Perhaps the most fitting thing a horror website can do is die and then spring back to life. Such was the fate of Bloody Good Horror, which began as a small hand-coded HTML site back in 2001, says editor Eric Newell. "My life caught up with me and I wasn't able to keep up with the daily work (let alone bandwidth costs) so we shut our doors and took the site down," he says, "We had already accomplished more at that point than I thought we ever would, so I figured I would never really be talking about it again."
A writing gig at Horror Hound changed all of that; newly emboldened by the experience, Newell and his brother Mark (the site's web developer) assembled a cadre of other writers and shocked new life into the limbs of their discarded site, creating a place where news, reviews, and podcasts could coexist peacefully under one sleekly designed roof. That design is itself quite a departure from the aggressively obnoxious look that many horror sites still cling to. "That has been Mark's pet peeve from day one," says Newell. "The generally concise layout, combined with the white background (another oddity in the horror community) is what makes us unique. That, and of course when you go to the site there's a headless corpse grasping at you... that seems to get people's attention also."
But without the content to back it up, it doesn't matter how slick your site is. Fortunately, Bloody Good Horror has an abundance of, well, bloody good horror. The site's podcasts -- meaty round-table discussions between writers from all over the US, who have become fast friends within the constraints of their weekly Skype rap sessions -- cover horror from every angle and have become a huge draw to the site, something Newell never foresaw. "I mean, I talk to these guys for two hours every Sunday night, every week, like clockwork. I don't even talk to my own mother that much!"
Newell doesn't need a huddle with his team, however, to choose which movie would sum up the character of his site, "Easy, Sleepaway Camp II: We're fun-loving, we try not to take ourselves too seriously and we were shot for much less money than it looks like. When it comes to philosophy on life, I try to refer to late '80s slashers as much as possible. It's gotten me this far, so I must be doing something right."
