Organization & Revelation

This last week I've been traveling and have not—with the exception of a delightful screening of The Big Sleep at the Glasgow Film Theatre—been able to watch any films, but I have had some time to organize the Dead of Night website.

Organization

This newsletter began in 2022 with an essay on Mephisto Waltz and Phantom of the Paradise and continued on with intermittent essays, but its current short-form, weekly format started last August. So it’s been almost a year of regular output and while each piece is meant first to be read in your email inbox, at this point there’s enough material that it felt necessary to make coherent browsing possible.

For readers, the way to browse is via this Guide & Index page. The guide organizes my newsletter releases (with links) into broad subject categories (think hauntings, vampires, etc.). It looks like this:

The index lists the films I've written about and allows you to click through to the relevant pieces. It looks like this:

Both the guide and the index only list and link to subjects and films that are a main topic of a newsletter. So the short weekly sections on new releases and recommendations are not linked in this Guide & Index. I do plan to do more with my collected recommendations in the future. 

Revelation

All the tagging and organizing was revealing. My subject is a broad one (“horror cinema and its tributaries”) and each week’s topics emerge simply from what’s on my mind, what I’m watching, and what’s going on in the horror world. Creating this guide and index forced me to look back and assess where I’ve been putting my energy. 

By far the biggest category is “Slashers,” with 10 pieces in it, double the size of the next-largest categories. I suppose I’m not super-shocked by its place at the top (I do have some meager grasp on what I’ve been writing), but the degree to which it outpaced the rest was a surprise. If asked about my taste in horror, I would never begin with slashers. In this piece on Five Movies That Shaped My Taste in Horror, I only mention one slasher—and it’s psychedelic meta-slasher New Nightmare. And yet, this is what I’ve been writing about. I have no clear explanation for this fact except to say that what’s most interesting to write about is not always what’s most personally inspiring, slashers are a major subgenre, and slashers have long been at the center of critical conversations about horror. I’m sure I’ll write about more of them in the future.

After slashers, vampires and serial killers are tied for second—though I’ve noticed that if I combine devil worship movies with movies about “demonic realms” into a super-category about the occult, fantasy, and magic, this is in truth the second-largest category. 

What I’ve also noticed, likely most usefully, are the areas and subgenres I haven’t yet explored much—folk horror in particular stands out. 

I’m sure I’ll continue updating and tinkering with this Guide & Index. If there’s anything I should change or add that would make the user experience better, please let me know (deadofnightmailbox at proton.me).

As ever, more to come . . .

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

I'm writing this email from Scotland where, north of me, firefighters appear to have turned the tide on a major wildfire burning for the last two weeks in the Cairngorms. South of me, catastrophic wildfires burn in Spain and France. Meanwhile, in my own fire-plagued country, our federal government continues to stooge for the fossil fuel industry and to prosecute a war on clean energy.