Ten years ago, the obscure publication you are now reading embarked upon a rather obsessive exercise—to publish a review of a horror film each day during the month of October. We called it ‘31 Days of Horror.’ By the time that first year’s collection of reviews was complete, we remained eager to delve further into the genre, and resolved to repeat the effort the following October. In the ensuing years our steadfast and sometimes qualitatively suspect foray into the horror genre became a staple of our publication.
Despite its extent, 31 Days of Horror was never intended to be construed as anything resembling an authoritative inventory of the genre’s undiscovered gems—although many of those have been included. Rather, it’s a reflection of our idiosyncratic preferences. This is why the work of certain horror stalwarts is absent from our pages, routinely supplanted by coverage of horror practitioners with far less renowned careers, such as Bert I. Gordon, Bill Rebane, or Dick Maas.
Entertaining this practice for a full decade has produced an irregular canon of taste, to be certain, but one that is nevertheless shaped by the genre’s history and trends: from Universal Monsters to Hammer Films to the 80s Slasher boom to the advent of streaming video. Any overview of the horror genre will be tent-poled by these and other of the genre’s hallmarks. But it is our hope to have deepened our readers’ conception of its parameters.
In 2013 31 Days of Horror reached its tenth and conclusive volume. In appreciation of what has heretofore been a ritual pleasure for us, we present the below: a cross section of our labor.
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