Bholenath's Horrolog

I curate the best horror branded content here: https://best-horror-branded-content.company

[bholenathvalsan]

From Chaos to Cinema: How Relocation Inspired My Weekly Movie Schedule

I haven’t written in this blog for ages, and that’s because my life changed.

This subject is not interesting enough for me to write about, but you’ll get the picture if I tell you the reason for the change: relocation.

Forced to start again in a new place, you may imagine the mess of such an event.

I am writing this blog post because finally, I had one of those moments of enlightenment where I could record the idea that flashed through my mind, as soon as it appeared.

This thing I’m talking about was something that, as a necessity, I was shyly bringing to my mind for the last 18+ months.

The thing is that I finally saw a viable weekly schedule for my one-a-day style of movie-watching.

Seven days per week is not a lot to sequence mentally without the need to write it down. Still, from mind to list on a text file was much faster to organize. It may have taken me thirty seconds.

This is the schedule I came up with:

SU Wildcard movies (items leaving streamers, arthouse, genre cinema, documentaries)

MO Noir

TU Horror

WE Classic Horror

TH Horror

FR Asian Films

SA Black films, Spanish films, or Westerns

SU Wildcard movies

I don’t want to exclude good movies from other genres.

One of the things I do to choose non-horror movies to watch is just check what’s leaving soon in the streamers I use and select from those.

Thanks to this rule I imposed on myself I watched a long list of old, non-horror movies that delighted me.

Here is a sample of non-horror movies I watched recently because they were leaving Tubi:

State of Grace

The Valachi Papers

Macon County Line

Moonshine Highway

King of The Mountain

Gutterbug

Drunken Master

Heist

The Legend of Billy Jean

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The Super

Felon

True Believer

Mobsters

Once Upon a Time in America

You see none of these are horror. Yet, I enjoyed watching them for many reasons.

One of the most important of those reasons is that many are time capsules of the years when they were made.

Monday: Noir

Currently, I’m starting to watch the noir movies in my collection (around 100 of them) again.

What I did was ask ChatGPT to order a list of the movies in my collection from the ones with the most straightforward plots to the most complex ones.

Because there are noir movies with such tangled plots I started to think a lot about why they were written in that way.

One of the conclusions I arrived at is that in the era of Noir, the 1940s-1950s, there wasn’t as much interactive entertainment as now.

Maybe writing the script for movies that rewarded mystery-solving skills, the eye of a detective, or laser-focus attention to the plot was a way of making them more interactive, and thus more valuable.

Tuesday: Horror

Any subgenre, recent and relatively recent ones.

After more than a decade and a half of watching horror constantly, I’m running out of old movies to watch.

I prefer old horror movies because the feeling I get from them is very different from the one I get from contemporary horror movies.

Wednesday: Vintage Horror

But I call vintage horror movies those who are four or more generations old (1956 and older)

ChatGPT and other A.I. chatbots made finding and listing old horror movies that are both classic and unknown if putting it that way makes any sense.

Thursday: Old Horror

Old horror movies are my favorite kind of horror movies. What do I consider old? Movies that are 24 years old or older.

Any sub-genre of horror, but they must be from one to three generations old (24 to 69 years old), not older than that.

Friday: Asian Films

Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc. Any movie that interests me of any genre, but preferably horror.

For me, Asian films are harder to get into than Western ones. They feel even harder than European films. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy them.

The point is I had to dedicate a day of the week to them to keep watching and learning at a steady pace because otherwise my viewing slants towards non-Asian, generally American, movies.

Saturday/Sunday: Other Genres A

Saturday is one of two wildcard genre days. If there is a movie about blacks, a Spanish film, a western, or an epic I want to watch I will watch it on a Saturday.

If it was an epic (as in Greek or Roman long, old epic movie) or a Western I would watch them in the afternoon. And generally something more in line with horror at night.

Sundays everything goes. Generally non-horror movies leaving a streamer soon.

[bholenathvalsan]

Only 2 Weeks to Halloween: On Anthology Horror

Pertaining to horror media enjoyment, this year I decided to do something different during October.

What I generally do is create a list of horror movies in a worksheet with 31 entries and sequence 31 movies to watch; one each October night.

Generally, I end up watching more than 31 horror movies, because being Halloween’s month I am in the mood for extra horror.

But I didn’t do that now, during October of the year of 2024, and here is why.

An Anthology Horror Movies Trip

I am not going to write a blanket statement on this blog entry, by saying something like “anthology horror movies aren’t good” because:

A) I don’t have the horror anthology sophistication to base it on an informed, well-rounded knowledge of the world of anthology horror movies, yet.

B) I have hopes and still believe that there is something to like in almost everything I watched up to now, even from horror anthologies that are D grade or lower, minus a determined type of media (read below).

To be honest with you, I was kind of excited to spend the whole month watching only anthology horror movies.

That was because, like I told you, I don’t pursue anthology horror movies in general. It was about time I did some self-actualization in that department.

Why I’m not a fan of Anthology Horror Movies

I try to be as open to horror cinema types as I can, meaning I am not cloistered in a mono-mythic addiction loop heavily biased towards Anglo horror movies from the U.S. and England.

Yet, I feel a serious decrease in enjoyment when the night’s horror movie is, by choice or serendipitously, an anthology.

For some reason, even if the movie is a horror art-house work that deviates from what one is accustomed to I would always prefer them over an anthology.

Anthology movies have to have a wrapper that is cleverly enmeshed with the shorts for me to consider an anthology of my liking.

Through a lifetime of general horror movies watching I watched most of the regular classics like Creepshow, Tales of Terror, Night Gallery, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum, Tales That Witness Madness, The Vault of Horror, Dead of Night, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Cat’s Eye, Tales from The Darkside: The Movie, Tales From The Hood, or Tales from The Crypt, or recent ones like Southbound and The Mortuary Collection.

Indie Horror Anthologies

I used Tubi to dig into this flavor of horror movie and more than two weeks later I feel steadily non-plused and under-entertained in a way.

Pun intended, because the greater percentage of anthology horror movies I watched are indies, and some included shorts verging on the underground horror movie styles I try to steer clear of.

I’m looking at you, sagas like The ABCs of Death, V/H/S, etc.

Not August Underground nor Otto; or, Up with Dead in their lower-than-satanic graphic meanness and superfluous homo-eroticism, but decidedly headed in that direction. So much disliked by me…

Yet, there is a shocking fact, especially with movie series like ABCs, some (maybe just several in each movie) shorts in those anthologies are gold.

It’s a pity that you have to wade through the revolting, stomach-turning, dry-heave-inducing balderdash that the other, not-so-good, over-the-top shorts confront you with.

Outro

I am still going through other anthologies, with very good finds like Dark Tales of Japan, or okay and above average indies like The Monster Mash, and more of the ones Tubi has to offer.

A tool like Tubi for a contemporary anthology horror movie greenhorn like me is great.

It may keep me entertained for a good while, but in November I will stop this modality and resume my old way.

Hopefully after this month I will develop a taste, and I’ll be able to make anthology horror movies a mainstay of my movies-watching schedules.

[bholenathvalsan]

Just Over a Month to Halloween!

How are you doing? Long time no see! Around here things are quite not-same-old lately.

The last hiatus I took from horror genre content publishing was rather extensive, and I couldn’t find a time when all the variables (read: enthusiasm, energy, and ideas for quality content) aligned like they are now.

My 2018-2021 experiences around the horror social web were nothing to write home about, so I branched out into video game design, as you may know already if you’ve been up to date with my other project going on at Jimminy Studios.

I guess my cinematographer side is too greedy to stay in one genre, so I took advantage of the past several years of disconnect from the horror and Halloween 24/7/365 mentalities that drove me from ‘18 to late ‘21 and got into many non-horror things.

I watched a lot of non-horror and must-watch series, like The Sopranos, Better Call Saul, or The Wire, and old 1980s series too.

One thing horror I got into, and extra enjoyed is that I realized I had come full circle with Lovecraft after decades reading his tales, and got started with the Cthulhu Mythos writers and the tales I’ve read so far are kind of good and highly enjoyable.

Lovecraft is too big of a subject to really be done with it, if he interests you, not just as a writer of weird fiction, but also as a person in general.

Consider all his tales, poetry and articles, the biographies, and the ton of letters. And all this without counting the derivative products, like the Cthulhu Mythos writers and stories.

The one side of Lovecraft I’ve been into lately is his T. S. Joshi biography. Although I haven’t read it for almost a year and a half I’m not done with it. It’s a tome. I’m taking notes and it’s the best biography I’ve read so far, truly exhaustive.

Even if I have been this self-absorbed (I don’t know if I told you, but I relocated to a different place from where I was before) moving to Florida wasn’t something to take lightly and it took me a long quantity of months to adjust (and I’m not sure I’m too adjusted yet, to be honest), even if I couldn’t write anything or do any work for Shock Depot to grow, I had the mindfulness I needed each time I saw or read something remarkable that relates or belongs to the horror genre to star/fav/save it so I can later share it with you.

Streaming services are the bread and butter for a Shock Depot horror content publisher and while I administer and own the website I also fed, feed, and will feed it with content like anyone else, and lately I’ve been focusing on one source of ideas for content that doesn’t cease to amaze me.

First, some background to give you an idea of where my all-time horror (borrowed) knowledge comes from, it comes from Fangoria. So you must imagine that it’s just a sliver (among many) of knowledge of the genre.

I read all the Fangorias from the first issue up to issues from 2005 or so, and while I was doing that, I was taking notes of the movies I thought I wanted to watch, and later went and watched them.

This went on from 2006 until 2012 or so, from then on I got all my knowledge of horror from the web. Thinking vainly that I’d watched almost everything there is to watch from past decades, I kind of stopped inquiring about non-current horror movies.

The thing that changed this wrong notion about myself was Tubi. It has a big bunch of old horror movies and series I didn’t even know existed, and still today it doesn’t cease to amaze me for more than half a decade now.

Among the things I’m going to share in the next month and a half, there are going to be some Tubi horror movie lists I curated from the horror movies I watched since I started using the service.

[bholenathvalsan]

2024 Second Quarter Horror Essay: The X-Files Industrial Think Piece

Of late, I was struggling to finish an article on The X-Files (to benefit horror fans in general, and first-timers in particular).

I was writing, because after the series’ thirty years standing in pop culture, there is a flood of information and data.

Found out that if you care to be exhaustive while doing research, you can’t go through all of the best of those items in just a few weeks.

I don't know if dormant TV series in general are an ongoing trend that never wanes.

Yet, numbers don't lie and The X-Files has a large search engine market share at 110k+ searches per month, so this series is one of those cases.

More than 200 episodes, thirty years standing, no wonder it gets that grade of ongoing interest, even five years after the series' latest installments.

When The X-Files was having an original run, instead of being glued to the TV watching it, I was outside in the streets.

That was because it was a season of my life when two of my friends were in the habit of pulling me from the reclusive corner I was all the time in my house, and taking me out to dine and such.

I remember that I thought that I was going to be a teenager only once, and never complained that my two friends were always coming to pick me up at the time The X-Files was going to be on the TV.

In my city (and in the neighboring ones) it aired on Saturdays at nine PM.

Those two friends who came to pick me up unexpectedly on Saturday nights always wanted to dine.

I remember a few times when we went to take out food to restaurants and then went to a park to eat it.

At least twice we went to a Chinese restaurant. One of those times we conversed for a while with one of the waitresses, more than the simple chitchat you generally exchange with waiters.

When we went to take out, or the Chinese restaurant, or elsewhere it was always places nearby. Those were dead-end places in our city, in different cities, but most of the time on the main roads.

The thing was that while The X-Files were on TV, nobody was around, ever.

It was prime-time Saturday night, yes, but I’m talking about a 2 AM grade of stagnant pedestrian and car traffic. 

We saw a thing we had never seen, a series being a society-killer like that.

I kept myself from adding this anecdotal passage to the article.

About the article, while writing it I couldn’t help myself. I gave my sentiment/personal opinion (a product that’s generally a dime a dozen) about why I thought the show was so popular when it had its original runs: what I saw as a generalized spiritual and esoteric thirst that needed to be slaked. 

I thought that in the minds of naive material persons, The X-Files may have been a good first step in those directions.

Still, that personal conjecture has nothing to do with the abundant horror narratives in the series a horror fan is bound to enjoy. I tried to bring that aspect of the series into focus.

[bholenathvalsan]

Jonesing a life of Integral Horror Art

Happy Halloween everyone! Like I said in my last entry more than a month ago Shock Depot is running better than ever. Who isn’t up to snuff yet (no pun intended) is me.

I had a handful of things planned for Shock Depot to be published on Halloween, but I couldn’t make time to work on a single one of them.

The most important piece was going to be a Vincent Price profile, a step beyond a mere review of a book like the one on Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror or the little Vampira Profile I wrote three years ago. Which was the funniest (while researching it and writing it) thing I ever wrote.

I guess that now I have a whole year to write Vince’s profile, so it’s going to be good. I might even make it bigger than a profile and a downright dossier on such a horror idol.

Besides that, I wrote a lot of listicles, but they aren’t finished so I’ll go publishing them one by one without any kind of haste. Most are about horror music on YouTube, something that is getting better by the hour.

Incorporating game development into a horror communicator occupation certainly drastically changed my lifestyle.

If there has been nothing from me on the horror topic since around November 2021 is because that was around the time I started to think about developing a game.

You can imagine from knowing nothing to having achieved something that resembles a game, with all the things involved in between, such as designing, learning how to implement things for the game, implementing… the last two years flew completely.

I remember it vividly, in 2020 I ditched my other two occupations for the whole month of October and the only thing I did was dispensing horror content.

In my current situation, I can’t do that anymore and it hurts but I guess sometime in the future I will have stabilized enough and will have the resources to do meaningful horror stuff during October.

Now I leave you with a thought, did it escape you that when some countries think of October as the month of Halloween for others is the month of Oktoberfest?

Nevertheless, for you and me, Halloween is every day.

Image Attributions: Bholenath Valsan

[bholenathvalsan]

Shock Depot is Back on Track

I can’t believe the day has come when I’m finally writing this. This is a very special day in the story of Shock Depot, my horror genre website.

!! Since yesterday Shock Depot resides in a better hosting provider !!

This is what happened: I had a horror blog that used this same address, but when Tumblr as a CMS stopped being usable I migrated that blog (its name was The Horror Vivarium before a horror movie named Vivarium was released, I beat them to the name for like 1-2 years) to a WordPress self-hosted website, and re-branded it to Shock Depot.

The hosting provider I picked for Shock Depot back then, in July 2020 was very stingy with the storage quota they give to their low-end plans but I was very strapped for cash back then, kind of unable to pay for a better hosting provider and plan.

I confess that in the last three years, I worked intensely, though part-time, for Shock Depot albeit for only one year and a half.

I kind of abandoned the site, because a lot of other things got in the way, the most important among them was my relocation to the American mainland.

But it wasn’t all about the things I needed to do that weren’t related to the website. It was also about the website itself.

It had a very limited scope for growth due to the tiny storage quota and I was already at a dangerous level of used space.

Things got so bad in the last year and a half that the only storage left I had I couldn’t employ it for publishing new content or posting more files to download because I needed that slack of disk space to be able to keep the website in working order without stability or glitch issues.

Finally, it had to do also with my branching out from web communicator to independent video game developer, something I started working on 1/1/2021.

All of these things don’t mean that since around November 2020, when I started to wind down from working on Shock Depot for one year and a half, they don’t mean I wasn’t longing to return to the site and the social media channels where I connect with other horror fans.

No. I was jonesing to return like crazy but today I can officially announce that I’m returning to work actively on Shock Depot to bring horror fans as many horror benefits, horror resources, and horror web entertainment as I can.

So What Now?

Now the website will become enlivened again, since I'll be posting content and resources to it consistently.

Also, I will be promoting the website for other horror lovers to discover it and take advantage of it in any of the many ways the site is useful to horror fans, horror workers, and anyone else involved with the horror genre in any capacity.

[bholenathvalsan]

1977 Punkettes Ltd. Nudes (PiL Nubes Reimagining) by Love-of-Camp on DeviantArt

This is one of my latest Photoshop practices. It's a mock-up of Jamie Reid's album cover design for Public Image Ltd "Nubes" LP.

[ronaldcmerchant]

Vampira aka Maila Nurmi in TV Guide magazine- 1954.

[horrorandhalloween]

[bholenathvalsan]

Note to self: watch more horror

[fitsofgloom]

She's Super Freak-Aaaay!

[bholenathvalsan]

My kind of girl

[bholenathvalsan]

Every #horror fan worth her or his salt knows who #Vampira is. Last year I wrote this #profile of #Maila Vampira #Nurmi, probably the first horror host ever!: https://buff.ly/2W8Gdlm https://instagr.am/p/CVicZYJMnVw/

[bholenathvalsan]

Among the #horror #movies that I didn't know, that #Tubi showed me for the first time is the SUBSPECIES #tetralogy: watch them free here: https://bit.ly/3bft9lK #vampire #horrormovie https://instagr.am/p/CViN_OvMXlP/

[bholenathvalsan]

Enliven a #Halloween #Exhibit, #Ride or #Installation by adding a little DIY Pepper Ghost: Pepper's Ghost: Behind the Scenes: https://bit.ly/3vMMS5L https://instagr.am/p/CVgQKMFLWh_/

[bholenathvalsan]

Shock Depot is now accepting all types of ads, and promotions content, for #horror and #halloween products, services, #amusements, and the like. The feature is 100% free, please read an explanation here: https://buff.ly/3jyOUBy https://instagr.am/p/CVdvD1SFZWN/

[bholenathvalsan]

In early '20 I watched BATES MOTEL and loved it. I waited almost one year to write something about it, and I think it has passed the test of time with me because I was as excited to write about it, as I was about it while I was watching it: https://buff.ly/3BG5MO2 #horror #series https://instagr.am/p/CVc9bbJAUiD/

[bholenathvalsan]

I wonder from which #horror #movie is this screenshot. Any ideas? Anyway, it doesn't matter, since it is just a test for an Instagram > Tumblr #automation #loveofcamp https://instagr.am/p/CVYyE02MeAC/

[bholenathvalsan]

Horror Arthouse on Netflix: “MALEVOLENT” Review

#Arthouse #horror about paranormal investigators / spiritual healers, "MALEVOLENT", it's a British #Netflix original with a familiar setup, but it's different to other "paranormal investigators enter a #haunt and.." kind of movies: #horrormovie #horrorfilm https://bit.ly/3Ayx87i