It has been a rough few months. This much is fairly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, and perhaps even to those who haven’t. Life, lately, has felt like a roller coaster operated by someone who has misplaced the instruction manual and is now making executive decisions based on many tequila shots. There have been swampy lows, a few sunny highs, and enough emotional whiplash to qualify for a medical study. There have also been some welcome distractions such as happy hours at Katy Trail Ice House with brisket nachos and Texas country music, the occasional impulsive timepiece purchase, and a newly replenished supply of jokes about circumcision that, mercifully, I have not yet been asked to explain to my immediate family. And yet, amid all this, one thing has remained remarkably constant. Besides family and friends, there has been horror.
I realize this may not be the answer most people would give when asked what has kept them afloat during a difficult stretch. Some people find solace in hot yoga, meditation, or long walks on a beach at sunset. Others discover the restorative powers of gardening, prayer, or a particularly well-organized pantry of Jewish holiday spices. I, apparently, prefer fictional serial killers, practical blood effects, supernatural entities, and the occasional maniac wielding a chainsaw in a remote cabin. To each his own, right?
But horror has always been there for me. It has followed me through childhood, adolescence, college, adulthood, and the various indignities of being a grown man who is expected to know things like how to schedule a dentist appointment and where he left his Maui Jim sunglasses. It has been a constant companion, lurking in the shadows like a sharp-toothed creature waiting to pounce, and, in its own strange way, it has become something like the older brother I never had. For many people, horror is about fear. It is the elevated heart rate, the sudden scream, the moment a seemingly innocent coed discovers that a pom-pom is a perfectly serviceable instrument of death. It is the blood, the guts, the monsters, and the deeply questionable decisions made by attractive young people who have apparently never seen a horror movie in their lives. And yes, I love all of that.
But somewhere along the way, horror became something else to me. It became family. Not the family that necessarily shares your last name or shows up for Thanksgiving with an unsolicited opinion about your career. I mean the family you find unexpectedly, and the people who understand a part of you that you might not have known how to explain. It’s the people who can turn a discussion about a rubber monster suit, a particularly effective jump scare, or the merits of a John Carpenter score into a three-hour conversation that leaves you feeling a little less alone in the world. Horror has taught me things about survival, friendship, resilience, and the peculiar human ability to find humor in the darkest places. It has given me a language for feelings I could not always articulate. And over the past few months, when things have felt especially uncertain, I have found myself returning to that language, to those movies, to those people, and to the strange comfort of knowing that somewhere, someone is probably arguing about whether The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Evil Dead is the more perfect American nightmare. And I find this very reassuring.
My relationship with horror began before I could have explained what horror was. I was an only child, and my parents, who loved music and movies, brought me along just about everywhere. They brought me on vacations, parties, restaurants, and even the cinema. If there was something to experience, I was generally there, occupying a seat somewhere near the adults and absorbing far more than anyone probably intended. In the early eighties, going to the movies felt like an invitation into another world. Stories were allowed to be strange. Characters could be messy. Movies could be sincere, ridiculous, frightening, or gloriously all three at once. My parents were not particularly interested in censoring the art I consumed, although they did establish one important rule, which was whatever I heard in a movie, I was not to repeat in public.
This rule, as family history would eventually demonstrate, was more of a suggestion than a binding legal agreement. There were phone calls from school and other parents, and there were conversations about what I had repeated and then there were occasions when my parents had to consider whether their son was developing a creative personality or simply becoming a tiny public-relations emergency. Still, they encouraged my curiosity. Halloween was a major event in our household. We dressed up every October thirty-first, and my birthdays often involved costumes and elaborate themes, frequently involving fantasy, monsters, or the supernatural. In retrospect, the signs were there. Other children wanted cake and balloons. I wanted an occasion that might plausibly involve a creature emerging from a fog machine.
One of my earliest encounters with horror came through Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I was two or three years old when the video arrived on television, and I watched it obsessively. The dancing zombies were marvelous. The ghouls were terrific and the choreography was practically a religious experience. But that opening sequence, in which Michael Jackson transforms into a werewolf, was another matter entirely. Every time the transformation began, I hid beneath the living room coffee table and watched through my fingers, leaving just enough space between them to see what was happening. I was terrified, but I never fast-forwarded through it. I let the whole thing play out. Then the music started, the zombies came dancing, and I was back in business. Eventually, I began noticing the craftsmanship. The makeup, the camera angles, the sounds, and the mechanics of the transformation. What had frightened me became something I wanted to understand. I was fascinated not merely by the monster, but by the people who had figured out how to make the monster appear in the first place. I was asking questions like, Why did that scene work? How did a human face become something so wolf-like? And how could a television screen produce a physical reaction in a little kid sitting several feet away? I didn’t have the vocabulary for any of this. I just knew I loved it.
Then came Aliens. My parents took me to see James Cameron’s film in a theater, where Sigourney Weaver, a colony of xenomorphs, and a young girl named Newt introduced me to a very different sort of cinematic terror. I had seen lighter fare, including Little Shop of Horrors, but that was a musical. You could sing along and you could tap your foot. The prospect of being devoured by an extraterrestrial flower was not, at least in my young mind, quite as likely to interrupt the evening. But, I loved Aliens. I talked about it all the way home, recounting the monsters, the action, the gore, and the dialogue as if I had personally assisted Ripley in saving the universe. My father, meanwhile, was preparing his own contribution to the franchise.
That night, after I had gone to bed, he put on a pair of my mother’s pantyhose, pulled them over his head until he resembled some kind of homemade xenomorph, and crawled into my bedroom. He scratched at the walls, crept toward my bed, and grabbed me while making the sort of noises that would have earned him a supporting role in any respectable creature feature. I screamed. I yelped. I cried. I attempted to fight back. My parents, naturally, were on the floor laughing. I would like to tell you that this was the moment I developed a sophisticated understanding of horror as an artistic medium. In reality, I was mostly trying to determine whether my father had been replaced by an actual xenomoph.
But once the initial shock passed, something remarkable happened. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even particularly frightened anymore. I was exhilarated. My heart was racing, my body was buzzing, and I had experienced the full force of what a story, a performance, and a little theatrical mischief could do to a person. The three of us laughed together and that terror became an inside family story. The monster became a memory, and the memory became one of the many ways my parents and I bonded. In a peculiar sense, horror had brought us closer. My father had accidentally, or perhaps deliberately, taught me one of the genre’s great lessons, which was fear can be transformed. It’s something that seems overwhelming in one moment and can become funny, fascinating, or even beautiful when you understand it a little better. Sometimes the monster is terrifying. Sometimes the monster is your dad in women’s hosiery. And sometimes the monster is exactly what you need.
By the time I was eleven, I had found a friend who shared my enthusiasm for horror. We also found a local video rental store whose employees, through either extraordinary generosity or a questionable commitment to age restrictions, allowed us to rent practically anything we wanted. We took full advantage. Every week, we wandered the aisles, selecting four or five horror movies at a time. We consumed slashers, supernatural thrillers, creature features, and whatever else promised a high body count or an especially imaginative death scene. We were building our own education, one VHS tape at a time. This was the early nineties, which was way before social media, streaming services, online fandoms, and the modern miracle of being able to find six hundred people arguing about a movie before you’ve even seen it. If you loved horror back then, you had to find your people the old-fashioned way. You went to school. You started conversations. You discovered, often with some disappointment, that most of your classmates did not want to spend lunch discussing the finer points of practical gore effects.
There was no algorithm waiting to introduce you to your next favorite filmmaker, and there was no online community to assure you that your enthusiasm was shared by thousands of other people. There was just you, your friend, the video store, and the hope that somebody else might understand why you were so excited about a movie in which an unstoppable maniac terrorized a summer camp. Every so often, though, a new horror movie would arrive in theaters, and we would attend a prime-time screening. There, surrounded by like-minded strangers, I experienced something close to spiritual fulfillment. These were my people. We knew the actors. We recognized the familiar faces. We began to notice the recurring sound effects, the camera movements that telegraphed an approaching monster, and the ingenious ways filmmakers could turn a modest budget into a nightmare. We knew when a practical effect deserved applause. And we understood that sometimes the cheapest-looking monster could be the most memorable, and that a well-timed cut could be more frightening than a truckload of computer-generated blood.
We were not merely watching movies. We were learning how movies worked. We were discovering the artistry behind the scares. And more importantly, we were finding one another. That distinction has stayed with me. Horror gave me a way to connect with people before I necessarily knew how to connect with them in other ways. I could begin with a movie, an actor, a director, or a favorite kill, and suddenly a conversation was underway. A friendship might follow. Sometimes it still does. In college, the genre continued to evolve alongside me. Saw arrived with its elaborate traps and moral provocations. Freddy vs. Jason gave horror fans the crossover event of their dreams. And Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses introduced a new generation to a particularly filthy strain of cinematic madness. Horror was becoming more inventive, more confrontational, and increasingly willing to explore the ugliness lurking beneath the ordinary.
By then, the internet was beginning to change everything. Film websites and online communities made it possible to find people who shared my interests, even when they lived hundreds or thousands of miles away. The conversations I once struggled to have in a school hallway were suddenly happening everywhere. I had found my Mecca. Even in Kansas, which occasionally felt as though it had been constructed atop one of the gates of hell (a true place), I found people who loved movies the way I did. The friendships multiplied. The discussions grew longer. And the community became larger than anything I had imagined as a kid hiding beneath a table during Thriller.
I studied film and journalism, worked my way into television and media, became involved with a comic book store and art gallery in South Dallas, and eventually returned to writing about movies, music, and culture. Radio followed. Podcasts followed. And one creative project led to another, and the common thread remained the same, which was that I wanted to talk about the things I loved, and I wanted other people to talk about them with me. Looking back, I can see that the monsters were never the whole story. They were the invitation.
The horror genre has changed dramatically over the years. It has expanded in its ambition, its visual sophistication, its storytelling, and its willingness to challenge audiences. It has also become a far more visible cultural force, attracting filmmakers who approach it as a playground for ideas about grief, identity, class, family, politics, trauma, and the human condition. The genre can be operatic or intimate, grotesque or elegant, devastatingly serious or gloriously stupid. It can give us a blood-soaked nightmare one weekend and a tender meditation on loss the next. It can feature a murderous clown, a haunted house, a demonic nun, an animated Halloween special, or a zombie musical set at Christmas. Speaking of which, if you haven’t seen Anna and the Apocalypse, I would encourage you to reconsider whatever objections you might have to the combination of Christmas, teenagers, musical numbers, and the undead. It is a movie that understands the absurdity of its premise and commits to it with such enthusiasm that the absurdity becomes part of its charm. This is one of horror’s great gifts, and it refuses to stay in its lane.
It has always been a genre capable of doing more with less. Horror doesn’t necessarily need a hundred-million-dollar budget or a roster of A-list movie stars to make an impression. Sometimes all it needs is a clever idea, a committed cast, a practical effect, a shadow in the corner, and a director who knows precisely when to turn off the lights. The economics are part of the appeal, too. Horror has a remarkable ability to turn relatively modest productions into cultural events, spawning sequels, franchises, conventions, merchandise, midnight screenings, and decades of passionate debate. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Jigsaw, the Leprechaun, and the various entities that have made the Insidious films so unpleasant to watch alone have become more than characters. They are fixtures of a shared cultural imagination.
Horror fans don’t merely consume their movies. They show up for them. They dress as their favorite killers. They cheer when a beloved character returns. They debate practical effects with the intensity of appellate judges. They collect masks, posters, autographs, props, and enough memorabilia to make their living rooms look like evidence lockers. They attend conventions, line up for photographs, travel across the country to meet filmmakers, and happily spend an afternoon discussing the precise mechanics of a fictional murder. It is a beautiful thing to witness. At its best, horror fandom is an enormous, unruly neighborhood in which everyone has an opinion about the best way to survive a zombie apocalypse and nobody thinks it is strange to wear a severed-head mask to brunch. And the neighborhood keeps growing.
For me, that growth has been one of the most exciting developments in the genre. Horror is no longer simply a collection of movies that people watch in the dark and then politely pretend not to have enjoyed. It is a community, a culture, and a continuing conversation between artists and audiences. It also reminds us that the things we love do not have to be respectable to be meaningful. There is room for the artistic ambitions of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, the visceral absurdity of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, the inventive craftsmanship of practical-effects artists, the low-budget filmmaker who has an outrageous idea and just enough money to pull it off, and the fan who has memorized every line of Army of Darkness. One person might come for the psychological terror. Another might come for the gallons of blood. A third might simply want to see what happens when someone makes a Christmas movie involving a zombie outbreak. The fact is that, well, they all belong. And that, to me, is the beauty of horror. Its doors are open to almost anyone willing to walk through them.
A few years ago, I decided I wanted to bring my love of horror to the airwaves. A friend and I started My Bloody Podcast with a fairly straightforward ambition, which was talk about the horror movies we loved, offer some insight into how they were made, and have a good time doing it. We weren’t trying to change the world. We wanted to talk about Killer Klowns from Outer Space. We wanted to debate which klown was the funniest, which was the most frightening, and how something so ridiculous could also be so wonderfully effective. We wanted to get into the filmmaking, the effects, the performances, and all the peculiar details that make horror fans happy to spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing a movie that most people would prefer not to watch before bedtime. It began as two friends talking into microphones. There is something rather touching about the smallness of that beginning. You start with a conversation. You wonder whether anyone will listen. You publish an episode, check the numbers, and hope that somewhere out there is another person who cares about the same things you do.
Then people start showing up. One listener becomes a hundred. One conversation leads to another. A filmmaker agrees to come on the show. Another amazing co-host joins the horror family. An actor shares a story. A fan sends a message. Someone discovers a movie they had overlooked. Someone else feels encouraged to make a film of their own. And gradually, the little thing you started because you loved something becomes a place where other people can gather around that same love. Today, My Bloody Podcast reaches more than 17,000 listeners weekly and has climbed into the top five of the horror podcast charts. Those numbers are extraordinary to me, particularly when I remember how it began. But the numbers have never been the most important part. The most important part is the people.
Every listener represents a person who has chosen to spend some of their time with us. Someone driving to work, folding laundry, walking the dog, or staying up too late listening to a conversation about monsters. Someone who might be having a wonderful day. Someone who might be going through a difficult stretch of their own. Someone who wants to laugh, learn something, hear from a filmmaker they admire, or simply spend an hour in the company of people who understand why horror matters. I don’t take that lightly.
A podcast is an odd little thing. You speak into a microphone in a room, sometimes surrounded by equipment and coffee cups, and hope that your words will find their way into somebody else’s life. You cannot always see the people listening. You don’t know what kind of day they are having. You may never meet most of them. Yet, over time, they become part of the experience. Their support gives the work a life beyond the room in which it was recorded. And that is something I have come to treasure.
My Bloody Podcast has introduced me to people I might never otherwise have met. It has allowed me to speak with actors, directors, writers, special-effects artists, and filmmakers whose work I admire. It has given me opportunities to ask questions, learn stories, celebrate accomplishments, and share the enthusiasm that first made me fall in love with this genre as a kid. But perhaps most importantly, it has given me another way to build community and meet my best friends.
I have always loved making friends. I love meeting someone new and discovering that we have a shared interest. I love the moment when a conversation moves past the polite introductions and becomes something genuine. I love watching people who have never met discover that they have known one another, in some strange sense, for years because they love the same movies, the same music, the same artists, or the same ridiculous things. Horror makes those moments remarkably easy.
You can meet someone at a convention because you both love the film Halloween. You can strike up a conversation about a practical effect and end up talking about your family, your career, or the difficult year you’ve had. You can interview a filmmaker about a movie and leave feeling as though you’ve made a friend. You can share a laugh about a particularly outrageous kill scene and find yourself having a sincere conversation about what it means to make art. The monsters break the ice. The people make it worthwhile. Over time, My Bloody Podcast has become more than a show about horror movies. It is a record of the friendships, conversations, discoveries, and shared enthusiasms that make this community special. It is a reminder that the things we love can become bridges between us, even when we come from different places or have very different lives. And I am grateful for every person who has been part of that journey.
To the listeners who have been there since the early days, when the show was little more than two friends arguing about movie monsters: thank you. To the people who have discovered us more recently, welcome to this quirky universe. To the filmmakers and actors who have given us their time, the collaborators who have shared the microphones, and the horror fans who have supported the show, recommended an episode, sent a message, or simply tuned in, you have helped make this into something much bigger than I could have imagined. I hope you know that you are appreciated.
And I hope you know that when I talk about loving horror, I am also talking about loving the people who love it. I am talking about the friends who make the long days shorter, the people who make creative work worthwhile, and the strangers who become familiar faces because we keep meeting in the same places, talking about the same movies, and finding new reasons to laugh. I am talking about the community that forms when people make room for one another. And, if I am being honest, I am talking about something that has helped me more than I can adequately explain over the past few months. When life gets complicated, it can be difficult to know what to do with yourself. You can try to solve everything at once, or you can sit quietly and let the uncertainty have its way with you. You can fill your calendar, buy yourself a watch, order brisket nachos, and tell a few jokes that are probably better suited to a late-night comedy club than a family gathering.
Or you can return to something you love. You can call a friend, record a podcast, talk about a movie, and remember that there are still things that make you feel like yourself. For me, horror has been one of those things. It has given me a reason to keep creating, keep connecting, keep asking questions, and keep inviting people into the conversation. It has reminded me that even when parts of life feel uncertain, there are still things worth celebrating. There are still people worth meeting. There are still stories worth telling. There is still plenty of blood to spill, so to speak. And I am NOT ready to put down the microphone.
I was reminded of all this at Texas Frightmare Weekend, one of the great gatherings for horror fans in the South. You can attend a horror convention and come away with photographs, autographs, merchandise, and the sort of credit-card statement that makes you briefly reconsider your spending habits. You can see incredible props, admire elaborate costumes, and meet actors whose performances have lived in your imagination for years. I certainly enjoyed all of that. But what stayed with me was the community. There were people of every shape, size, color, age, and background. There were longtime fans who could talk for hours about the movies they grew up watching, younger fans discovering the genre for themselves, collectors, artists, filmmakers, families, and people who had gone to extraordinary lengths to dress like their favorite monsters. There were even dogs and cats participating in the festivities, because apparently the horror community has decided that the only thing better than a terrifying creature is a terrifying creature with a leash.
Everywhere I looked, people were smiling. They were talking to friends, meeting strangers, comparing costumes, sharing memories, and enthusiastically explaining why a certain movie meant so much to them. There was an openness to it all that I found deeply moving. These people had come together because they loved horror. They might disagree about which franchise was best, which sequel was unnecessary, or whether a particular film was genuinely frightening or simply a parade of increasingly elaborate body parts. They might have completely different tastes. But they had something in common, and that common ground was enough to begin a conversation. Nobody needed to justify why they were there. Nobody had to explain why they loved monsters. And nobody had to apologize for being enthusiastic.
For someone who spent part of his childhood wondering why more people at school didn’t share his interests, that kind of gathering is a powerful thing. It reminds you that the world is much larger than the small circle you sometimes find yourself in. The people you are looking for are out there. They may be in another city, another state, or standing three feet away from you in a mask that looks as though it was assembled from the remains of a particularly unfortunate Halloween party. You just have to find them. And when you do, something wonderful happens. The thing that once made you feel different becomes the thing that brings you together.
That is what I saw at Texas Frightmare Weekend. It was not simply a convention celebrating horror movies. It was a gathering of people who had found a place where their enthusiasm was understood and welcomed. It was a reminder that fandom, at its best, can be generous, joyful, and profoundly human. We often talk about horror as an art form that pushes boundaries. It pushes technological boundaries, visual boundaries, and the limits of what audiences are willing to watch. But horror can push us in other ways, too. It can challenge our assumptions, broaden our sympathies, and encourage us to look beyond the surface of a person to discover what we have in common. It can make us more curious about one another. It can make us kinder. And it can remind us that belonging does not require everyone to be the same. Sometimes it only requires a shared love of something strange.
There is an obvious irony in turning to horror for comfort. The genre is full of terrible things happening to people who, in many cases, have done absolutely nothing to deserve them. Its characters are stalked, haunted, chased, possessed, dismembered, and occasionally forced to endure the indignity of explaining why they went into the basement in the first place. Yet horror is also, very often, about survival. The final girl gets up. The family fights back. The survivor discovers a strength she did not know she possessed. The seemingly helpless character finds a way through the darkness. And the monster may be formidable, but the human spirit is not always as fragile as it first appears. I have always been drawn to that part of the genre.
Horror acknowledges that the world can be frightening. It doesn’t always offer easy answers or promise that everything will work out. Sometimes people make terrible decisions. Sometimes the danger is real. And sometimes the ending is not the one we wanted. But the characters keep going. They improvise. They fight. They learn. They find allies in unexpected places. And they discover that survival is not always a matter of being fearless, and sometimes it is simply a matter of continuing even when you are afraid. There is something deeply human in that.
Over the past few months, I have had plenty of opportunities to think about what it means to get through a difficult stretch of life. I have thought about the people who show up, the people who surprise you, the people who help you laugh when you need it most, and the people who remind you that a bad chapter does not have to become the entire story. I have also thought about the things that keep us connected to ourselves. For me, that has meant returning to the movies I love, spending time with the horror community, writing jokes, talking to people, and remembering why I started doing all of this in the first place. It is easy to lose sight of those things when life gets noisy. You can become so preoccupied with what is going wrong that you forget what has always made you happy. You can become so focused on the storm that you forget there are people willing to stand beside you while it passes. Horror has helped me remember.
Not because a masked killer or an ancient demon has any practical advice for navigating adulthood. Although, frankly, I suspect some of the characters in these movies could offer useful guidance on personal boundaries. It has helped because the genre represents something I have loved for as long as I can remember. It represents curiosity, creativity, humor, and a community of people who are passionate about the same things. It reminds me that I can still be the kid watching Thriller through his fingers, the teenager racing through the aisles of a video store, the college student discovering new filmmakers, and the grown man sitting behind a microphone asking someone about how they made a monster come to life. All of those people are still in here somewhere. And I am glad they are.
I sometimes think about how different my life might have been if I had never fallen in love with horror. Would I have studied film? Would I have pursued writing, radio, and podcasting? Would I have met so many of the wonderful people who have become part of my life? Would I have found the same sense of community? I cannot say. But I know that horror has given me a great deal. It has provided a creative outlet, a professional direction, a lifelong source of fascination, and a way to meet people who make the world feel a little smaller and a little warmer. It has also given me a place to return to when I need reminding of who I am.
Romantic comedies have their charms. Big action movies have their explosions. There is certainly something to be said for a good drama, a beautiful score, or a perfectly timed joke. I enjoy all of those things. But I have never felt quite as at home in those genres as I do in a darkened theater where the audience is collectively holding its breath, waiting for something horrible to emerge from a closet. Give me the creeping dread of a John Carpenter film to watch with your young nephew. Give me the glorious absurdity of Bruce Campbell declaring, “Groovy.” Give me the practical effects, the elaborate makeup, the ingenious camera work, the music that tells you something terrible is about to happen. Give me the filmmakers who take impossible ideas and find ways to make them feel real. Give me the people who love these things enough to spend their lives making them, studying them, talking about them, and sharing them with others. And give me those extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime friends who will sit beside me, eat chocolate chip cookies, watch a ridiculous amount of blood spill across a screen about a clown named Art, and then spend the next two hours explaining why it was actually a masterclass in filmmaking. Those are my people.
I hope to keep finding them for the rest of my life. I hope to keep making movies part of the conversation, keep welcoming new people into the genre, and keep supporting the artists and fans who make horror such an endlessly surprising place to visit. And I hope the people who have never understood the appeal will occasionally give it another chance. There is more to horror than gore and jump scares, just as there is more to comedy than punch lines and more to music than a catchy chorus. Sometimes a horror movie can break your heart. Sometimes it can make you think about your family, your fears, or the world around you in an entirely new way. Sometimes it can make you laugh so hard that the person sitting next to you wonders whether you need medical attention. And sometimes it can simply be fun.
For those who already love horror, I hope we keep the tradition alive. I hope we keep watching, talking, debating, creating, and introducing new generations to the movies that made us who we are. I hope we keep celebrating everything from the sheer, unrestrained madness of ReAnimator to the carefully constructed dread of a modern psychological nightmare. I hope we keep making room for new voices and new ideas, because the genre has never been more exciting, and there is no telling where it will go next. Most of all, I hope we remember that the community is as important as the movies. The conventions, the podcasts, the festivals, the screenings, the late-night conversations, the friendships that begin with a shared obsession and grow into something much more meaningful: these are the things that make horror feel like home. And to everyone who has been part of my life through the past few months, whether you have checked in, shared a laugh, listened to an episode, offered some encouragement, or simply been there in whatever way you could, thank you. I may not always have the right words to express how much those gestures mean, but I notice them. I appreciate them. And I carry them with me.
Life is rarely as orderly as we would like. There are wonderful stretches and difficult ones, moments when everything seems to click and moments when even the simplest things feel harder than they should. We don’t always get to choose what happens to us, or when the next frightening thing will appear. But we can choose to keep showing up. We can keep making things. We can keep laughing, even when the joke is inappropriate and the timing is questionable. We can keep reaching out to people. We can keep building communities where others feel welcome. And we can keep finding joy in the things that have always made us feel alive. For me, that means horror. It means the movies, the monsters, the blood, the filmmakers, the fans, the friends, and the wonderful, wonderfully weird community that has grown around them. It means My Bloody Podcast, which began as a conversation between friends and became a gathering place for thousands of people who share that same enthusiasm. It means remembering that even in a difficult season, there are still things worth loving.
So let’s turn on the night-light, throw away the key to the basement, put on a movie, and make some room on the couch. Let’s invite a few friends over. Let’s argue about the best slasher sequels, admire the practical effects, and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Let’s keep talking about horror, keep celebrating the people who make it, and keep finding one another in the dark. Because if horror has taught me anything, it is that the darkness doesn’t always have to be something we face alone. Sometimes there are friends waiting for us on the other side of it. Sometimes the monster turns out to be Dad wearing pantyhose. And sometimes, after everything, you discover that the place you have always felt most at home is the very place everyone else was warned to stay away from.
I suppose that makes me a horror guy through and through. And if you’ll have me, I’ll keep the microphone on, the coffee hot, and the blood bags ready. We have a lot more movies to talk about. And I’m not done yet. Not by a long shot. So let me get my Boomstick, stare a deadite down it’s narrow cloudy eyes and say, “Groovy,” because horror is my life blood and horror is family.
