Phew, this is haha, going to produce some out-of-season thumbnails?
But okay, hey, here’s one of those channels that is ‘the worst’ of Youtube that I like:
FoundFlix is a reasonably mainstream Youtube channel. I don’t know where it stands on the rankings, but it’s a channel with 2.2 million subscribers (as I write this) that mostly presents as content, short-form summaries of horror movies. These movies are presented by a lone presenter who speaks very quickly and in a slightly high pitched tone of voice, often quickly. At the end of each movie, he provides a form of analysis that is a little surface-level, and occasionally involves some really entry-level university assignment script phrasings. Lots of actuallies where they don’t need to be.
It is an entire genre of horror media, processed into a thick soup and then simmered down into half-hour Youtube-consumable segments with extremely surface level jokes. In a way it is what is commonly seen as the worst of its type. And it is… really quite good, relaxing media for consuming a large number of movies I wasn’t going to watch or even consider watching.
Through leaving this channel on while I worked, letting it autoplay movie after movie, showing horror movies of the past 20 years I was able to get a lot of surface impressions of movies I was unaware of. Visual palette, style, actors I may be interested in following up. There’s a lot of different strata in the horror landscape after all, it’s not all as simple as slashers and ghost stories.
What strikes me as most interesting about this channel though, and the reason I kinda binged through it this year, is that it reminded me that a lot of horror movies are really dumb in ways that don’t make sense. They often rely on the worldview of a singular director who also kinda needs characters or people to be dumb or insensitive assholes, which means that the vast majority of horror movies are, well, like that. And that’s interesting to analyse in a big broad top down way, but it’s not something I want to do the slow way.
Basically, this channel is great way to get the reference points for a lot of interesting possible texts that just happen to occasionally feature evil pumpkin children.