Hello!
It’s been a minute since we popped into your inboxes, which is due almost entirely to a hectic month of personal and work travel for me. But we’re back, we’re better than — or at least the same as — ever, and we’re ready to talk about all things horror and indie publications.
If you’re a regular reader of the website, you may have noticed over the weekend that we started to run some “advertisements” for other publications and podcasts. I use scare quotes there because no money has exchanged hands — sites like But Why Tho? and CultPOP! are friends of ours, and we made the decision to start using our advertising space to cross-promote other indie publishers.
It’s a nice thing to do, but it’s also a little bit of future-proofing. Earlier this week, Google announced that they’re reimagined Google Search as an AI echo chamber, which means sites like ours — that are built not for millions of angry Reddit clicks but for the handful of weirdos who look up movies like Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi each month — are going to continue to see their traffic decline as more people are served AI summaries instead of relevant websites.
After all, why read a killer piece on The Exorcist III at our website when you can just get the aggregated “people are saying” write-up from Gemini?
That means us little guys need to stick together. If you like what you read at Certified Forgotten, we want to turn you into a fan of the other publications we love. It’s no substitute for Google, but if we’re as loud as possible about the writing that we enjoy, and are aggressive in sharing those recommendations with others, we might just find a niche for ourselves as the internet’s biggest search engine doubles down on its efforts to control the spigot of the flow of information.
So if you run an indie publication and want to be considered for advertising (“advertising”) opportunities on Certified Forgotten, drop us a line at [email protected]. Our inventory is limited, and we can’t promise we can accommodate everyone, but at least you’ll be on our radar.
New This Week
In End of the Line, Faith is Anything But a Binary
I’m going to share a hack with you: one of the secrets to writing a good Certified Forgotten essay is digging through the list of film festival titles from the early 2000s. Case in point: this essay on End of the Line was inspired by scrolling through lineups from previous Fantastic Fest programming. We love genre film festivals, probably more than anything, and there are still more excellent festival titles waiting to be championed.
From the Archives
The Cremator Is a Meditation on Extremist Indoctrination
As an editor, articles are like children: you claim to love all of them equally, but you do have your favorites. That’s certainly the case with this piece on The Cremator by Tori Potenza. Tori joined us for a podcast episode on the film, and we were so taken by the movie’s grotesque play with fascist horror that we offered Tori a corresponding article ten seconds after we ended the recording. She crushed this. Oh, and if you happen to live in Philadelphia, it’s showing at the Lightbox Film Center in June.
Around the Web
Quick hits from around the world of horror and indie journalism.
Speaking of CultPOP!, I’ll be in studio tonight to record an episode on Curry Barker’s Obsession, a movie I can’t stop thinking about. Be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here and get the notification when we go live.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Directive 8020, a horror narrative game from the makers of Until Dawn. It’s got a lot of Event Horizon and a little bit of Prometheus in the game design so far, and this review by Kate Sánchez at But Why Tho? is what got me to purchase my first new release in years.
I know a lot of people who are excited about a sequel to Behind the Mask, so here’s Certified Forgotten cofounder Matt Donato at Bloody Disgusting in conversation with the filmmakers about their much-anticipated follow up.
A few of our friends have joined Four Seasons of Fear, an anthology horror comic from LGBTQ+ writers that is about to drop on Kickstarter. Sign up now to be notified on launch! I already have.
Want more? Certified Forgotten also offers a weekly podcast series featuring some of the biggest names in the horror genre. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast platform of choice.