House of Horrors

Next up in my trip down internet memory lane, I’d like to talk about a website that had a huge effect on me: The House of Horrors.

Having grown up in the video store age, I loved the horror movie section. When I was really young, it was off-limits (as well as the curtain in the back of the store), but I’d occasionally pretend to walk through the horror section to show my dad what I wanted to rent, while slowly browsing the grotesque covers and imagining what chills those tapes contained.

I saw a horror movie here and there, but the turning point for me was around 1995, when my dad and I were standing in line at Blockbuster. By the register was a copy of Halloween, which had been re-released by Blockbuster, and it was priced for $7.99, which was an extremely low-price for a VHS tape in the 1990s.

He looked over at me and asked me if I had seen it, and when I said no, he grabbed it and bought it. This was such a rare sight, since my father didn’t believe in owning movies. He didn’t think any film had value in watching it more than once.

That night, once the sun went down, I experienced Halloween for the first time ever and my life was changed. I saw what horror could be and I needed more.

One of the pros (and cons) of the video store was the sheer amount of tapes. It was hard to know what was good, especially when at times more thought went into the cover than the actual film. This led me to looking for advice online in places like AOL’s Horror Chatroom or alt.horror. Eventually, I ran across The House of Horrors, and it was the perfect guide for me.

The site only highlighted a couple dozen films, but each film was given a page with a synopsis, some additional info, and approval by the author. I used this to track down films I’d never seen before like The Thing and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer. I’d check back daily, in hopes of there being an update, and whenever there was I’d carefully study anything The Caretaker had to say.

At some point, a forum was created titled Horror Speak. This forum was extremely active for many years and contained a wealth of knowledge. All aspects of horror were discussed, and the discussions were open-minded than what I found on alt.horror. Updates were few and far between on House of Horrors, but HorrorSpeak had new content every day, and so I visited, read, and rented the movies that were talked about. I learned so much about the genre from that forum, and it’s arguably my favorite forum of all-time.

House of Horrors is still online, but it was bought by one of those foreign scam companies a few years ago, and other than the name and a couple of old graphics, the site is mainly a shill for online casinos. I’ve waited around for years, because I had hoped to buy HouseofHorrors.com and HorrorSpeak, but that day doesn’t look like it’ll ever come. I mean, there is no way I’m spending $1,500 on the domain name for HorrorSpeak.com.

House of Horrors was an incredible site and I really wish I could tell the webmaster how much it meant to me and how it shaped so much of my movie watching for so many years. Heck, I ran a horror blog for around five years that was very much inspired by House of Horrors.