Rise from your grave!

Shameless self-promotion and yet another substack to subscribe to

Do you wanna party?

It was almost ten years ago that I closed up shop for good on a project that had occupied me for almost as long as it’s been dead. I blogged prodigiously at a website called Cinema Suicide and spent a couple of years producing content at Youtube that ended up shoved straight down the memory hole since the search algorithm hates the word suicide. The topic couldn’t have been more different from what you read here at Codex A: Movies. But not just any movies. My attention was placed squarely on the seediest, nastiest stuff on the video store shelves. I got online in the mid-90’s and some of the first websites that I visited were related to horror movies and what I found in those nascent forums was a network of people trading VHS bootlegs, a circuit that I promptly dove into and in a matter of months had amassed a gigantic collection of videotapes that looked like the archives of Videodrome’s Civic TV. I had nasty splatter films from Italy, high-flying martial arts and bullet ballets from the kung-fu factories of Hong Kong, painfully erotic vampire films from France, deeply unsettling Pink Films from Japan… And along with this, an encyclopedic knowledge of the films and the people who made them. It only made sense to me as blogging software began changing the shape of the internet, that I write a blog dedicated to these movies. Thus was born Cinema Suicide!

Guess who's back?

In short order, I found myself nominated for awards, speaking on convention panels, beefing with horror film legends (ask me about my feelings on Tom Savini some time), and being quoted on NPR’s All Things Considered. It was quite a ride.

But rides end and things change. Reading blogs ended up shit-canned in favor of watching Youtube and in spite of my best efforts, I just couldn’t keep up and called it a day. But based on the success of this modest affair, the re-emergence of newsletters and blogs, and enough streaming service subscriptions and Kodi add-ons to keep me busy for years, I have access to all the trash I could ever want to see and a built-in audience to read my thoughts on it. For fuck’s sake! My Letterboxd watchlist is over 400 titles of unbelievable garbage from around the world.

There’s enough crossover in the occult/weirdo scene with the horror scene that makes me think that more than a few of you might be interested in also reading my thoughts on high-concept/low-brow movies. So do me a little favor and check out Cinema Suicide. Give it a subscription if you like what you read here but also like trashy horror movies.

Codex Astarte will continue, unabated, as we march forward to 2023. Rejoice!