100 (Asian) Horror Movies in 92 Days
This year I did the Spooky Sarah Says challenge to watch 100 horror movies in 92 days. The challenge started in August and ran till the end of October. The rules were simple: watch 100 new (to you) movies during the time period. When I decided to do the challenge, I was in the middle of watching a lot of Korean horror and had just started planning my October posts. Because I knew that I was already going to be watching a bunch of Asian horror, I decided to do the challenge with a focus on only counting Asian horrors. I started off just tracking movies, but as I got into October I feared that the challenge was forcing me to focus on movies too much, and added tracking dramas into the mix. In the end, it didn’t really work out and I barely touched dramas. Such is life.
I thought it would be fun go through the movies and dramas I watched and check out some of the stats on them to see how the challenge went (besides whether I completed it or not). I also think it would give a greater look into what I chose, and may help in the movies that I choose from here on out. I didn’t try to vary up my content that much, I was mostly concerned with the number, but towards the end when I was less concerned about hitting 100 I started to really try to expand what movies I was watching.
The Stats
-My final count was 116. 8 of those being dramas. My starting baseline for this is 108 movies, 8 dramas.
-The oldest movie I watched was the 1958 Mansion of the Ghost Cat, from Japan. This was a movie I had no clue about before this challenge and one that I randomly picked up. It was a YouTube suggestion after another movie I had been watching and decided to give it a try after realizing that I was enjoying a lot of the older Japanese horror movies I was encountering. The newest movie I watched was Ouija Japan. Its premiere date is listed as October 19th, and I watched the day it dropped on Amazon Prime.
The years in between the oldest and newest least of my worries when picking, mostly because it would be the thing I have the least control of or care due to my options to watch and not having a budget to buy or rent new movies. I did want to see if I somehow favored a year. I assumed that they would mostly be older just purely because I was watching movies on streaming services and assume those would be the cheaper to get rights for thus populating my options. At a tie for first place with 9 entries each was 2009 & 2016. I don’t know how 2009 got to be so high - maybe it was just a good year for horror to come to the box office? I would like to dive deeper into this when I get the time, I would assume that the previous years had popular box office hits that reignited the passion to ride on that popularity or focus distribution rights budget on them. 11 out of the 33 years represented have only one movie or drama watched within them, a much higher number than I would have expected.
-I’m not much of a fan of rating things, and thus rate things extremely weird. Since most of the time I’m rating dramas, I've gotten used to my rating score over there. Problem is…it doesn’t necessarily translate to movies. With dramas I drop them and not rate if I do, that means that I rarely will have a low-rated drama and I’ve worked that into my rating system. With movies, I rarely drop due to their length being a smaller time restraint. I did want to include some stats on my ratings, though. Generally, my rating thought process was 5’s: perfect, 4/4.5’s: all-around great, 3/3.5’s: pretty good 2/2.5’s: not the best, but didn’t hate everything, 1/1.5’s: mostly sucked, .5’s definitely sucked.
Here’s the breakdown of each rating:
.5: 7
1: 6
1.5: 7
2: 19 (1 drama)
2.5: 11 (1 drama)
3: 30 (2 dramas)
3.5: 13 (1 drama)
4: 21 (2 dramas)
4.5: 2 (1 drama)
5: 0
I didn’t rate any movie or drama a perfect 5, but I did give a 4.5 to one movie and one drama. One Cut of the Dead was the movie. It is the best movie that I watched during this time, and truly one I had on my watchlist for way too long. If you haven’t watched it yet, don’t read anything about it and watch it knowing nothing. The drama was The Guest. Fantastic drama that was also one I kept putting off not because I didn’t want to watch it, I just didn’t make the time to.
Some other interesting data from my ratings: 2 out of the 3 Indonesian films I watched got .5 stars, the lowest rating based on percentage. All three of the top dramas were Korean. Korea also dominates the 4 stars section. I gave out the most 3 stars (26%) which roughly translates to middle of the road in my enjoyment level, fairly average but possibly had some better than average aspects. I also gave out a fairly large percentage of 2 stars, about 17% of the movies. I was kind of expecting my 1.5/.5 ratings to be a bit higher than they actually turned out. Not because I think I am a ruthless rater, but simply because of the movie pool I was picking from. A lot of the time I would turn on movies at random on Tubi leading to more of a gamble if the movie was good or not.
-Out of all the data I was most interested in seeing was my breakdown of movies based on location. Again, I didn’t try to vary this at the beginning between the Korean Summer Horror posts and the 31 Days of Asian Horror posts constraints. Here’s the breakdown:
Cambodia: 1
China: 1
Hong Kong: 8
India: 4 (2 dramas)
Indonesia: 3
Japan: 37 (1 drama)
Korea: 37 (3 dramas)
Laos: 2
Mongolia: 1
Philippines: 3
Singapore: 1 (1 drama)
Taiwan: 5
Thailand: 9 (1 drama)
Vietnam: 3
I pretty much knew that Korea and Japan would make it to the top of the list without guessing. I had the most options from those accessible, and the most that were already on my watchlist. Hong Kong came in fourth, which was the most surprising out of the group. I had some movies lined up because Hong Kong had the most options in vampire movies (a theme for some of my blog posts), but most of the ones I picked up were completely random. Most of the movies from Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines were from Netflix which I have found seems to be the platform’s favorite area to pick up Asian horror content from.
I know this data is probably only interesting to me, but I had fun trying to figure out some of the stats and it gave me a good look at how I did. I think it’s an interesting perspective on my viewing habits, and I think in the future will help me try to diversify my viewing a bit more. I might do a break down like this for the dramas that I watched this year to give me a greater look at my drama watching.
If you want to see the full list of movies and dramas, check out my Letterboxd list here, and while you’re there follow me so we can be friends!
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