LOTT D: Want a little fromage with that whine?

Let me tell why it's cooler than cool that Casey Criswell – the blogger behind Cinema Fromage (a long-time feature on the ANTSS sidebar), one of the gang behind the Bloody Good Horror podcast, and the sterling human being lucky enough to be married to lovely and talented Colleen: The First Lady of Fright – is now a member of the august League of Tana Tea Drinkers.

What?

Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway. When you don't live on my blog, you won't have to live by my rules.

There's a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called "Earth's Holocaust." In it, the inhabitants of our little home planet decide that life is essentially suffocating under the weight of past culture. The burden of what's come before, the long trailing chain of history, literature, art, philosophy, and all the rest of it, is stifling humanity's ability to create anew. It is dooming modern artists to endlessly parrot universally acknowledged masterworks and creating a tyranny of the dead ideas over the living. To solve the problem, humanity consigns all its culture to a massive bonfire in one of the expansive plains of the Midwest. Genealogies, heraldry, historical documents, letters, plays, paintings, novels, money, clothes – all that can be tossed to the flames is burnt away.

The point – and I know some of you doubted I had one here – is that the horror blog-o-sphere sometimes reminds of Hawthorne's pre-bonfire world. It is so often so besotted with nostalgia as to be blind-drunk on it, so focused on the past of the genre that there's no hope for the future, so utterly backward that the thought of moving forward is pretty soundly mocked.

But not Casey.

Casey's blog won't hesitate to drop some horrortastic science about a classic like Young Frankenstein, The Brood, or even Something Wicked This Way Comes, all of which were recently featured on his blog or podcast. But what Casey does that makes him a real HERO OF THE INTERNET™ is give massive amounts of time to new releases, especially straight-to-DVD releases. And he reviews these puppies with wit, insight, and genuine good humor, eschewing the condescension and cynical "been-there-done-that" attitude so many horror bloggers take to anything made after 1989.

He's one of a handful of horror bloggers – including ANTSS fave Mermaid Heather and Black Horror Movies (one of the newest additions to the sidebar) – who care about what's going on now and cover contemporary horror with real energy.

Plus, he writes sentences like this: "If you refrain from seeing this due to the name, you’re a goob!"

Anyway, enough jibber jabber! Go check him out and congratulate him. I command it!