TEN YEARS OF CREEPY CINEMA: A CCC Blog Retrospective
I have reviewed 271 films in the horror, thriller, comedy, science fiction, and fantasy genres during the month of October from 2014 to 2022. That is INSANE. Over those nine years I’ve also written seven reviews for TV shows/miniseries’ and six horror-themed top ten lists, and this year I’ll be bringing the grand total of film reviews up to 301. I look at that number and I can hardly believe it.
What ended up turning into a decade-long tradition started out as simply a personal challenge. I asked myself this: can I write one horror movie review to post to my blog for every day of October before the end of each day? I accepted my own challenge, and just barely pulled it off—but, I had so much fun doing it and felt so rewarded in accomplishing the challenge that I set myself the same one again the next year. And again the year after that. And again the next year. And again.
Why do I do this? I don’t have to do it. I don’t make any money from doing Clayton’s Creepy Cinema every October. Well, I mainly do it for two reasons. The first is for myself. It keeps me writing and it keeps me watching movies, fueling two of my passions at once. I really just love sharing my interests, and that’s what this blog has always been about first and foremost. Sometimes I’ll talk about something current, but mainly I like to bring my unique voice and perspective to what I write about and get all of the thoughts and ideas and opinions and knowledge down into words and sentences and paragraphs to form reviews, and this blog is a way for me to put all of it out there for whoever might see it.
The reason I specifically choose to do horror movie reviews throughout October is because I’ve always loved Halloween, but Halloween just isn’t the same when you’re an adult. I was never someone who liked going to big parties, so when I outgrew trick or treating I didn’t really have anything else to do other than carve pumpkins and watch scary movies. Then, after my first year of university, I decided I should start a blog, since I was studying creative writing and needed a hobby to keep me writing. One of my biggest inspirations, YouTuber/filmmaker James Rolfe, had reviewed horror movies every day of October since 2007, so I thought, why don’t I try that, too? I can look forward to watching one of his reviews and post one of my own, as well! He originally started Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness for the same reasons I started Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, and when he quit doing marathons after ten years, I felt like I was still carrying on the tradition, in a way.
October 2023 will be the last Clayton’s Creepy Cinema horror movie review marathon.
It has been a tradition I have thoroughly enjoyed sustaining for the past decade, but even the best traditions have to be laid to rest at some point. My life has changed plenty since I first started. In some ways it’s become less busy, but in other ways it’s far busier, and the marathons inevitably take up a lot of time to make. I’m sure it’s no surprise to hear that it’s been tough to get that many reviews out that fast all in one month year after year in addition to all the other projects I work on, and while I have enjoyed it, I’m ready to make this the final time I do it so I can invest the writing time I have into those other projects and new ones.
It has not been an easy feat. In fact, it’s often been extremely challenging, and there were even a couple times when I considered giving up. But, I persevered, and now, with the last marathon looming in the very near future, I thought it would be fun to do a little retrospective of the previous nine Octobers here on the CCC blog and look back on what I’ve created. Long time readers may have forgotten some of the earlier marathons I did, and newer readers might not be aware of just how many movies I have reviewed. So, I’m going to break it down year by year and give insights into each marathon, and even if you’ve been a constant reader since October 1st 2014 you might find enjoyment in some of the anecdotes about behind-the-scenes inspirations, challenges, and surprises I faced along the way.
YEAR ONE
I had no idea what I was doing when I started Clayton’s Creepy Cinema. Even the very name I still question. I wanted it to retain the use of three C’s like my blog’s name but make it clear that it was horror-focused. While I eventually changed my blog’s official name because I didn’t want people to think of me as a “critic” the marathon name ended up sticking because, well, that’s the best I could come up with, and I didn’t want to just rip off Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness (which has a similar use of alliteration), but the name was the easiest part. I had to figure out what movies to review and what kind of structure to give the marathon. For whatever reason it seemed important at the time to have the whole month divided up based on different themes, while still giving readers something new every day.
I came up with five general categories that would define each week of the month, starting with Freaks and Fiends from the 1st to the 4th, then Mutant Mayhem for seven days, then Hair-Raising Horrors, Creative Killers, and finally Remakes and Rehashes for the last six days. I reviewed 31 films and organized them by release date, starting with the oldest and ending with the newest. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I tried to correlate release dates and weekly themes. I never tried to do something like that again because it made it unnecessarily difficult to find movies that fit within the weekly category and fit into the release date chronology.
Looking back at it, I get post-traumatic stress thinking about how I would leave some reviews until the absolute last minute to complete, and I think it sometimes showed in the quality of my writing. I kept the whole marathon simple—no graphics, no deep dives, no countdown lists—and made all the reviews short, less than 1000 words each. I mainly reviewed movies I had in my collection or had seen recently, which meant some of them were utter trash, but I thought it would be fun to review bad movies because I could make fun of them and write funny insults or jokes. To save time I even reviewed movies I had previously covered in early top ten lists and copied things I had already said about them! I forged ahead and hoped nobody would notice. I learned a lot from doing that first marathon, though, like how to structure a short film review and create my own style that I could more or less replicate each time no matter what movie I was reviewing, and I realized it’s better to review movies that are either really good or so bad that they’re entertaining, not movies that are just plain bad that I don’t end up recommending.
YEAR TWO
In 2015 the luster of having started a new blog had worn off. I had posted over 80 times in the first year and was experiencing burn out with trying to maintain consistent blog writing plus keeping up with my classes and homework and part-time job and friends. But, in the summertime, I started thinking about a second October review marathon, and in the same way Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness had done month-long themes, I wanted to do a whole month dedicated to just one particular corner of the horror genre, but what would be unique? I realized a number of movies I owned were in what I learned was called the “natural horror” subgenre, but I didn’t like that name for it, and still don’t. I thought of them more as killer animal movies, because those ones in particular were the ones I enjoyed the most—Anaconda, Lake Placid, Piranha, and many others.
I announced the second marathon in late September as Clayton’s Creepy Cinema: Animal Mayhem! One of my favourite things about doing the first marathon was building up the hype for it and coming up with creative ways to tease what was to come each week/day, so I doubled down on that effort in year two and came up with the first Creepy Cinema banner, which I created in Microsoft Paint and it definitely doesn’t show at all. While I think my banner-making skills have improved very slightly since then, that banner was my favourite one to make. It was almost as fun as writing the actual reviews.
Overall I found Animal Mayhem much more fun to assemble than the first marathon. I bought a dozen DVDs and Blu-rays early in the summer just to watch for reviewing purposes. The one hiccup I faced was trying to find a DVD copy of the movie Bats, so I reviewed the unofficial sequel Bats: Human Harvest instead, but then ended up finding Bats in September, so I watched it and reviewed it and did a double review, meaning I actually reviewed 32 movies in October 2015, and I went more in-depth than I had the year before.
Once again I fixated on creating a weekly framework, but disregarded release dates. It was easier to group the films based on the attacking animal in question, so it started with Three Crazy Creature Features, because October 1st was on a Thursday (again, I don’t know why it mattered so much to me at the time to have such a rigid weekly structure), then the first full week was Slithering Serpents, followed by Creepy Crawly Critters, What a Croc, and Something Smells Fishy. I reviewed a lot more good-to-great movies, and while I had seen a number of them before, over half of them I had never seen until that summer. I started working on that marathon way earlier and more intensely than the year before, even taking notes while I watched the films. Ever since year one I have begun preparations for Clayton’s Creepy Cinema in the summertime, but every year it seems to get earlier. I was still working on Animal Mayhem reviews well into the month of October, but getting them all done on time felt less stressful than it had before, and by Halloween I felt even more satisfied with how the month had went.
YEAR THREE
I had the idea for a marathon of reviews for Stephen King movies long before October 2016. Once again I ended up buying a number of new DVDs and blu rays, but this marathon proved to be a lot more work than year two. Out of all the Stephen King movies I ended up reviewing I had only seen six of them before that year. The other new challenge I faced was a more limited supply of films. As October got closer and closer I started to get concerned I didn’t have enough to fill 31 spots. I watched and reviewed Riding The Bullet extremely quickly because October had already started, so I couldn’t do any movies that were too old because I couldn’t go back, I was doing them in chronological order of release date, with only one out of chronology on purpose, because I knew Cell (the most recent Stephen King movie in 2016) was going to suck, so I reviewed my favourite scary Stephen King movie on Halloween, Misery, instead. I ended up cheating a little and split my review for the 1994 miniseries The Stand into two parts, reviewing Part One and Two on October 20th and Part Three and Four on the 21st. In total, I reviewed 26 movies and 4 TV miniseries spanning five decades.
At this point it might seem like I made more work for myself than I needed to with Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, which is 100 % accurate. I tend to do that with a lot of things, and I’m better about doing it less now, but back then I made everything harder than it needed to be (this was true of my university projects, too, and not just the writing kind). In the end, though, I think King-a-thon was a success, and having a purpose at the start of it made it fresh for me, too. I intended to determine that most movies based on the works of Stephen King are not that bad, which was contrary to what I had heard for so many years prior. Many of them were bad, yes, but even though I followed up King-a-thon with a recap and two countdown lists of the best and worst Stephen King movies, I still didn’t really answer the question of whether or not more were good than bad…oops.
YEAR FOUR
2017 was a great year for me overall—I finished my degree at the end of 2016, then went on new adventures, worked new jobs, and met new people—and instead of making the fourth October marathon stressful for myself, I made it more fun. I poured more creativity and more time into the visual aids and diversified my picks for what I would review, first creating a large graphic for advertising the marathon in September, then making posters for each day of the week in addition to the banner. Monster Madness had ended over at Cinemassacre the year before, so I paid tribute to James Rolfe by following a daily framework similar to what he had done for his tenth and final(ish) year. I had Sci-Fi Sundays, Modern Mondays, Top Ten Tuesdays, WTF Wednesdays, Thriller Thursdays, Free-For-All Fridays, and ‘Saurus Saturdays. This gave me more opportunities to talk about some of my favourite genre movies, including more mainstream films, countdown lists (including a whole entry dedicated to talking about Monster Madness), and classic dinosaur movies. I reviewed 25 films, made 5 top ten lists, and even reviewed a TV show for a change of pace.
YEAR FIVE
I thought I made a great collection of horror content for Clayton’s Creepy Cinema 4, but for year five I wanted to go back to doing a whole month-long theme. I didn’t write as much for my blog in 2018, but I felt personally obligated to continue the October tradition, especially because I had received lots of great feedback the year before and it had been a lot of fun to do. So, I chose a theme that would allow me to cover some of my favourite horror films without needing to watch as many new ones, and thus work on Sequel-a-thon began. I reviewed 29 movies and 2 entire TV shows spanning seven different franchises: two sequels to Creature from the Black Lagoon (my favourite classic Universal monster movie), all films in the Alien and Predator franchise up to that point, all adaptations of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, two sequels to Ginger Snaps, all Scream films directed by Wes Craven, and the Evil Dead films, ending with the show Ash vs. Evil Dead on Halloween. Even though I enjoyed exploring the different franchises in-depth, I think it was around this point that I had considered quitting. I had lost some of my creative spark and didn’t have any ideas for what to do the next year at that point.
YEAR SIX
In order to get reinvigorated for the sixth annual review marathon I opted for no theme again to make it more like year four, and then tried to go back to doing weekly themes. I found a way to incorporate more movies that I had recently chosen to watch just out of my own personal interest instead of seeking out specific movies to review, and what I ended up with was this: the three Jaws sequels, a handful of dinosaur movies, a couple monster movies, and some random ones that didn’t really relate to anything else. I figured out a way to brand this marathon as Schlocktober (the majority of the movies I would focus on were either not well made or very low budget), and I captured the cobbled-together-nature of it with the banner, spelling out Schlocktober using different letters from the posters of some of the movies I was reviewing. I covered 31 movies, and used that marathon name specifically because I had seen it used by multiple other movie reviewers, in hopes of drawing new readers who were looking for the kind of content I was creating and finding it by accident.
I tacked on Son of Kong and Ghost Ship to the Jaws sequels to fill in the first week, which became Sea-Faring Schlock, then week two I called Experiments and Slashers, with the idea that the movies might be about slasher villains, science experiments, or social experiments (pretty random, I know), then it was Aliens and Apocalypses, Prehistoric Monsters, and for the last five days I reviewed food-related horror movies, which was an unofficial subgenre I had discovered accidentally a few years earlier with my cousin, and we had watched a new one every Thanksgiving since (a tradition that, as of writing this, we have somehow maintained for nearly as long as I have maintained Clayton’s Creepy Cinema).
I didn’t really advertise each week as clearly as I had in past marathons that had weekly themes, and while I think I made some pretty entertaining reviews out of some pretty silly movies, I wasn’t as happy with this marathon overall, despite having completed all the reviews in record time, reviewing movies I had wanted to review for a long time, and getting some more positive feedback. It just wasn’t as cohesive or as consistent. I had had big plans a few years prior for making an elaborate review of the movie Thankskilling and doing it as a short-film-style video, but that time of my life had passed me by, so I felt like I was giving in by just writing a regular review for it as the Halloween review that year. I’m over it now, but I can still picture what that review would have been like, and I know it would have been infinitely more work than writing it the way I did, but super fun to make.
YEAR SEVEN
When I wrapped up the Schlocktober marathon in 2019 I had no idea that only a few months later I would be writing about the movies I had watched in quarantine, because a worldwide pandemic was going to confine us to our homes for over a month and the rest of the year would be unlike any year of our lives. Looking back on it, I don’t think I had the worst time during the height of the pandemic, but one of the things that kept me going during those extended periods at home was working on the seventh annual review marathon. I decided on another month-long theme again, and recalled how James Rolfe had repeated the Sequel-a-thon theme a second time back when he did Monster Madness.
Instead of doing more sequels I thought back to my favourite Creepy Cinema marathon, and revisited the subgenre of killer animal films. Clayton’s Creepy Cinema: Animal Revenge was my most ambitious marathon yet. I reviewed a total of 35 films and created a top ten list of best (and worst) killer animal films for Halloween. Thanks to streaming I was able to watch over a dozen new movies I had never seen before without needing to spend as much money on DVDs and Blu-rays. I had a blast reviewing them, and having invested more time into it that summer I was able to complete every review and have them all ready to go before October, which was a first. It was nice to be able to resume the October tradition like normal that year when nearly every other aspect of life had been altered because of the pandemic.
YEAR EIGHT
Every new Creepy Cinema marathon has felt intentional to me in how I choose to approach curating the films I’m going to review, and in the wake of 2020 I felt I needed to open myself up to more possibilities to match the overall feeling I went into the new year with: 2021 was a fresh start. A lot had changed from when I had started working on Animal Revenge in summer 2020 to when I had started thinking about the eighth annual marathon. Aside from the pandemic, plenty had happened in my personal life, too, and I was halfway through my second degree (which I had completed almost entirely online) with only one semester left. I decided Clayton’s Creepy Cinema Year 8 did not need a theme but did need to have a little structure just to keep me focused. I made every Tuesday a new entry in my Favourite Films Series (where I talk about only my absolute favourite movies of all-time and go as in-depth and personal in my writing about them as I can) and every Friday was dedicated to reviewing a new horror movie (meaning ones that had come out within a year), because the world had been so neglected of new movies the past year with theaters being closed.
I think this marathon had the greatest variety of all so far, covering exactly 31 films, ranging from mainstream to obscure, and I was pleased that I was able to let each review be whatever it needed to be. Some were short, some were long, but like the best years before, I got some great responses and look back on it now quite fondly. It left me actually looking forward to making the next marathon, and I was pretty sure I knew what I wanted to do. Unlike previous years, I decided on the theme far in advance.
YEAR NINE
Just like the seventh year was a repeat of a previous month-long theme, so was year nine, which I branded Sequel-a-thon 2. By the end I was feeling the creative strain, but I also knew when I was finished assembling the reviews for that marathon I would be making the next year my last year of doing this. Going into 2022 there were still a number of horror movies that I knew I wanted to review, so I wanted to give myself the chance to finally cover them. I reviewed the original Wolf Man and all sequels, all the Critters films, the Phantasm sequels, the Scary Movie franchise, the Underworld franchise, and the Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich, which I calculated perfectly so it ended up being 31 reviews. I had put off a second Sequel-a-thon because I knew it would be a lot of work, but I didn’t realize how much more work it would take by postponing it for so long.
Believe it or not, I technically first started working on the Sequel-a-thon 2 reviews back in early 2021! I wrote a review for Critters Attack! and let it collect digital dust on my hard drive for a year and a half, then re-watched the other four films in summer 2022. I watched (or, in most cases, re-watched) nearly everything before I reviewed it, I wrote some of my most in-depth reviews ever, and I had everything written and edited and waiting in the wings well before the end of September. How was I able to invest more time and energy into Clayton’s Creepy Cinema than ever before? Remember that second degree I mentioned earlier? Well, I finished that degree and went on to become a teacher, and the thing about teaching is it means getting the summers off, but also means working more the rest of the year, and in my case my creative writing was channeled largely into that job as soon as September hit. Going into that summer I knew in the back of my head I had to have 90 % of the October marathon completed and ready to go as early as possible because I was not going to have any extra time in the months of September or October, and I had stressed myself out needlessly enough in past years. I might not be the fastest learner, but I had learned.
The marathon came and went, and afterward I felt a lot of the work I had put in was not energy well spent. For the past ten years I’ve known that writing reviews is a hobby and writing fiction is my real passion, and as much as I love doing Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, it takes up more time every subsequent year because it requires more and more planning ahead and more work to watch the movies and review them, and it shouldn’t feel like work if it’s supposed to be a fun hobby, right? This is why I’ve decided the tenth year will be the final year, but I still plan on celebrating Halloween on my blog in new ways in the future. Even James Rolfe has brought back Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness in a few different forms over the past few years. I’ll still do something, it just won’t be another marathon of 31 horror movie reviews every day of October.
YEAR TEN
Now here we are, with the tenth and final marathon of October horror movie reviews coming in just three weeks! You might be wondering what I’m going to do to make Clayton’s Creepy Cinema X: The Final Marathon special. Well, I have 30 movie reviews and 1 TV show review lined up, so here’s the promo, as always:
Comprising all the best parts of every past marathon, this year has a little bit of everything I’ve done before only new: classic horror movies from the past, new ones from the present, killer animal movies, a Stephen King movie, horror movie sequels, schlock movies, giant monster movies, dinosaur movies, food-related horror movies, movies YOU the readers have asked for, and lots more!
Schlock Sundays – cheesy genre fare that is guaranteed to make you lactose intolerant
Ani-maul Mondays – killer animal and natural horror films
Timid Tuesdays – more family-friendly films that still have horror elements
Requested Wednesdays – reviews for films that readers have asked for over the years
Throwback Thursdays – classic horror films from the 1960’s and older
Frightful Fridays – a grab bag of scare-your-pants-off fright fests
Sequel Saturdays – horror movie sequels that don’t suck
Join me this October as we count down to Halloween with 31 reviews for the last time! It’s Clayton’s Creepy Cinema 10: The Final Marathon!
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