The midnight hour is close at hand.

First of all, my apologies for being a most irregular blogger. I have about 10 half-written blog posts in the drafts section, but I have several horrible habits that cause me to leave them that way, and some may never see the light of day. Oh well.

That said, Boxing Day shopping caused a great blogging opportunity to fall into my lap: while perusing HMV for films I happened to come upon a DVD box set of 50 classic horror movies for the astoundingly too-good-to-be-true price of 25 dollars. This set had many films I'd never heard of, but it also had some that I've always needed to see, such as the original Phantom Of the Opera (1925), the original Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Nosferatu (1922), and at least 5 other classic horror movies that I'd normally pay about $30 or more per DVD for, damned rare things that they are. The only two films in the set that I'd previously seen were Nosferatu and, confusingly, Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis--I really have no idea why it's there--which I'd (ironically) just ordered from Kino's website for approximately the same price as the entire set, minus shipping and tax.*

Now, for 50 cents apiece, I knew the transfers would likely be awful; a quick perusing of Metropolis confirmed this suspicion, because I've seen VHS copies of that esteemed film which look better than this one. But beggars rarely find themselves in the position to be choosy, and I am nothing if not a hungry film nerd. With a rarely-updated blog and my outlet-starved ability to conjure spontaneous film essays, with this post I am officially kicking off my Classic Horror project, in which I will watch each and every film in the set and publish my thoughts, with as much research as possible. The full list is linked here; I'm not sure how I want to go about it yet--it'd be really neat to do it chronologically, but much easier to just watch wildly--but expect the first review to go up in the next week or so, either way.

See you on the other side.

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* This also means I will own Metropolis at least three times over the course of my life, because once they're done restoring the complete copy they found in Argentina, I will be all over that like a fat kid on a Smartie.