About Vogue Horror

I started Vogue Horror for a multitude of reasons, though not all of them will be easy to trace and articulate. I’ve been a creative person since childhood, but most of the outlets where I’ve tried to express and employ that creativity are ones where I didn’t know the rules of the game, who the gatekeepers were, or how to improve.

Many times I got in my own way, being too proud, too inexperienced, or too unwilling to ask for help (something I’ve always been miserable at) from those who were a few rungs higher. There are other things that kept me back, things I couldn’t control, but I think the less said about them, the better; this project is about the future.

And so, after long consideration and writing thirty-odd articles in private, we have Vogue Horror. No one can tell me it isn’t the time, the content isn’t quite right, that an audience won’t get it. In this, I hold the keys to every gate, and the limits are exclusively my own.

So why horror? And why a potentially awkward name like Vogue Horror? Quite simply, horror is the one beloved, continuous thread that has held true throughout my life: from Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, specifically if the episode The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers, on up to the book on my nightstand right now (Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman), horror has been to me what sports are to the athlete, money is to the socialite, reflections are to the poet.

I love the genre because no matter who you are, where you are, what you’ve known, you can identify with a character knowing fear. Fear erases all but itself, and a person can touch the fear of a teenager in a slasher movie as readily as they can the nameless narrators of Poe’s fiction. I hear the heart beneath the floorboards, and the scratching on the other side of the boarded window. For me, horror has always been the sharpest, purest, most accessible and affecting form of art.

…and yet Toni Collette can’t even get a Oscar nomination for her performance in Hereditary.

Whatever lies along the darker roads of human creativity, I was born to them, and will walk their lengths. It is there I have found that which inspires me above all other human creativity.

But Vogue Horror? That’s a bit of a journey. I initially sought to call my site Modern Horror dot com, but the vultures who who seeks to profit from aspirants like myself snapped up that address and demanded nearly three thousand dollars to procure it. I wanted Modern Horror, but not at that price, so I began to mull over what else might work. I began to think about how I think about horror and why it’s special to me.

As you may have gathered from my previous comment about Toni Collette, I resent that horror is regarded as lowbrow, base, unimportant and unworthy of serious critical consideration; for many people it is something trotted out of the closet in late October for a week of cheap fun and then forgotten, even if that cheap fun was the most they’ve had all year. Yet horror is at home in the gutters as it is in ivory towers, as sacred as it is profane, and those who look on it with honest eyes can find it as deserving of praise and veneration as any other facet of human creativity, and thus my mind followed the course it found.

To be vogue is to be a prevailing fashion or popularity; to be vogue is to be taken seriously from a cultural perspective, even if what you’re doing has previously been regarded as less-than. Alongside other art forms, fashion is itself a sort of apex of what we humans create, it says when the old specters of hunger and shelter and mortal danger are banished, and the brutish laws of nature are firmly sealed away behind a sturdy barrier, this is what we do. This is what we give our energy, our thoughts, our lives to. We adorn the barrier that we may forget what it keeps away.

I liked that idea, and I liked that the word was monosyllabic. Vogue Horror was too fringe for a website company to buy it, and thus, for twelve dollars, the site was born and my dream’s realization moved a bit closer to reality.

Take that, vultures.

So here we are, this is my passion project, this is what I’m putting my creativity into. I’ve closed other channels to essentially say that this is what I’m doing with my life for as far as I can see. What I offer as a critic is my own meager talents as a writer and the lifelong interest and appreciation for the genre, even when it isn’t doing anything exceptional. I bring a willingness to adapt my vision to wherever horror ultimately goes, and try to appreciate it without necessarily declaring that it is worthy of the attention of others.

My goal for Vogue Horror is simple at the moment: to give myself a creative outlet in a territory that I love. I don’t think that simple mission will last long, as opportunities will arise and I will deem some of them worthy of pursuit. The site will be very different a year from now, and (hopefully) contain more than just my reviews and writings. But for now, attention is best tethered firmly to this adventure’s start.

We’ve pulled up outside of the haunted house, time to get our equipment in order and walk up those stairs.

–Wyatt Towns, October 30 2022

(thanks to everyone who bothered to read this)