Everyone likes a bit of data and, as a change, I thought it would be interesting to check in with the most popular posts on the site this year. It’s often interesting to keep half an eye on this – not least because, on occasion, it can be quite surprising – but I’ve not been in the habit of running more detailed analysis, though as the site has more than doubled its readership this year (thank you!) now’s as good a time as any. The first thing to say is that on occasion, it can be quite dispiriting when you have worked on a detailed review and no one seems much engaged by it, but it happens a lot, and always will: there are a lot of sources and sites out there, and it can be quite tricky to navigate the vagaries of Google (though being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic has helped a lot). The other side of this is that sometimes you write a piece with no expectations and it just takes off somehow – a mention on Reddit, a positive comment, and less frequently, a repost by Bruce Campbell (which I recommend, if you can get it).
Interestingly, this year, all the most popular posts were actually written in 2024: past years have seen slow burners from years previous taking responsibility for the vast share of visitors. Not so this year. Articles where both myself and Darren have found some fault (or a lot of fault) with films have also done very well; people clearly don’t come here for puff pieces or unquestioning positivity, which is as it should be. In fact, the tenth most read article of 2024 was me taking issue with the newest Neil Marshall/Charlotte Kirk vehicle Duchess, though it’s certainly not just me: at the time of writing, this baffling project is standing at 14% approval on RT and has the honour of being Neil Marshall’s worst-rated film. The poster alone set the bar, as I discuss in the article. The ninth most-read piece, though, felt rather more like it was just me, when I reviewed one of this year’s biggest horror hits – Longlegs, finding it to be “a patchwork of piecemeal squares, rarely scary and barely sequential”. It’ll be interesting to see whether director Oz Perkins can make more of a cogent narrative out of his next feature The Monkey, a film already starting to land in the site inbox in the same sorts of small, tantalising mini-trailers as Longlegs did. Hey, it might be great. Cynicism – begone!
In eighth place is my review of All You Need Is Death, a piece I really enjoyed writing. The film’s an interesting kind of music-specific folk horror which really didn’t need that jokey-sounding title, but has a lot of ideas and means to blend genres together. In seventh place, it’s Darren’s detailed and balanced review of DogMan, another film full of ideas, some of which struggle to find their place, but come together with enough clarity to make for a decent and original film. Then in sixth place – quite surprisingly, actually – is my piece on George Miller’s Fury Road prequel (and one of my favourite films of the year) Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga. The bigger release reviews can go one of two ways – either obscurity (because the big sites see the big films first and write them up first) or – surprising popularity. The Furiosa review is happily in the latter camp…
The fifth most popular piece this year is another film I didn’t take to at all: Pandemonium. The more I think of the opening scenes versus what follows, the more frustrated the rest of the film makes me feel, even now, at a remove of some months (though it’s worth adding that Warped Perspective contributor Darren loved it, and put it on his Top 10 films of 2023). Well, in my own case, a lot of people stopped by to check out my detailed frustrations. A piece on the oh-so slow, zombie-adjacent mood piece Handling The Undead drew people in their thousands, too, as the fourth most popular post: this is one of those pieces mentioned above which just ‘takes off’, for reasons unknown, but it’s a hopefully fairly-balanced review of an unusual spin on the ‘undead’ idea.
So we come to the top three…
The third most popular piece on the site this year was claustrophobic ordeal horror Cold Meat, a film which throws a number of potential threats into the mix: will it be people, or the environment – or even something else – which destroys our protagonist? I saw this very early on in 2024 just prior to its February Netflix release, which perhaps explains its popularity (people often want to read up on a title before they commit to streaming it, particularly if it’s not a huge budget project). Well, if anyone went for it on the strength of my very favourable review – I hope you enjoyed it!
The second most-read piece I’ve written this year continues to clock up hundreds of hits every week, and has been read several thousand times overall. When I saw Late Night with the Devil, as much as I loved it, I decided not to just write a conventional review: I was more drawn to the wealth of references and ideas which the film uses, so I did a deep dive on these which has proven very successful, spreading far and wide. Everything from the anti-magic sceptic, to the cult leader, to the secret sylvan meeting place of the rich and famous – all of these have real precedents, and I really enjoyed putting the pieces together. In fact, given its immediate popularity, I was absolutely sure that it would be the site’s most-read feature in 2024 – but I was wrong.
Clocking up over 25,000 hits this year, my review of supernatural horror Baghead has turned out to be the most successful piece the site has run in 2024. Part of this, surely, has to come from the fact that many viewers unfairly dismissed the film outright because they assumed it had borrowed heavily from the surprise hit Talk To Me. As I confirmed in my interview with the director of Baghead, Alberto Corredor, the short film upon which Baghead was based pre-dated Talk To Me by over five years. It’s just that Talk To Me‘s greater reach suggested to those who (let’s be honest) hadn’t looked into things properly that Baghead was a bit of a rip-off. How frustrating for the team behind Baghead, a film which, in its own right, is an effective ghostly horror with some fantastic ideas. I saw a lot of positives in it, and it’s rewarded the site in turn by being an incredibly popular feature; I only hope that it helped some people go into a viewing of Baghead with a fairer idea of that film’s origins.
Still to come before the end of the year: Darren’s own Top Ten films, which I look forward to posting very soon!
Aside from that, though, that’s a wrap from Warped Perspective this year, so for all of those of you who come here and read the articles, whether once in a while or regularly – thank you so much. I know that some of you have been following the site for many years and please know that your support is genuinely invaluable. Likewise to all the filmmakers and promoters, thank you for your hard work. Whilst the site can’t be as active as I’d like it to be due to other commitments – a full-time job leaves very little mental and physical energy – new material will always be posted as regularly as possible. There will also be more special features, more interviews and more competitions in 2025, so keep looking for those! For those of you who have supported my Lucio Fulci book so far – and they’ve been sent all over the world, which is amazing – a special thank you: I am hopeful of completing another personal print media project in 2025, which had to be side-lined this year as I worked an immense amount of hours/collaborated on other projects, some of which have now been released (such as the amazing Hellebore special) and some of which are in the pipeline for a 2025 release…watch this space.
In the meantime, please feel free to reach out via email or via social media: Warped Perspective is only on Twitter/X and Instagram in any regular fashion at the moment, but we’ll see what the New Year may bring!
Again – thank you for your support!