to get through seriously heady topics was to write in an almost happy go lucky way. Make the topic entertaining for whoever was reading it. I also was knee deep in the New York improv scene where making serious things fun was the current trend (I was on an improv group that did shows based off of a name from the obituaries it was fun).

When I had graduated from the program and was trying to work out just how I was going to make this new and exciting degree work out in the real world. Then a bunch of serious life events happened and I have had to place that part of my life on the backburner for several years. I am finally bored with all the current serious bits of my normal work life and have decided to try, with gusto, to work on a horror blog.

Now, will all the entries be silly and whimsical? No, probably not as I’m dusting off the cobwebs that accumulated on the writing part of my brain. 

Will this blog be super academic? Not really. I would love to do something that is heavily researched and has sources and footnotes (god I love a footnote). However, I still have a day job that takes up most of my time. There are some very excellent places to find strong academic analysis on horror films already and I will post a list of great sources for that on its own. 

Will all of the movies reviewed be scary? Oh no. Not all horror films are scary to every person. Not all the horror films I enjoy could be considered scary to anyone. Is the 1958 film, The Crawling Eye, scary? Was it ever scary? It involved goopy giant eyeballs from space terrorizing a sleepy ski resort/science observatory. I love that dumb movie. 

What I plan on doing is taking a selection of films that share a similar topic (haunted families, a franchise here and there, movies that try to create folklore, etc.), writing short reviews on each of the films exploring the overarching topic and then writing an essay examining the full topic with all the films. That is the most structure I am going to place on this blog for now. I will also, from time to time, post some writings on movies that fall outside of the grand topic I’m currently covering. Reviews and thoughts on new films that come out, or that I come across, maybe a special run of films to coincide with a holiday or season. These will be short bits here and there. I am also going to leave things open to change as things progress of course but this will be the plan for now.

I have my first topic for this blog all marked out. I’m going to be looking at Haunted Homes and the families that live in them. Ghost films make up a healthy portion of horror, haunted house films also a big selection of films. I am not going to cover every haunted house film out there, at least not for this first run of films. I’m looking specifically at films centered around a family that moves into a home with ghosts and/or demons. I’m also largely looking at films set in America and Britain at the moment. But I have also added in a few films that come from a less western centric view point. When I go through some of the broader subjects I would like to focus on how the topic is seen from creators that don’t all share a straight, white, cis male viewpoint. Why? Because variety is the spice of life and I watched a lot of rehashings of the Enfield Poltergeist for this series. 

I also know I need to watch The Innocents (1961). I currently can not get ahold of a copy of The Innocents, nor The Uninvited (1944), a film I loved growing up and am desperate to see if it still holds up. I will revisit this and other topics I end up covering for sure. 

After this run of films goes through I am currently thinking of taking it “easy” and deep diving into the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. So that’s a fun thing to look out for. I am also, for the month of October, going to be doing a film almost every day for the month. These will be short written pieces, less reviews more like overall impressions on the films. For those I will try to keep spoilers at a minimum. For the longer pieces that tie into a larger topic? There will be spoilers. Lots of spoilers. I’ll tag a warning at the start of the articles for safety sake and for those that don’t read through this whole intro entry. Which is fair. 

So welcome to Lost in the Horror Section! A film blog about horror movies and the ramblings of a weird, old nerd!