10-11-26 — SPECIAL REPORT — Interview with author and YouTuber Mike Bracken
Guys! I finally worked up the courage to ask (annoy) THE Horror Geek, Mike Bracken, to answer a bunch of fangirl questions. Two restraining orders later, here they are! I hope you love these as much as I did.
After reading these, head over to his YouTube channel and subscribe THEN go to his website for his debut novel and non-fiction offerings.
Christina Pfeiffer: Horror is the foundation of your Youtube channel, as well as your non-fiction and your upcoming release. How did your love of horror begin?
Mike Bracken: I’ve loved horror since I was a very small child who saw John Carpenter’s Halloween and Spielberg’s Jaws at way too young an age.
My Dad had the paperback of Jaws when I was like four years old and I remember sitting on the couch staring at it, both terrified and fascinated by the woman swimming oblivious while this giant monster with butcher knives for teeth was shooting up from below.
I begged my parents to let me see it. They bought the soundtrack album and I was afraid to even listen to the theme with no visuals.
Halloween was a similar experience. As a kid, the world doesn’t really make much sense to you, but you know there are rules and order and all that. But Halloween really felt like it broke a lot of those rules to me as a kid. You weren’t safe in the suburbs of Haddonfield. The cops couldn’t protect you. And worst of all, you couldn’t even kill the boogeyman. I was too young to get it at the time, but the idea of Michael just being an embodiment of absolute evil has always been the scariest and most interesting thing about him to me…which is why Rosenthal’s Halloween 2 always felt like such a letdown. Michael’s not nearly as scary once you give him a motivation. But that first film? He could go after anyone. He could be anywhere. That’s scary shit when you’re a kid.
Both those films traumatized me on some level, but they also gave me this profound love for the genre. Those films were essentially my gateway drug into horror.
Around this same time, Stephen King was really bringing scary stories to the mainstream and my mother was a constant reader of his stuff. I remember a lot of trips to the library to get the newest King book. I’d just sit and stare at those covers (The Stand, in particular, fascinated me as a kid). Then, like most Gen X kids, I started reading the books for myself a few years later (again, probably way too young), and that just further cemented the love of dark and scary things for me. From there it sort of morphed into a full-blown passion, and eventually a career.
CP: What was the catalyst to starting The Horror Geek Youtube channel?
MB: I’ve had this very strange and fortuitous career, honestly. I grew up wanting to write horror novels. I spent most of my early to mid 20s writing short fiction and trying to break into the small press with varying degrees of success. I didn’t want to be Stephen King as much as I wanted to be Skipp and Spector or David Schow (even back then I loved the splatterpunks…).
Anyway, that was the early days of the internet and a lot of us gravitated to the old Horrornet site with its chat room and message boards. A whole lot of writers who made it went through that place back in the day (it’s where I met guys like Brian Keene, Ryan Harding, Tom Piccirilli, Geoff Cooper, and too many other folks to list).
It was there and over on the old Alt.horror newsgroup that I started writing a lot about horror movies along with the fiction stuff. I did this mostly just for fun, but one day a friend was like “you should be writing this stuff about horror movies for an outlet instead of just giving it away on these message boards.”
So I eventually started writing for a horror movie site, then that morphed into some bigger gigs. Then one day in 2001 I get an email from a lady saying she’s working on a Comedy Central gameshow called Beat the Geeks and they really want to have a horror film geek, and would I be interested.
I thought it was a joke and said as much. She writes back “no, we’re serious…we’ll fly you down here to LA to audition.”
I jumped at the opportunity and landed the gig, which basically made me THE Horror Geek.
Afterwards I had a lot of TV offers that never went anywhere and really just was happy to write about this stuff online. But the dotcom bubble eventually burst and it was a race to the bottom writing about movies as far as money was concerned.
So jump ahead a few years (man, this is like a novel-length answer…) and a friend from a site I wrote for reaches out to me. He has a Youtube channel dedicated to DragonBall Z and he’s got over half a million subs. He says “Mike, you gotta get over here on Youtube…you’ll kill it.” There was also talk of how much money he was making, so I was sold.
Youtube is a really strange beast, but I love it and am glad we made the jump. It certainly pays better than writing reviews at this point.
CP: SICK FLICKS VOL. 1 is a soft spoiler journey through many of the horror genres most infamous and often beloved films with a sprinkle of underground gold. Along with mild spoilers, you give the reader so many killer (pun kind of intended) fun tidbits about the film, director, or other unknown facts. How did you decide which films to include and were the factoids hard to narrow down?
MB: This is a great question!
So, Sick Flicks Volume 1 was this project I wanted to do like 20 years ago, long before I ever got to Youtube. I loved the books of guys like Chas. Balun and Tom Weisser and the Psychotronic Film Guide and all that and thought “I could write one of those…”
So I did. The original Sick Flicks was way longer and had way more movies in it. I wrote it and then reached out to a bunch of publishers absolutely convinced I’d be in the middle of a bidding war for my book at any moment.
The reality was most of the places were like “thanks for the unsolicited query and manuscript. Talk to you never!” but one was interested. They had this other project going, a book on slasher movies with essays from critics and filmmakers and whatnot and they needed two more entries. So they asked if I’d contribute. I said sure and that’s how I wound up in Butcher Knives and Bodycounts.
During the course of that, the publisher backed out and it was taken over by another imprint. They never took Sick Flicks. So, at that point I had a lot going on in my personal life and all that so it kinda got shoved to the wayside.
When I came back to it a few years ago, it felt like it was too long and that it would be better broken up into multiple volumes. So I chopped it down and reworked it.
The goal was always to find a mixture of films that were gross, but I had to be careful. I have this tendency to just go fully obscure if left to my own devices. Keeping that in mind, I tried really hard to give the book a mix of mainstream friendly stuff like Dead Alive and Evil Dead 2, but mixing in plenty of more obscure stuff like Premutos or the All Night Long films. I wanted people to find their footing with stuff they knew, but I also wanted everyone to leave with homework in the form of titles they needed to track down. I think we mostly got it right. Mostly.
As far as the details, it’s always based on the stuff that’s interesting to me. I think in a book like Sick Flicks, you have to share any real life grossness and rumors that you can. But mostly, it’s just the nerdy stuff that interests me. I figure if it was a bit of trivia or a detail that stuck out to me, there’s probably other people out there who will be interested too. That seems to have panned out.
I guess in that way I’m always the audience I’m writing for or making the videos for – if it’s something that’s cool or gross or weird to me, then it usually makes it into the book or script.
CP: On the completely opposite end of the writing spectrum, you have your debut novel, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL, releasing in October. (October 6th to be exact). Can you tell us about how it came to be and a little bit about it?
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve wanted to write novels since I was a little kid. I spent a lot of years writing fiction that sometimes sold and more often than not, didn’t sell. I had a really hard time writing anything novel length for years, mostly because my brain is wired to like completing things and a novel could stretch out for months or years and I would often lose interest or momentum about 20k words in. A short story might be two or three days for a draft, tops…a novel was just a monumental commitment.
In like 2009 I wrote a zombie novel that got very close to done (but not done…) and that was essentially proof that I could probably focus and do it if I had a system. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a creature of routines and systems. I produce the Youtube videos in a very specific and regimented way because my life is just easier if I know exactly what I’m doing and when I’m doing it. But the novels were harder because even if you plan, a novel is gonna throw detours and dead ends at you.
So, with my routine-oriented brain, I figured out that if I had any shot at writing a novel, it was going to have to be meticulously outlined. I had the idea for Sympathy for the Devil ages ago. Like all writers, I have an idea file that has all these little interesting snippets and plots and characters and all that. I’ll never write most of it…but Sympathy’s idea of a murder mystery set in Hell just refused to go away.
My significant other is a USA Today Bestselling Novelist (she writes Rom-Coms, not horror), and she eventually sort of just steered me into finally writing the thing. It was both the most exhilarating and terrifying thing I’ve ever done (and now that it’s out in the world, its even more terrifying…what if people hate it? What if no one even reads it? These things keep me awake at night).
With her kind of shepherding me through the process I did finally write the book. I sent it out to a lot of agents, had a ton of interest, then in the most on-brand thing for me ever, I basically just let it all sit for a decade. I’m nothing if not a procrastinator. But it’s finally out, I’m working on some more novels (including a sequel to this one…) and hope people have fun with my nonsense. But the process of writing novels still hasn’t really gotten any easier for me.
CP: With your writing process - are you an outline guy or type by the seat of your pants?
MB: Ha! I kinda unintentionally answered this already. I’m a crazy plotter. The initial outline for Sympathy was 64 pages long. That was probably overkill in hindsight, but at the time it just made sense to me to do it that way. I have a million friends who are pantsers and I don’t know how they do it. I would be miserable getting up every day and writing and not even knowing where i’m going or if any of this will be useful.
I suspect this is because I spent so many years working as a freelancer on a bunch of movie sites and all that. I think when you work those kinds of gigs, where you’re paid by the piece and the faster you write the more money you make, it sort of trains you to look at the work in the way the classic pulp writers did. It was publish or go hungry. So, when my pantser friends are like “yeah, I had to toss out 25k words on the work in progress today because it just wasn’t going the way I wanted it to”, I die inside. If I had to scrap 25k words I’d be like “how will I pay the mortgage this month?”
The catch here is that even after writing professionally for almost 30 years I still haven’t really found that plotting system that works for me (and I’ve tried them all at this point, I think). So deep down in my heart there’s a twisted little part of me that’s actually envious of the pantsers. If you gave me the choice between writing prose or plot outline, I’d take writing prose every time. But I just can’t bring myself to start a novel-length voyage without a roadmap.
CP: Is there a genre besides non-fiction and horror that you would love to dip your creative toes into?
MB: Yeah, I’d really love to write a grimdark fantasy series. I read less horror these days than I used to, not because I don’t love it, but mostly because I read so much when I was younger that I started to think “what else are you missing out on?”
That led me to reading a lot more fantasy, urban fantasy, and crime novels. Sympathy really is sort of a hybrid in that it has some minor horror elements, but at its heart it’s really more like an urban fantasy with Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard in Hell. But yeah, there are a bazillion different genres I’d love to dip my toes in at some point.
CP: If you could co-author with any author, who would it be?
MB: Oh, wow, this is tough. On the one hand, I’d love to work with some really talented guys – Joe Hill and his dad, Barker, Joe Lansdale. I’d be terrified if it happened though…they’re all way better writers than me.
I would love to do something with friends like Stephen Graham Jones or Keene or Ryan Harding too. Ryan and I share a lot of the same interests, the same wildly inappropriate sense of humor, and all that. I think it would be fun to write something with Richard Kadrey too. I think his Sandman Slim books and Sympathy have similar interests, philosophies, and worlds. It would be fun to play in that sandbox.
CP: I have heard there may be another release in the not so distant future from you. Can you give us any details?
MB: Sick Flicks Volume 2: More Gore is off for proofreading at the time I’m answering these questions. I’m not sure yet if it will be out at the tail end of 2026 or early 2027, but it’s coming soon. I’m already writing stuff for Volume 3.
Volume 2 is 50 more reviews, with some really obscure stuff that only the hardcore gorehounds will know, but it’s got some safer picks to ease you in as well. I hope people like it as much as they seem to like Volume 1!
CP: With your Youtube channel, is there any upcoming series or episode that you are excited to tell us about?
MB: The main channel has been toying with some new show ideas this past year (Sick Flicks is almost 8 years old, which is ancient in internet years, so it was time to try some new stuff both for me and the audience). I have a couple of new formats there I’m looking forward to sharing but nothing’s set in stone yet.
The second channel, Grindhouse Gospel, has been where I’ve felt the most creative lately. We’ve got some cool episodes coming up over there, including a video on Near Dark that I think turned out pretty well. But honestly, these days it’s all I can do to keep up with my release schedule (two videos a week between the channels is a lot). But if people keep watching this stuff, I’ll keep making it!
About the author:
Mike Bracken is best known as the host of the popular weekly YouTube shows, Sick Flicks, which boasts more than 100,000 subscribers, and Grindhouse Gospel, which boast more than 120,000 subscribers. Bracken was the "Horror Geek" on Comedy Central's pop-culture TV quiz show Beat the Geeks. He is also a popular film and video game critic who has written for NBC Universal's Fandango and Movies.com, Cinescape Magazine, IGN.com, GameCritics.com, Cinematical, MovieFone, and Cinema Blend. He was the on-air film critic for the syndicated Big O & Dukes radio show and a contributor to the cult-classic Butcher Knives and Body Counts anthology (Dark Scribe Press, 2011). He's the author of Sick Flicks: Volume 1, a collection of horror movie reviews, and Sympathy for the Devil, a supernatural crime novel about a damned homicide cop tasked by Satan with solving an impossible murder in Hell.
YouTube:
THE HORROR GEEK - Sick Flicks: https://m.youtube.com/@TheHorrorGeek
THE HORROR GEEK - Grindhouse Gospels: https://m.youtube.com/@GrindhouseGospel
Website:
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