There’s a lot happening for Dread Central co-founder and former editor-in-chief Steve Barton right now. Not only is his autobiography, A Comedy of Tragedies, coming out in December, but he has several movie projects in the works, one of which you can watch for free on Tubi. It’s the fourth film in the All Hallows’ Eve series of anthology films. Subtitled Inferno, it features the work of seven unique directors showcasing films with a variety of styles and themes. Steve worked as the producer, shepherding the various shorts and coming up with a wrap-around concept. Asked about the origin of his project, Steve told Horror Obsessive, “Around six months ago, Jesse Baget, the dude who produced the original, asked me if I was interested in coming aboard as a producer on a new one. I was like, yeah, but there’s got to be a good angle, you know what I mean? And I thought about it and I called him back and I’m like, ‘Listen dude, the only way this really works is we don’t have filmmakers shoot shorts specifically for it.’”

The reason for asking only for premade IP was simple: “So when you do a short film,” he said, “when you do an independent film, unfortunately your work has a really finite lifespan. You make your movie, you kill yourself to do it, whether it’s two hours or two minutes. And your film either does its festival run and it gets some accolades there, and if you’re lucky maybe a website or two hosts it. But, ultimately, at the end of the day it’s going to end up dying somewhere on YouTube or Vimeo. You have to hope people have a chance to really see it. They just happen across it. And that’s getting really hard to do lately, what with the ease of which it is to make a movie. I mean, you can make a movie completely on your computer, right?”

And so the search began. Steve personally watched over 900 movies. “Watched every one of them. I say I’m going to do something, I’m gonna do it. It’s not fair to anyone if I don’t watch their project when I asked for it. So it took a few months. I’m not going to lie — it was a really long procedure. But, what happened was, being that I was able to see them, I could get a feel for what went with what. Because there’s also a tonality you have to pay attention to, you know?” 

The question of whether there should be a theme naturally came up. Steve said, “I mean it’s All Hallows’ Eve, shouldn’t they all be Halloween shorts? But then we decided they don’t have to be because, well, listen, these movies they’ve already got a finite lifespan. Why pigeon hole them for somebody who’s just going to watch them once a year? So we’re using the All Hallows’ Eve masthead as a vehicle for these short films. And as long as they’re spooky, scary, and good, we’re very lenient in terms of what subgenre they fall into. So this last one we have ghosts, we have monsters, we have psychological horror, we have demons, we have a bunch of stuff. And I think that was a little bit of a gamble to not make it all Halloween themed, but I think ultimately it paid off because the response to it has been very, very good. And we’re lucky for that, and I’m thrilled to be able to share the work of these up and coming filmmakers.” 

And, indeed, it’s a very fun anthology. But will there be more? “I’ll do them until the day I die. I love helping the indie filmmaker. I’ve done it my whole career. One thing people can do to make sure there’s another is rate it on IMDB. And I’m not saying go and write some false fucking review or any shit like that. Rate it as you saw it, you know? It doesn’t have to be a 10/10. It’s ridiculous to even think that. Obviously it’s clearly not. But if they just give it an honest rating and you bump up your IMDB rating, there are other companies, other services, once you get above five point something — they’ll take it.”

Of course, every good horror anthology needs a good wrap-around. Steve said, “I wanted the wrap-around to be something very simple, and I wanted the films to be the star. So we did this animated wrap-around with this animator who works in Unreal Engine 5, and it is what it is. It just serves to get from point A to point B.”

In doing research for this article, I naturally hit up IMDB to see if there was anything I’d missed that I needed to cover, and to my surprise it turned out that Steve had written a film called Quantum Supremacy, which will be released next month. Quantum Supremacy has a really interesting backstory. Steve told me, “So, basically, the making of that was really bizarre. It was almost made backwards. This animator had all this stuff, and then this person got involved and that person got involved. And then they had all this cool stuff, but they needed a story. And, so I was given all the footage and they’re like, ‘Can you write a story around this?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah. It’s kind of backwards to do it this way, but I can do it.’ So it ended up a lot of fun. Probably better than it should have, to be perfectly honest with you. And then Cuba Gooding Jr. got involved. And hopefully it does well. It’s exciting.”

Curious, I asked if writing scripts was something he’d been doing regularly. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got a project with one of the studios right now, and hopefully that goes through. I wrote another indie project that’s kind of personal. It’s pretty cool. It has a really great twist. I mean, I never considered myself a writer, man. Anything I’ve ever done I taught myself to do. Even when it came to Dread Central, when that came about, I was one of the people working on the Internet when it was in its infancy. But the only thing I did was, I never wrote like I was trying to be a writer, I just wrote like I spoke. I write as I speak, and that’s how the book is. It’s a very conversational thing, and it’s interesting. People are — you never know what’s going to resonate with somebody. So you look at things like Terrifier, which exploded, you look at things like Never Sleep Again, which was considered the definitive horror documentary. I’m very lucky to have been attached to several really high profile projects.”

Dread Central was, of course, the place where Steve honed his “Uncle Creepy” persona. Between reviews, news and blog posts, he has to have written at least a few hundred thousand words for the place. But, if you were to go by his autobiography, which is available everywhere next month, Dread Central was the first time he did any serious writing. I asked Steve if my impressions were correct. “I never wanted to be a writer, but what I wanted to do was turn people on to cool shit. So I got my start writing local fanzines that would be passed around schools I was going to…before I got thrown out! And when the web turned out to be a thing, I was like, ‘Well, how does one go about creating a webpage?’ And there were various services like Geocities and shit like that. And so in order to make that, I had to learn HTML. So I went to the library (remember those fucking things?) because there wasn’t really anything online to figure out how to do this at the time. And I read a couple of books and I practiced, and I learned to hand code all by myself.” 

He went on to describe some of his editorial philosophy at Dread Central. “When I chose writers for Dread Central, I didn’t really pick writers. I just went to the fans. And I found people who had unique voices. And I wasn’t worried about their grammar or how they structured shit, because I knew I could fix it. I can’t do math for the life of me, but English I have more than a grasp on. 

“So I knew I could do things like fix their grammar and make shit work well, but what I couldn’t manufacture was a unique voice. So I wanted Dread Central to have a sense of realism about it. And it is a fan site, written by fans. And I know the whole ‘by fans, for fans’ thing is very cliche nowadays, but in the infancy of the Internet, it was very much that. And I ended up being editor-in-chief of that site for eighteen years before I moved on.”

Steve no longer has anything to do with the site, but could he see himself running a site like Dread Central again? “No, I don’t really have an interest in that. Maybe I’ll do an op-ed for somebody, if they need one and it’s something I’m interested in. There are things about it that I miss, like being an indie filmmaker, but now with All Hallows’ Eve, I can scratch that itch. The one thing I don’t miss, because I’ve done it for so long, I’ve seen every ad campaign you can imagine, and every media push you can imagine within the horror genre. And by the time a movie came out, when I was in the thick of it, I felt like I had already seen it. Because I got all the behind the scenes stuff, I’ve seen all the film stills, I’ve seen the posters, I’ve watched the clips. And there wasn’t anything left for me to enjoy. And now I can watch a movie and know nothing about it and be surprised, and be happy again. So in a lot of ways even though I was doing what I considered to be an important job, I was also ruining a lot of movies for myself. And I don’t miss doing that.”

We got to talking about Steve’s autobiography. I asked what made him want to write the book. “So I had a lot of demons. I still have a lot of demons. And I was trying to do the psychological thing. Get it all out, then when I’m done, boom, burn it! And then all that shit is out of my system and it’s up in smoke and blah, blah, blah. So I kind of never meant to release it. That was written for me. It never started as a book, at all. 

“And I did half of it, and as it does every so often, as you read, my life explodes, and then I ended up moving from California back here to the east coast. And I end up being with this woman who I ended up marrying. This girl who’s so out of my league, I have no idea what she’s doing with me. And one day she came over and she said, ‘Hey, that book that you were working on, do you still have it?’ And I was like, ‘Well, yeah.’ And she was like, ‘Well, can I read it?’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck for? You know me, you married me and everything.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m just curious.’ So I sent her what I had, which was literally half the book, or half the book as it is now. And she took what I had written and she went upstairs and read it and while I was down here working, I would hear, every so often, her laugh. Or cry. The fuck did I do, right? And then I’d hear her laugh again, and I’d hear her cry again, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here.’ And she came downstairs and she sat down right across from where I am now, and she looked at me and she says, ‘You can’t burn this.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ She says, ‘There are a lot of things you talk about in this book that I’ve never seen anyone talk about. And there’s a lot of things you cover in so much detail that I think people can relate to. If you finish this, I think this book has a chance to help somebody.’ ‘Cause I’ve felt alone all my life, man. I’ve always been the odd man out. I had to create places just to feel like I belonged there, like Dread Central. 

“I thought about that and I was like, ‘You know, if this book reaches one person, or helps one person get through their day and feel less alone, or know that no matter what’s going on, if  you just hang on, you’ll get to the other side of it,’ then it was worth it. Every ounce of pain. Totally worth it. So I finished it two years later. The book took a total of four years to finish. The last thing I wrote, as you read, was March of 2024, so it’s super current. And I think the last chapter, which I really don’t want to discuss, I think the final permutation of that was locked in August.”  

Steve’s journey wasn’t over with the completion of the book, of course. He still had to find a publisher. And how did that happen? “I was going to do what I always do,” he said. “I was going to self-publish the motherfucker. And my friend Josh Millican, who was editor-in-chief after I left Dread Central, he basically asked me if he could read it. And I was like, ‘Of course’ And so I sent it to him and two weeks later he wrote me and he’s like, ‘This is really fucking good.’ And I’m like, ‘Really?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, what are you doing with it?’ ‘I was going to self-publish it.’ And he’s like, ‘No, don’t do that. Let me send this to my publisher.’ Because he’s an author, and he has several books out from this publishing company, Encyclopocalypse. And I was like, ‘Well, all right. I guess.’ And then the next day, those cats called me and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we want to put this out.’ They wanted to put it out just because I wrote it. That’s a huge compliment. But this wasn’t just Uncle Creepy sitting around telling industry stories. I mean, that stuff is in there, and there’s a whole lot of it. But it’s more than that. It’s about literally how one idiot learned to deal with every kind of adversity you could imagine. 

“And I was like, ‘Before you make any decisions, just read it. See if this is what you want to get yourself into. Because this isn’t the typical thing that you guys put out.’ So they came back to me two weeks later and they’re like, ‘Okay, now we have to put this thing out.’”

The book comes out next month, and Steve is nervous about what the reaction to it is going to be. I asked why and he told me, “Because when I wrote that, it was just for me. In order to do some of those moments justice, in order to get it out of me, I had to open up doors I’d kept locked shut. And I figured if I was going to do it, I was going to go all in. So I put myself right back in a lot of those situations, and it hurt just as much as it did then. I was just getting it all out, man. And I was confessing to shit about what I was feeling, some shit that I did. Stuff I’m not proud of, you know? But when Danielle said to me to finish the book I’m like, ‘Well, this is everything.’ If this is going to be out there I’m not going to change the tone of it. I’m going to keep going, and keep doing it exactly as I did the first half. So in order for me to kind of make it read like a book, I didn’t take anything away from the beginning, but I added to it, just to introduce the reader to what they were getting into. I even put some of the first things I wrote in the prologue. I don’t know what this is going to be about. This was me talking to myself. 

“It’s weird, man. You never know how people are going to react to something. But I’m not scared in the sense that I don’t want people to find out certain things about me or how I got where I got. I’m scared in the way that it’s the ultimate vulnerability. Here’s my life. This is it. And, again, it’s written like I speak. People tell me it’s like I’m sitting at a table with them. And by the time I got to that industry stuff — I mean, I’m very lucky, dude. I’m the luckiest person on the planet. I got to be friended and be mentored by George Romero and Sid Haig. And one of my most important things I wanted to convey with the book, and I hope I have, was I wanted to give people insight to who they were and how they were as people. Not just the legends that they are. And I hope I did that.”

In addition to the print version, A Comedy of Tragedies will be available as an audiobook in the near future. Although the exact date hasn’t been set yet, it will be narrated by Mark Redfield. Steve says about Mark, “He has a voice I want a whole fucking house made out of it. I just want to roll around in it. And people are like, ‘Well, why aren’t you reading it, it’s your autobiography.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, I wrote that shit, I lived that shit, and now I’ve gotta read it again? No, I’m not doing that.’ And plus, honestly, there are certain chapters of my life in that book that I don’t want to revisit again. So I don’t want to have to be the one to read it out loud. I’ve been there, I’ve shut those doors. That was part of the psychological thing. 

“And so Mark read the book and he called me up and said, ‘Steve, I don’t want to narrate this book. I want to perform this book.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s not what I expected, but I’ll take it.’ He goes, ‘No, there’s just no way to read this without performing it. It’s very visual. And it deserves a certain cadence every now and then, and a certain thought process and feelings. You have to make sure the listener can feel it.’ And that’s another huge compliment, so I’m excited to see what he does with it. I mean, I am on it. I did the introduction. I did the thank yous, then I did the ‘What the fuck are you still doing listening to this?’ part. It’s going to be interesting to see how it’s all pieced together.”

To close out our interview, I was curious: as possibly the biggest horror superfan in the world, what excites Steve about what’s going on in the scene right now? He answered, “Look at the excitement around Terrifier. I very much had a hand in everything that’s going on. I did not work on [part] three, but I plucked that first movie out of obscurity. Put my career on the line for it. And I executive produced the shit out of part two. To the degree that there was such a fervor around it that part three could have been 90 minutes of Art taking a shit and it still would have made bank at the box office. And that’s not hyperbole, that’s not ego, that’s just the fucking truth. And what I’m most proud of with my work in the Terrifier franchise, what excites me the most, is even if it wasn’t one of my movies or if it wasn’t Terrifier or whatever, if it was any indie film that broke through, but is now holding the door open for other people to get their shit into theaters. That’s incredible, you know? So now because of the success of Terrifier, you’re seeing theaters or other studios taking chances on properties they probably never would have before. And that excites me. So I’m really excited to see what’s out there. What else is waiting to be discovered? And I love being on that spectrum with it, and I love pointing people toward it, and I love making it. I love everything about this. This is me. This is who I am. This isn’t an act. It’s not a job, it’s my life. And I’m very proud of that. So that’s what excites me.”

A Comedy of Tragedies releases on December 10th.