MONSTER SERIAL HANGOVER

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Luckily, we found ourselves with a shitload of bricks in October, and the determination to pave the best damn road we possibly could.

MONSTER SERIAL came to a violent end yesterday. Our 31-day experiment -- to write about one horror movie a day throughout October -- probably should have failed. At best, I was expecting readers to simply reject the feature. Trends in traffic to this site suggest DARK SHADOWS is your first love, with the other features showing inconsistent peaks and valleys. I know you people love Jonathan Frid, but what about Stephen King? Tobe Hooper? Rob Zombie? I had no intentions of placing all things Collinsport on hold for a month, but the demands of MONSTER SERIAL would definitely put them temporarily on the backburner.

Long story short: I've got an open-minded bunch of readers. While there was neither rhyme nor reason to last month's traffic (the numbers for CREEPSHOW were through the roof, while my piece on 1978's HALLOWEEN went relatively ignored) the event was an unqualified success.

It's a cliche to say "I couldn't have done it alone," but in this case it's the absolute truth. The original plan was to split the series in half between myself and Patrick McCray. Patrick proved to be an overachiever and lived up to his end of the bargain with flying colors. Me? Not so much. Fortunately, the cavalry arrived in the form of David-Elijah Nahmod, Will McKinley, Ansel Faraj, Jonathan M. Chaffin and my wife, Sara Shiver McBride. In the end, the scheduled 31 films turned out to be 36 films, making Halloween week much more interesting than expected when I first spitballed this idea two months earlier.

We also got support from some unlikely places. THE CHURCH OF SATAN gave MONSTER SERIAL a shout out on their blog three weeks ago, and we later joined forces Voltron-style the weekend of Oct. 25 with The Nitrate Diva's VINCENT PRICE BLOGATHON. And DREADIT, the horror board at REDDIT, was sporadically supportive of the series, as well. My thanks to you all.

Please take a moment to visit the websites of our contributors. You won't be disappointed.

• Patrick McCray: THE COLLINS FOUNDATION
• David-Elijah Nahmod: BARNABAS' COLUMN
• Will McKinley: CINEMATICALLY INSANE
• Ansel Faraj: DOCTOR MABUSE
• Jonathan M. Chaffin: HORROR IN CLAY
• Sara Shiver McBride: DAY DRINKING WITH SARA AND ALEXIS