Vincent Price died 20 years ago today

Vincent died on October 25th, 1993. Can you believe it?

He died before most of today's horror fans were even born!

I recommend buying one of these if you aren't familiar with the great man's work.

The last one is cheapest in Target.

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.

Celebrating a Year on Blogger

It's actually been slightly over a year since I first moved my website over to Blogger and so I thought might as well write something about it.

"Dr Blood's Video Vault" has been in existence since 1994 when it was little more than a column in a once internationally famous vampire club's magazine. In 1997, after that magazine no longer existed, I moved everything to the internet using Microsoft Publisher 97 of all things. You can only imagine how bad it used to look but everyone thought it was great.

By around 1999, the website had outgrown the Publisher format and became completely HTML based using Bravenet as the host and FTP as a means to upload everything. I spent thousands of hours coding pages, promoting "Dr Blood's Video Vault" through banner exchanges, and, ultimately, made quite a lot of money selling horror videos through affiliate links.

All that changed once my main affiliate sold their business to someone else and so my site just plodded along with occasional movie reviews for a number of years until, in October 2006, CosmoGIRL decided to feature it as one of their "cool websites".

"In light of the horror season, we thought Dr Blood's Video Vault was another exciting time killer (hehe). This site is designed to pack you full of horror knowledge, including how to survive scary situations based on films. It offers film reviews, interviews and downloads, with a quiz to test how much you really know about scary movies. It also provides an A-Z list of the best-known horrors, so you'll know exactly what to rent for your scary sleepover."

From that moment on, I decided to hit the social networking scene and promote the hell out of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" and I had a lot of fun doing it. The internet paper trail that I left behind is the stuff of legend as I don't think that there is a single social networking site which I don't still have a profile on.

All this was great until Bravenet decided to reduce their free webspace to only 5 MB per person. I got away with it for a year by not uploading anything else but, when I did, the automated capping took effect and I lost most of my site. Thus began the MySpace blog incarnation of "Dr Blood's Video Vault" which would still be going today if the programmers there hadn't killed their site too. I used to have around 87,000 "friends" on MySpace and talked to all kinds of celebrities through it. I really miss MySpace but it's too slow and practically unusable now.

I obviously needed a new host and, after looking around, I realised that Blogger had everything that I needed to continue my mission of "watching the crappy ones so that you don't have to". It's so quick and easy that I wish I'd used Blogger to begin with. Who cares if it doesn't have quite the professional appeal of a "real website"? There's absolutely nothing you can't do on Blogger if you put enough time or creativity into it. My "monetising" now though is simply a token gesture which I only use to provide an image of the DVD sleeves when I write a review.

It's been different. I've met quite a few interesting people online, encountered haters, spammers and trolls like never before, and also made a few new friends in the horror blogging community.

One of the biggest distractions for me has been tweaking all the template settings and rearranging the widgets. To mark my year on Blogger, I've just wiped the blogroll and only added back the people who I know are following this blog. I was originally following around 800 people but now it's less than 250. A lot of the blogs I added to start with are dead now anyway which is a shame but at least my dashboard should load faster.

Anyway, thank you all for reading my blog, following it, and leaving comments. Keep coming back as there's a lot more horror to come.