Top Articles of 2023
Here's the (belated) December 15 edition of the Certified Forgotten newsletter.
Spooky friends,
With the year winding down to a close, I thought now would be a great time to review some of our most popular articles of 2023. This list include a selection of both old and new essays — some from our first months in operation, others from just this past year.
We always talk about our desire to put a spotlight on unseen cinema, but articles like this are where we put our literal money where our mouth is. Violent Burns tapped into one of the weirdest corners of found footage with her essay on this film, and it’s fun to be part of the conversation around the movie.
Is this piece by Trace Thurman a delightful exploration of sexuality and horror? Absolutely. Do we think that most of our search engine traffic is coming from people who are seeking critical, text-based explorations of sexuality in horror? Maybe… not, but accidental learning is still learning.
When people talk about SEO writing, it’s often a dirty word. But this is an example of SEO done right: keyword research suggested an article about Hagazussa would perform well, so we gave one of our favorite writers, Meg Shields, a blank check. The results — both in terms of quality and performance — continue to speak for themselves.
Takashi Miike might not be for everyone — hell, he’s probably not even for me. But there’s no denying the impact he’s had on the industry as a filmmaker. Shae Sennett sent us a wonderful pitch about one of Miike’s more underrated films, and it continues to connect with Miike fans a year later.
We’ve been the proud home of Molly Henery’s Uterus Horror series pretty much since day one, but this one remains one of our favorites all these years later. We’re glad to see the internet agrees.
How Trauma Shapes Perceptions of Body, Identity and Time in I am The Pretty Thing That Lives in The House (2023)
Here’s a 2023 release! It’s one of the worst-kept secrets of Certified Forgotten that knowing your audience — the Matts — is a great way to get your pitches picked up. Lívia Reim might not have known I’m an Osgood Perkins superfan, but even if I were the only audience for this piece, we still would’ve published it.
Another Molly Henery banger, and a movie that is really starting to resonate with horror fans two decades later. We sometimes scoff when people celebrate big anniversaries for movies — Eve’s Bayou turned 25 in 2022 — but when they raise awareness for films younger audiences might’ve missed, they do good work.
More proof that SEO goals aren’t all bad. We gave Mary Beth McAndrews a target keyword (‘abaddon hotel’) and a blank creative check, and the result is one of the best pieces we’ve ever published. Most smaller sites have a few articles that generate a big chunk of their traffic, and this one certainly fits the bill.
Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good. I love The Nightingale — tough watch though it may be — and we were happy to make Sarah Durn’s article one of the first ones we published all the way back in 2020. But it continues to be one of the most influential pieces in the history of the site — due in no small part to ranking highly on Google’s video search for our embedded trailer. Who knew?
Two articles about sexuality rank among our Top 10? Back in 2021 and 2022, we launched something called Halloweeiner, where we would give our favorite writers a chance to explore sexuality in horror however they saw fit. BJ Colangelo is a tremendous talent — you know this, we’re preaching to the choir — and like Trace above, we hope people accidentally learned something here.
Published This Week
Slashers Has No Patience for Reality TV by Darcy McBrinn
There’s a lot of research that suggest nostalgia works in thirty-year cycles. It makes sense if you think about it — people fall in love with things in their teens but reach their maximum purchasing power in their forties. But what this means for horror is that we’re just starting to enter the peak period of ‘90s horror, with ‘00s horror hot on its heels. Darcy McBrinn taps into the emerging dynamics between horror and reality television in a way that makes me think there’s a lot more scholarship coming along these lines.