About

Welcome to Classic Horrors

Hi, my name is Jeff and I’m a Monster Kid!

I literally ran home from school to watch Dark Shadows. I set my alarm clock to wake up at midnight to watch the Universal Monsters on Sleepwalker’s Matinee with Count Gregor. I went to the drive-in to see the latest Hammer films. I took my copy of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies to school for Show-and-Tell. I read Famous Monsters of Filmland on the way to the lake on family trips. I subscribed to The Monster Times. And so on…

Life intervened for a few years and, while I always enjoyed horror movies, my priorities became college, marriage, family, and career. In 2016, with the internet and the birth of podcasts, “classic horror” seemed to be all about the 80’s and 90’s. Popular “retro” was not retro to me. Therefore, I launched this blog to focus on the true classics from the dawn of cinema through the movie that changed everything, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978.)

Over the next seven-and-a-half years, I extended my definition of “classic” to include films from the 1980’s and added a “Slasher Age” to my original five “Ages of Classic Horror.” In 2017, I launched a podcast with my dear friend, Richard Chamberlain, the Monster Movie Kid. As I write this, we’re nearing our 100^th episode. (Both the website and podcast are multiple Rondo Award nominees.) As long as there are unwrapped Blu-rays sitting on my shelf, I’ll be tearing them open and writing about them.

Movie Reviews Discussions & Ratings

Movie reviews are more about the writer than the movies.

Think about it. A movie is what it is. It isn’t what you wish it had been. Therefore, a review is only what someone’s experiences and expectations perceive it to be. It’s an interpretation of a product from a moment in time. The critic may change, but the movie does not. When I write, “The movie is good,” I’m really saying, “I think the movie is good.” It’s my opinion and only my opinion. In my “reviews,” you’ll learn more about me and what I like than about the technical aspects of a film.

It’s a fact that movies certainly range in quality. However, there’s no correlation between the quality of a movie and how much you like it (unless you don’t like movies of low quality.) I’ve used stars to try to rate them, I’ve used IMDb, Letterboxd, and my own ratings systems (7 possessed children, anyone?) Never completely satisfied, I’m launching a new system. It’s a rating or score based on two things: how much I enjoy a movie and under what conditions I’d recommend it.

I’ll rate how “engaging” I find a movie to be based on four factors:

• Writing
• Direction
• Music
• Pacing

This gives us six possibilities:

• F = Favorite
• G = Good
• A = Average
• B = Below Average
• W = the Worst
• D = Defies explanation (no matter how “bad” it is, I love it)

In addition, I’ll identify what’s perhaps more telling: how likely I am to watch a movie again. The six ratings have six associated recommendations:

• F = Confidently Recommended for an Entertaining Experience
• G = Recommended for a Better-Than-Average Experience
• A = Cautiously Recommended for a Possibly Mediocre Experience
• B = Reluctantly Recommended for a Questionable Experience
• W = Recommended Only for Indiscriminating Genre Fans
• D = Recommended Only for Serious and Forgiving Genre Fans

Ratings “cards” like the one shown below will appear at the bottom of each review… no, let’s call them “discussions”… written after April, 2019.

Genre and Categorization