What’s going on here?
The simple answer is that Forced Viewing is a collaborate blog dedicated to reviewing horror movies and (to a lesser extent) horror on television. We have a fairly broad definition of what constitutes horror. We’ve reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas, Arsenic and Old Lace, Caligula, The Passion of the Christ and even Twilight.
Basically, if we can justify it as a horror movie, it’s in.
Who’s responsible for this?
Our founding reviewers are Jori Laws, Daniel Lackey and the Drudgeon. Additional regular reviewers are John Bruni, Blick Tolkien, and Robin Franson Pruter. Other guest reviewers have contributed in the past (including, in one particularly notorious incident, Lackey’s cat) and will do so in the future.
Please note that none of us are professional reviewers. We are simply ordinary people who have become obsessed with the horror genre, a passion most likely borne from intense childhood trauma.
How does it work?
Two articles are published daily Monday through Friday, at 8am at 12pm Central time.
Jori, Lackey and the Drudgeon each write up at least two (occasionally three or even more) reviews per week. Mostly these are movie reviews, but there are occasional reviews of standalone TV episodes or of TV miniseries (either the entire series or in episode-by-episode format, whatever seems to make the most sense to the reviewer).
Episode-by-episode reviews of The Walking Dead (by Blick Tolkien) and The Vampire Diaries (by Robin Franson Pruter) are published on alternating weeks. The Drudgeon has also written episode-by-episode reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that’s currently on hiatus (although he, er I mean it, intends to return to the series in the future).
We publish a podcast on a monthly basis. Imaginatively, it’s entitled the Forced Viewing Podcast. In it, the Forced Viewing gang and a couple of guests discuss four or five specific movies. You can get it here.
In addition to all that, we also publish interviews and articles about events such as conventions, movie marathons and film festivals–chiefly Chicago-based events such as the Music Box Massacre, the Indie Horror Film Festival, and Flashback Weekend.
Every Friday afternoon, we announce the schedule for the following week in a “Coming Attractions” post which is published at 4pm Central time.
What’s a Drudgeon?
The Drudgeon is apparently (concrete information regarding the Drudgeon is sparse and possibly unreliable) a genderless thing that lives in a hole and spends all day watching horror movies and television. (When it’s done with a movie or show, it eats the media.) It then writes its reviews and passes them along to Jori’s husband Jason, who enters them into the Forced Viewing system. We tend to refer to it as “Drudgie,” on the grounds that if it knew we were calling it that, it would probably be annoyed.
None of us have actually ever met the Drudgeon, so we only take Jason’s word that it actually exists. We are assured that under no circumstances is the Drudgeon really Jason, gosh no.
