It’s hard to believe, but we made it! The Scariest Things turned 100 episodes old, and we had some of our Patreon pals and horror media associates to celebrate with us by picking through our Horror Movie Championship Tournament, where we picked the best Horror Movie of all Time!
Mike, Liz, and I say this fairly regularly, that we are astonished at the success of The Scariest Things to date. According to Feedspot we are now the #36 horror website on the internet! We’ve got 20,000 Facebook followers, and we just crossed 450,000 views on this site, and it’s all a bit hard to believe. So thank you to one and all for visiting us and listening in!
Some of the first-round matchups included:
For our big 100th Episode The Scariest Things wanted to have something more celebratory, more involving than our typical episode. For this extravaganza, we are doing a live run-through of our Horror Movie Championship Tournament with some of our Patreon contributors and our friends in the Portland Horror media scene.
You can preview this Tournament by filling out a bracket yourself, and then follow along and see how your picks compare with what our decisions were. This Tournament was styled after an NCAA Basketball bracket, with weighted pairings of movies in a single-elimination battle until only one movie remained. We are in a pandemic era, where the new tools of the age allowed us to have a fifteen person bracket via ZOOM. The online site Bracket Fights made this possible, along with the real-time voting application Swift, which was instrumental in allowing us to pull off this stunt.
Having said that, I should point out that not everybody’s microphones were working 100% efficiently, and those of you who have been doing ZOOM in this era will sympathize. I could not have asked for a better spirit of fun and camaraderie than what we got as a result from all of our guests, and I am HUGELY thankful of everyone’s participation, particularly our generous Patreon contributors.
In a bit of a surprise, our bracket could be described as “Chalky” in that the bracket by in large proceeded by seed strength… but the great fun of this podcast is the reaction of our players to when their favorite movies get knocked off. There were, of course, movies that were perceived as snubs that should have made the list, and there were underdogs that made a daring run for the top prize… but as we were to find out the top seeds were placed up high for good reason and proved to be really tough to eliminate.
I would like to thank all of our readers and listeners who’ve been on this journey with our little site and podcast that could, and we anticipate bringing more unique ways of getting involved with our fans in the future. We hope you have enjoyed the ride so far! We’ll see you for Episode 200!
Special Thanks to Our Podcast Guests!
- Amy Faust, Contributing Author
- Bryce Hanson, Horror Movie Talk
- David Day, Horror Movie Talk
- Ian Parker, Patreon Contributor
- Jeff Dean, The Portland Horror Trivia Massacre
- John Foley, Writer and Movie Trailer Creator
- Matt Howl, Patreon Contributor
- Nathan Tice, Patreon Contributor
- Roberta Pennington, Starchitects Podcast
- Sharon Yablon, Patreon Contributor
The Results:
Here is how our version of the run through played out. No major upsets until round two. Still, plenty of excitement as the voting unfolded from the second round on. The images are a little small to make out the posters, so if you don’t recognize the posters right off the bat, you can visit the Championship Bracket Post to see the posters more clearly.
Eric Li, Managing Editor
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