The October Horror Movie Challenge is Nigh

Tomorrow is October 1st and that means one thing: it's horror movie time. No more hoarding those twisted little movies. It's time to watch them and write about them.

The Rules: Your mission is to watch 31 horror movies between 12:01 AM on October 1st and midnight on Halloween. 16 of those movies must be movies you have never seen before. TV movies count. TV episodes do not count unless they are feature length entries in an anthology series. TV miniseries also count, so if you want to watch The Kingdom or Bag of Bones for the challenge, feel free. Feature length is arbitrarily cut off at 50 minutes. Anything shorter than that is a short and does not count (unless you want to play the variant where several shorts collectively count as one feature once they collectively reach 50 minutes, but that's a pain to keep track of). As for what counts as "horror," use your best judgement. My own definition of "horror" is notoriously permissive, so who am I to throw rocks. You are, of course, more than welcome to watch movies beyond 31, so if you have time for fifty or a hundred movies this month, knock yourself out.

If the Challenge is too easy for you, you might try some variants: only watch movies you haven't seen before, only watch zombie movies, only watch movies from Asia, whatever you like. It doesn't matter HOW you do it so long as you make it to 31 movies with 16 first time viewings.

One variant of the Challenge that I do encourage is this one: watch horror movies for charity. I'll be blogging for the National MS society again this year, and I encourage you to donate some nominal amount--ten cents, fifty cents, whatever--to the charity of your choice for every movie that you watch. It's not mandatory, so don't feel bad if you don't, but I'll be cutting a check in November for my viewings and I hope you will too.

I'll be doing Challenge roundups every day, so if you post something for the challenge, leave me a comment and I'll add you to the link dump.

Here are some other banners for the challenge if you want them for your posts, or just use the ones at the top of the page.

Now then, ladies and gentlemen, start your screaming!