SteveZodiak wrote:
back in the day of the blazing 14K modem in the lightening fast 486SX processor, when online time was charged by the minute, the Universal Horror board drew most of my AOL $. To find there were adults (allegedly) who had keen interests in these movies was reassuring. Now the CHFB provides so much more, even a sharing platform for mates to share music.

By the way, if my poor memory serves, it was Realms of Shadows Past, or something like that

Yes, the original Universal Horrors folder started by David Colton was founded in Realms of Shadows Past, which was predominantly a horror literature area on AOL. It was roughly two years later that the collection of folders were reorganized into what became the CHFB. In its early days, an AOL topic folder could only hold 500 posts. Every post after 500 would automatically delete the earliest posts in the folder. We didn't realize it until the very first posts (and many, many more) in the Universal Horrors folder had been wiped away forever. After that hard lesson, the Bride of Universal Horrors folder was created as the new active folder for all the subsequent posts. We might get as many as five posts in a day; I can recall getting excited when there were 17 posts in one day. Seventeen! When we got closer to the 500th post in the Bride folder we created the Son of Universal Horrors folder and so on. That became the standard practice until AOL removed the 500 post limit. 

The loose confederation of classic horror film folders finally got its own location on AOL in 1997. I had been in communication with the AOL moderator assigned to us to see if we could get a cyber-wall put up between us and the modern horror area that we had been moved into. Too many "Frankishtine is kewl" posts plagued the CHFB.  Thinking about it a little more I asked if it would be possible to have our own area on AOL, including a reorganization of the folders. The moderator suggested other possibilities, including a library for our legacy folders and promised to look into it. While waiting for a response I broached the subject with David and a few others. The moderator eventually responded that AOL would indeed set up an area for us but that we would have to be precise how we wanted it organized. We began soliciting ideas for the reorg. At the time there were two factions in our horror film area that were quite hostile with one another. It would have been difficult to go through the reorganization without a consensus, which meant getting input from the other faction led by Scarlet Street magazine. After we had put together a plan I sent it via email to Richard Valley, editor of Scarlet Street and the de facto leader of the opposition, and, to my surprise, he accepted it without suggesting any changes.

We placed the reorganization plan before all the members for final buffing and polishing. But what would we call the new area? There were many suggestions but it eventually came down to the Vintage Horror Film Boards or the Classic Horror Film Boards. True to their word, AOL gave us our own area and the little Universal Horrors folder along with all the other topical folders created since that day in early 1995 was finally given its own home and a name.

The factional infighting unfortunately continued and would even spread to Usenet newsgroups.  In 1998 I approached Richard Valley at the Monster Bash convention to try and work something out. It was an amicable talk but within two weeks the truce was over, fighting ensued and became even more inflamed. It got so bad that in 1999 David called for a week of silence to protest the endless conflagrations. The Week of Silence was pretty much honored by everyone accept the other faction, but it was a turning point--within the year they left to start The Scarlet Street Forums on the still fairly new World Wide Web. The fighting would continue though it took a more unconventional route. However within the AOL CHFB, things--at last--were relatively peaceful.

Over time, the personalized approach by AOL's business model began to fade into the past and we found ourselves at the mercy of continuous changes and modifications at the hands of AOL. A promised graphics library didn't work out and a strange, new format for message boards made things intolerable. We started to look for a new, more suitable location. Meanwhile, Kerry Gammill, a member of the CHFB, had created his Monster Kid forums on EZ Board to augment his online Monster Kid Magazine. Kerry offered to reorganize the Monster Kid forum, give it a graphics make-over, and make it the new home of the CHFB. It couldn't have worked out better and thus the migration to the new home of the CHFB began in 2004.  Thousands and thousands of posts were abandoned on AOL; that was a hard thing to do. But new gold would be mined at our new location on the WWW. Thus the CHFB entered its third stage--truly a new world of gods and monsters.



GARY L. PRANGE
I'm not all bad, just mostly.

"Sic gorgiamus allos subjectos nunc."