In July 2023, I quit my job to go freelancing and pursue a number of side “passion projects” – one of which was Talking Terror, which was born just over a week after I gave up a dreary full-time role to chase work/life balance; autonomy; creative freedom...all that jazz.
I came charging out of the blocks with Talking Terror, publishing a 3,300+ review of Malum (2023), followed by 3,500+ words – my longest article on the site to date – on one of my all-time faves (and a film that’s extremely close to my heart) – a review of Braindead (1992).
I wanted, then (as I still do now) a more dynamic blend of more recent horror movie reviews – Brooklyn 45 (2023), Talk to Me (2023), The Boogeyman (2023), and Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) – with some more classic flicks, like Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead (1990). (Don’t ask me why on that one, haha.) I even dipped my toe into the murky, at-times-ignominious waters of horror television, with a deep dive into John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams (2023).
Then, something happened. I just…stopped.
Call it not enough time to write for leisure. Call it frustration with the CMS I’d built the site on. Call it frustration with Google, which didn’t seem to be showing the articles I’d worked so hard, and for so long, on. Call it…apathy?
So yeah, I quit. And there was no content on Talking Terror from late November 2023.
I thought about it a lot, talked about it a bit – I even had a few close friends (bless them) ask what had happened to the content. What did I tell them? All of the above, of course. And all were factors. But I think (and I’m not super proud to say so) that I lost some motivation because no one was reading the content. It might’ve been this impulse to lead me, at some point around the middle of 2024, to peek back into the analytics department of Talking Terror and see what was happening – and there, I made a discovery.
Turns out, Google hadn’t indexed several of my articles – meaning they weren’t showing up on the search engine’s results pages. This is a quick fix (resubmitting those pages, via Google Search Console, to be crawled), and one I did.
By that time, I was back in a full-time job after a year of successful freelancing (albeit one that tailed off, money-wise, in the last couple of months) – and it’s a job I’m loving, and in which I’m surrounded by smart, talented people. (Connect with me on LinkedIn, if you fancy it.) And it was during the course of this job that, checking my emails at lunch, that I started to get a few updates from Google.
Talking Terror was getting noticed – it was getting read!
First, the read counts were in the tens, then twenties, then a hundred – then two.
Now, I write this in mid-December, the website I left stagnant for over a year (and one in which there is, by my own admission, still a paucity of content) is accruing between 500 and 600 hits per month. I even found out my aforementioned Malum review – in which I also gave a detailed breakdown of the film's ending, and what it meant – had secured a featured snippet on Google (also known as an "answer box") and was raking in the traffic.
What did happen to Jessica?
I don't do it for the views, of course – but I'll admit, this gave me a big boost.
So I’m getting back into it.
I know, I know – it’s a little sad when it takes some recognition or notice (heck, even a few readers) for you to keep doing something you’d do for love, but I think that is the love I have for the genre – not only the love of watching and writing about films, but about sharing them with people; and who better to do that with than the voracious hordes of the horror community? It’s hard when the passion leaves your passion project, but it certainly never left my love of the genre. I’ve watched a lot, read a lot, researched a lot in the year I was away from my fledgling foray into fear, and now I’m ready to take it back into my bosom.
In fact, I’ve already started – and my reviews of Handling the Undead (2024) and The Vourdalak (2023) – the latter of which I watched, wrote a summary of, and uploaded in a single afternoon – are already live.
Basically, Talking Terror is BACK, baby…so what can you expect?
Well, I’m gonna be doing not only more reviews (drilling down more, specifically, into that modern horror era – one I’ve somewhat clumsily defined as those in the era from 2000 to 2022), but more comparison guides and listicle-type rankings. (All of which will culminate in the big one…my top 100 horror films of all time. But also, why not make it 200? 500? 1,000?!)
I’m excited for it. Hope you are, too.
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