How do I explain this without sounding insane...
I like horror. The first horror movie I ever saw was probably Alien 3, though Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom certainly scared the bejesus out of me when I was little. I've always been fascinated by horror, and from my late teens onward as I discovered the joys of Dracula, Aliens, and Stephen King -- all to my fundamentalist mother's intense chagrin -- I slowly came to realize that horror is the favorite genre of mine. I like it in almost all its forms, from the Gothic horror of the literary scene to the space horror that defines some of my favorite movies and video games.
Several years ago I played through the Resident Evil series in in-universe chronological order, starting from Resident Evil 0 all the way up to the then-recent Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. I had a blast doing it, and I immediately decided to do it again, only this time to add some other horror properties like Silent Hill and Castlevania to it. The addition of Castlevania meant the addition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and that was the little stone that rolled downhill and became an enormous, unwieldy Project that I've been working on ever since. I call it The List; sometimes, the Disturbing Universe.
The basic premise is simple: I arrange, and ideally review, a variety of media (movies, video games, books, whathaveyou) in in-universe chronological order, with a very loose pretense of these works existing in a shared universe. So I would play Silent Hill, the original, as it's (apparently) set in the early 80s, before I would play any of the Resident Evil games, with the earliest game chronologically occurring in July 1998. I'm constantly adding to the List, though addition to the List doesn't guarantee that I'll go through that work right away -- I've been at this project since 2018 and I've yet to get past World War II, and I'm eager to start getting into the material that actually inspired this project in the first place, so I skip around a lot. It'll be there when I "rewind" the clock -- go back to the top of the List and cover all the stuff I haven't done yet.
The core of the List was obviously initially horror themed, but over time I began to expand the definition of what that actually meant. War is a very human horror; film noir often exposes us to the dark underbelly of society. Mythology, folklore and fantasy all place heroes against inhuman monsters. And so on. I would say the List as it stands is about 60% horror as the genre is commonly accepted; its vast explosion in scope was at least partially an excuse to watch a bunch of movies I otherwise never would have seen.
There are a few rules for inclusion on the List. The first is that it's gotta take place in "our" universe. By "our" I mean something that mostly resembles reality as we understand it: there's an Earth, there's humans, history generally plays out the same. No alternate histories where World War II never happened or something like that. There are a few overtly fantasy franchises whose early entries are fairly ambiguous as to whether they're a constructed world or set in Earth's history; if you can make an argument that, at least from the perspective of someone at the time of those works' release, that they're in a medieval Earth, on the list they go. No apocalypses -- those are clearly failed timelines and go on their own list. And so on. It gets interesting the further into the past or future you go; in one direction, you start encountering gods and dinosaurs; in the other, gods and aliens, and in either direction, the question of what it means to be human may have wildly different answers. And sometimes, a popular franchise just can't all fit on the List; the Halloween movie franchise alone has at least four, maybe five mutually exclusive timelines. I'll fit in what I can and throw the rest into a different list. It all deserves to get talked about, after all.
I have other lists too. Before this gargantuan project ever even got started, I was reviewing popular World War II shooters like Medal of Honor. Most of my early notes on the first several Medal of Honor games are lost; after my interest in the project petered out and several years had gone by I decided eventually to add most of the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty (World War II-era) series to the List and replay and write new reviews for them, but there are other entries that never made it to the List that also got write-ups, such as most of the Wolfenstein series. Probably my most successful project besides the big one is the post-apocalypse list, which to date seems to be mostly writing about Fallout and Doom. I'll definitely write about zombie stuff and cyberpunk stuff too, but it's up in the air how I'm going to categorize them.
When I started this project it was originally on Twitter. I'd intended it as a writing exercise; looking back on it, I think I was just stupid. Beginning with review #401, I migrated to Medium, and spent four years slowly but surely updating my old reviews for that platform. As I gradually approached #400, I realized I couldn't stand the SEO hell that is Medium anymore and decided to make the switch to Blogger, which I was already using for my boomer shooter blog. As I reached #700, I announced my retirement on Medium and have made the switch to Blogger on a permanent basis. What this means, unfortunately, is that I have to start all over again, which is fine, as my oldest reviews needed updating and reformatting anyway. This is your reminder that the lower the number, the older the review: some of this stuff was written before Covid. I'm constantly updating and in some cases outright rewriting, but I try my best to maintain the overall tone and conclusions of the review. On rare occasions, I will go back and add an addendum when my opinion on a work has genuinely changed in the time since I originally reviewed it. I've learned a lot over the years and I've tried to reflect what I've learned in my updating older reviews, which admittedly is something of an act of vanity because I sound really stupid in the older stuff sometimes! I'm still deep in the process of reposting my old reviews, but you can read the old stuff (minus #333-400 as I never reposted those) on my old Medium account in the meantime. In the meantime, I'll make sure to keep updating the Index, and I'm developing a robust tag system as well. It's my intention that this blog be a permanent catalog for all my reviews going back to 2018. It's just going to be a lot of work.
Hm. Looking back on all this, I guess I sound crazy after all. Oh well, at least I'm keeping busy!
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