Once again, it's that time of year, and once again, I needed to remind myself of the therapeutic benefits in one of my favorite things in the world: the horror movie.

Although I realize 2020 has been emotionally challenging for every last person on this planet, all the societal clashes, environmental calamities and pandemic terror has mostly functioned as unnerving background noise for my own unrelated, unprecedentedly painful transitions. It's been slow going, but I'm getting there, in part by trying to align my new normal as much as possible with the old one. Come autumn, my normal will include watching lots of people's faces melting off, despite my dumb human brain telling me that's the last thing I need to see right now. It's cool. We'll get through this together, and I'm sure it'll be fun.

With no local marathons I can attend, I'm taking this opportunity to whittle down some queues and shrink my stacks of unwatched discs. Owing to those deep pits of classics n' crapola (and, of course, to Cinemonster outlining the rules), this one's my most divergent Hoop-tober slate yet. There are a greater number of recent-ish titles than I typically go for, too, probably also due to this year's rules... I mean, barring apesuit transformations, there is not much body horror from the 1940s.

If you're really bored, CLICK HERE for a playlist of as many trailers as I could find on YT, which I am considering a "trailer reel." Hope you enjoy.