Well, the jig is up. I accidentally said something on Twitter that ‘outed’ me, and now I have to come clean. And by *I*, I mean *us*. Yes, Horror Movie A Day is actually the brainchild of five people, who take turns watching/reviewing the films. Ironically, Twitter was originally started to try to keep up the ruse that it was one guy watching the movies every day, by posting “proof” (a couple of tweets during each film when possible) that it was really occurring. But the other day, two of us were using the account simultaneously – notice how many times Brian supposedly tweeted in one day? At one point I was supposedly at work, playing Xbox, and watching the movie (The Resident)! Someone noticed the “plot hole”, so now we have to fess up.
At first, it really was just Brian watching and reviewing, but after six or seven months, he started to crack. At the time he chalked it up to depression from Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, which everyone bought easily, but it was really due to the stress of watching so many movies that weren’t even AS GOOD as the Halloween update. So he hired a few local bloggers to help out, and eventually relied on them more and more. As of this writing, Brian actually only watches 3 (at most) of the films each week, with the others tackling the rest.
And now that it’s out in the open, Brian feels bad that they’ve been doing all this work for so long without recognition and no perks (Brian won’t even comp them free tickets into his HMAD screenings at the Bev), so this post is both an apology and an introduction to the other folks who have been helping keep HMAD running smoothly over the years.
(Though really – you guys really thought Brian was watching movies while at Comic Con or visiting his family in Boston? Come on! He’s not psychotic!)
Frank O’Hare, 28, Los Angeles
Frank was the first writer Brian hired, initially with the idea of trading off, with Frank taking even numbered days and Brian taking the odd. Amongst many others, Frank is responsible for the Prom Night review, which caused a problem when Brian had to record a commentary and pretend to like the film. Luckily, no one ever listened to it.
Alexis Rydell, 21, Burbank
Alexis was hired in 2008, after Brian was inexplicably invited to a press screening of the Sex And The City movie. Alexis was sent in his place and wrote the review, which Brian found “quite brilliant”, and thus kept her on full-time. She has also covered all of the Shriekfest entries since, because Brian refuses to watch movies in a place that doesn’t serve hot pretzels.
“Ivan” (details unknown)
No one else on staff has actually met the mysterious Ivan, who we assume is from somewhere along the East coast. He usually covers the newer theatrical releases, seeing them at midnight on opening day (something Brian is unable to do because he’d fall asleep and thus not be able to write the review) and sending along his thoughts so HMAD can have a review up before the other sites.
Tony Smith, 31, Torrance
Tony from Torrance has been a life-saver in the past year or so, since getting hired after Brian began hosting screenings, guesting on podcasts, appearing on cable specials as a “Film Historian” (HAH!), and numerous other activities, while keeping his day job and retaining a decent Xbox gamerscore. Brian has referred to him as his true alter ego, and the two have trouble telling which one of them wrote certain reviews. The only film they disagree on was The Shining – BC prefers the TV remake whereas Tony prefers the original Kubrick adaptation.
So now you know the truth. We here at HMAD hope you don’t think less of the site because of this, and we all look forward to providing daily horror reviews for many years to come. However, either way, we’d like to ask you guys – should everyone start “signing” their reviews, so you know who is informing you about the movie? Or should we just keep chalking everything up to BC? If so, we’ll just take this post down later today (today being April 1st) and pretend it never happened.
Thanks in advance,
The HMAD Team
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