Hard as it is to believe, today marks ten whole years since the very first post from Warped Perspective!
By anyone’s reckoning, that’s a good stint: Warped Perspective was also a relaunch, following the closure of the earlier, US-based Brutal as Hell (which was founded by Marc Patterson back in 2009). So that’s a decade in this incarnation, but a steady fifteen year run as a film writer for me between BAH/WP, and as I was approved by Rotten Tomatoes as well as joining the OAFFC in the past few years, it’s fair to say that film writing has grown to be a big part of my life during this time.
This feels, despite the fact that a group venture has steadily whittled down to mainly being just …me over the course of the decade – though with some amazing contributing writers – like something to celebrate. In that time, thousands of reviews, articles and interviews have run, hundreds of films have been watched, and books after books of notes have been taken (I’m from the 20th Century, see, so I handwrite review notes before I type anything up). Perhaps it’s as a consequence of the shift from being Brutal as Hell to more of a broadly Warped Perspective, but there’s been a lot fewer, erm, heated responses from directors and filmmaking teams following critical reviews over the past few years; instead, the site now has a good relationship with a number of independent directors who are happy stay in touch, and Warped Perspective is also indebted to all the fantastic and accommodating publicity and distribution teams who work with the site.
Whilst the shift from BAH initially knocked the site traffic for six – as myself and the other co-founder suspected it would at the time – Warped Perspective has grown exponentially, particularly over the past two years. We now have in the region of 200,000 visitors per year – Fangoria it ain’t, but for a primarily one-woman operation keeping a fan site going around a full-time job and a tendency to run silly distances for pleasure (though I promise there’ll never be a running blog element here), that’s a really encouraging rate of visitors who visit and then – thankfully! – stay long enough to actually read things.
If that’s you – whether you pop in now and then, or whether you’re one of the site’s regular visitors – I cannot thank you enough. Thank you for coming along, thank you for engaging with the website, agreeing, disagreeing, sometimes sharing the posts, sometimes entering competitions, even the odd few hateclicks – all of it. The essential idea behind the site has never changed: it’s by fans, for fans – particularly horror fans, but anyone with an interest in the other, usually independent cinema which forms the bedrock of Warped Perspective. There are no plans to stop doing it, solo-ish or not, and as it seems as though people are still happy to visit as the site moves into 2026, it will continue to cover as many independent films, festivals and releases as possible, with a few special features and bigger budget film reviews, too. In that, it’ll be business as usual.
Something which has changed over the past few years – with the exception of the commemorative Brutal as Hell magazine which also released a decade ago – is the shift into creating more print media. Online writing is great, but I’ve always been interested in getting more writing into print. After a couple of co-writing projects, I got my Lucio Fulci book Opening The Cage completed a couple of years ago – there are just 13 left at the time of writing – and just before Halloween 2025, I published Celluloid Hex: the Witch in Horror and Genre Cinema, which is doing well so far. They’re all independent ventures, done for the love of physical books, and there are already a couple of ideas brewing for the future. And, hey, if you don’t fancy either of those, but like the site enough to want to contribute to its running costs, please click on the Buy Me a Coffee button on the bottom right hand of the site. Warped Perspective is free of advertising, but not free to run: any help with this is awesome.
A lot has changed over the past ten years, and not just in terms of film itself – which has been rocked by streaming platforms and Covid, to name just two seismic alterations to the landscape. As I’ve talked at length about new filmmaking trends and filmmaking traumas in my reviews, often totally tangentially, that’s not for here. Instead, a note or two on how it is to be an online critic these days…
Since WP first appeared, the world of online reviewing has changed seismically. The emergence of TikTok, YouTube and other video sharing platforms has meant a lot of younger potential readers would now prefer a quick video over a lengthy written feature. I forget where I saw it exactly, but someone online recently suggested that the real generational divide is between people who would eschew a written piece to watch a review, and those who would never willingly click on a video when they could read the article; most of you, at a guess, are in the latter camp, as of course am I. There are no current plans to start video reviews here, and I’m not particularly sold on the idea of podcasting even, but I am fairly open to suggestions, either in terms of new ideas for written features or something else. Something that isn’t related to video. An occasional podcast could be a goer, perhaps. Starting up a Discord is another potential idea, one which hopefully wouldn’t take a great deal of policing or time away from actually running the site…
Do let me know what you think. What do you want to see? I know that comments have remained switched off on the site and honestly, this is unlikely to change, largely because a live comments section seems to attract a large number of spam posts and hacking attempts; given that the demise of Brutal as Hell was partly down to a sustained run of DoS attacks, spam comment issues and even the entire site being cloned at one point, caution has won the day, though alongside some exasperation with some of the comments, at least as-were. But Warped Perspective isn’t a monolith! Feel free to email or DM on Instagram (the most lively social media platform at the moment): you will get a response.
And once again – marking a decade of horror, indie and cult cinema coverage is a very cool milestone, and everyone who takes the time to visit and read here is massively appreciated. Thank you for your support, and please keep watching for much more to come. Thank you!