Horror-101.com booms

This past weekend I found a bit of news that has me smiling wide: Horror-101.com, the website I launched in September 2006 and that I run with my business partner Alex Divincenzo, has experience a substantial boom. We're now routinely getting over 30,000 hits per month, already over 110,000 on this year so far, and could very well end the year with a quarter of a million hits. Woot! This has given me an extra oomph and I will be working hard to continue to grow the site in the months ahead.

Horror-101.com concentrates just on the critical aspect of horror cinema. When I started the site, I knew it was a very concept, but we're finding out that there's an audience out there of dedicated horror cinephiles that do care a lot about the quality of their fright films. For them, I do the site. Although we're a long ways of from catching up with leading sites such as Bloody-Disgusting.com, Fangoria.com, CHUD, or Dread Central(we think of these sites as brothers instead of competitors, really), i believe we're slowly gaining in stature in the horror genre community and I hope this growth continues.

Most people may have me tagged as just a horror filmmaker, but in reality I care about all filmmaking in general. In the future, I intend to make a wide range of films, not just horror. But I have a certain fondness for the genre because that's how I started my lifelong love affair with cinema--thru my excitement for scary flicks when I was a teenager. I hope to communicate this fondness to a new generation thru Horror-101. We intend to be a beacon for the fans and a resource for a new generation of horror filmmakers, even as we intend to become a repository for the critical mass of the best the genre has offered.

Horror-101 should continue to grow in the near future. More reviews, more news, more opinion pieces will be forthcoming. We're still struggling with finding writers dedicated to the genre, but this comes from one of the big lessons we learned in our first year--you can expect to keep writers ,no matter how much they may love the genre, to write for free. For this reason, we will begin to explore ways to make the site commercially viable this fall(without compromising our critical approach to horror films. we don't take studio screeners nor are our reviews 'for sale' thru advertising).

So, if you're a horror fan, come pay us a visit. I'm encouraged to see that a little seed of vision I had a couple of years ago is blossoming and gaining hold. It tells me I need to continue to work toward my goals, more specifically making the short film this fall and the feature that will follow after that.

*****

I slaved over the final Biology notebook all this past weekend. The final exam is tonight. I can't wait to be done with this class. And looks like I'll be reaching that finish line with a good grade later tonight. One race ends, and another one begins--I intend to focus on my short film and Horror-101 all thru the summer. And, oh yeah, I got to find another place to live by mid-August too.