Early Seasonal Greetings to you all!

We’ve made a lot of changes to the site (www.darkwebonline.com) of late. The home page has received quite an extensive remodelling and we’ve improved many of the feature pages, such as the Hall of Fame, and introduced new landing pages for other pages, such as the Darkweboline Accolades page, the Reviews page and Films to Buy page.

In additional, we’ve now incorporated movie AKAs into the database, which not only allows you to search by alternative titles, but also allows searches for titles beginning with ‘A’, ‘An’ and ‘The’. Naturally, with over 6,000 records to update, this has kept us busy for sometime!

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve uploaded a brand new forum which now allows you to upload videos among other features and, from our point-of-view, it has much better spam prevention features. We are also incorporating many of our written articles into the forum, which again is a time-consuming activity.

On top of all this, we’re currently compiling the Fantasy 100 – a slow process since I really want to see every highly recommended film before finalising the list. We never realised how many good films we have still to see!

One of the issues with compiling lists is the classification of films. Our site is strictly for HSF (horror, sci-fi and fantasy film), and many films have only slight genre elements that allow us to classify them as appropriate for our site. While this allows us to add more films into our catchment group, it does mean that films with only minor elements qualify for top/bottom 100 lists. So, for instance, films that are great thrillers - but not necessarily great horrors, are still in contention for a place in one of the top 100 lists.

I recently came across an old forum discussion that criticised our Top 100 Horror list for including a number of films. Some, such as ‘Nightmare Alley’ and ‘The Scarlet Claw’, in which the supernatural elements are proven to be fake, and ‘Night Must Fall’ (a psycho thriller) are fair comment, but other inclusions criticised were ridiculous. ‘Young Frankenstein’ may be a comedy, but it’s certainly a horror movie too. 'The Night Stalker', and it's sequel, 'The Night Strangler' it was suggested, shouldn't be included because they are TV movies. Not sure of the logic behind this, a great film is a great film, no matter who makes it. Our Sci-fi 100 includes other made-for-TV classics like the Peter Cushing version of '1984', the original TV version of 'Quatermass and the Pit' and, best of all, Spielberg's classic 'Duel'. It would be a sorry day when we remove those films in favour of theatrical releases like Michael Bay's grotesque 'Transformers'. The inclusion of ‘The Elephant Man’ was criticised too; I assume because John Merrick didn’t go around terrorising people. But if this is the case, should horror classics such as ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ be included? The horror of ‘The Elephant Man’ is in our society castigating and exploiting someone based on their appearance alone. Hence, ‘The Elephant Man’ counts – The Cher film ‘Mask’ doesn’t. But most of the discussion was based around one film – ‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Quite how a film about a cannibal and a cross-dressing serial killer wouldn’t be a horror be beyond me. Many scenes in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ are constructed to terrify. If ‘Lambs’ is not HSF, then neither is ‘Halloween’, ‘Friday the 13th’ or ‘Psycho’. I have to wonder if people don’t like to think of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ as a horror movie because it’s clever and received critical acclaim and Academy Awards. It's one thing for cinema snobs to dislike horror movies, but when genre fans themselves start to disown films because they’re mainstream or, simply, good, then you have to start worrying! Horror doesn’t have to be cheap and nasty - it's usually better when it isn't.

Well that’s enough ranting from me now – enjoy the improved site and let us know below what your thoughts are regarding genre classification and the films mentioned above. Or take a look at our Top 100 lists on the Accolades page and let us know if you disagree with any of these inclusions!

Until next time...