Two Years on Blogger!

I've been on Blogger for two years!!! I know I had a considerable break after last year's Hallowe'en, but, I needed it. Out of all the things which I ever had an interest in, horror movies have remained a constant in my life, so, even when I wasn't blogging, you can be sure that I was still watching 2 or 3 nasties every day, learning more about them, and, generally, just enjoying them for what they were without feeling the constant pressure to write something.

I've now got 323 subscribers, 190,649 pageviews, and I'm quite amazed that people are still reading my 707 (now 708) posts. I would like to say that all the numbers have doubled since this time last year, but I can't and I only have myself to blame for it.

When I look back at some of the posts I made on here, it's embarrassing. I wanted to do too much too quickly and I whizzed through everything superficially. I'm glad that I've decided to treat this as just a journal now rather than yet another poor man's version of the IMDb. Too many other people are writing horror blogs which set out to be the definitive guide to horror and have essay length posts written about each and every film. Good luck to them but that's not how I want to do things anymore.

Since my return earlier this year, I've just been writing what I've felt like writing about the horror movies which still interest me, the ones I've watched, and the ones I've collected. I'm done with trying to change anybody's perception about what makes a good horror movie because, as I've discovered, other people's tastes (especially those of anybody under 25) really suck nowadays. If they're not e-begging for money to make more of their homemade zombie crap, they're writing ungrammatical gibberish on their clicky little phones, drinking hand sanitizer or eating each other. The whole world is going to Hell in a handcart and there's nothing I can do to stop it. What I have to say about an almost extinct genre of movies isn't really that important.

One thing I've noticed is that my "articles" and "off topic" posts get a lot more responses than my movie reviews. I don't think I write particularly bad movie reviews (at least not as bad as that slimy little Bulgarian fellow who still reviews like he's writing the promotional blurb for the back of the sleeve), but I think people skip over them in the same way that I skip over theirs too. There's only so much you can say about a film and so many different ways to say it especially when it's some 30 or 40 year old piece of nonsense which is long since past its watch by date.

I'm still going to write horror reviews because there's always a chance that I can lead somebody to something good or away from something awful. That's why I do it. It's a free service, if you like. I know you didn't ask for it but you're getting it anyway.

Nobody on the planet has watched every horror movie ever made but we're all giving it a damn good try. Some horror movies never made it to VHS, less made it to DVD, and the percentage of horror on Blu-ray is still ridiculously small. I'm lucky that I was there as most of the horror movies which are still being raved about came out theatrically. I'm also unlucky that I've seen the awful crap which straight-to-video horror has become. Swings and roundabouts, my friends, swings and roundabouts.

I will shamelessly promote the fact that I know a lot more about horror movies than 90% of the other horror bloggers just because I've watched so many of them. It's not this blog which is the "ultimate guide" anymore (nor has it ever really been), it's me! Yes, I am a big-headed, arrogant bugger but you have to be to do this every day.

Over 100 horror bloggers which I used to follow in the beginning have given up. A lot of them are now wasting their time writing never ending documents on Twitter, Reddit or whatever other FaceySpace clone is flavour of the month. It takes stamina and dedication to continue to blog and there's nothing quite like this system to separate the poseurs and wannabes from those with a genuine passion for the genre and this medium. I've seen hundreds of new bloggers start up, write a bit, get disillusioned that they didn't instantly have thousands of followers just because they typed a few paragraphs or leeched some pictures, and disappear again.

Will I still be doing this in another year? Maybe. Probably. Will I still be doing it in another 5 years? I sincerely hope not. Most horror movies are for teenagers now and it's been a very long time since I was a teenager. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the same formulas over and over again, I'm barely keeping up with all the new actors and actresses who are famous for 5 minutes and then disappear into obscurity just as quickly, and, to cut a long story short, I don't even care if I'm out of touch with any of that showbusiness malarky.

So what does the future hold for "Dr Blood's Video Vault"? More of the same; more rants, more reviews, more stuff about cats, and my battles with the latest technology. Yeah, nothing is really going to change except, hopefully, it will be better written.

Thanks for reading.