By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report.

Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days.

We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time.

Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Stephen, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff.

You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst?

Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK.

I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place.

Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess.

GoldenEye is my only guess.

It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character.

But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun.

I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind.

That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google it and it would either be you, me and I'd forgotten, or no one's done it. That's great. What a privilege to have a space to actually make some progress in.

It's good. Again, I admire your stuff so much, and this is why when you hit me up and mentioned you were working on this project, I was so excited. Horror movies have been one of the biggest success stories of the past couple of years, particularly in the postpandemic box office. They tend to overperform; they tend to get good ROI. We've seen a surge in horror film production and we've seen the market share increase.

Can you talk a little bit about why this is historically anomalous? We've always had horror movies, since the beginning of the invention of the medium, but why are we now seeing a bit of an uptick?

You're absolutely right. It's way more than an uptick. If we were looking at how many horror films were made last year worldwide, it was over 1,500, whereas around 2000, it was 500-something, and in the 1980s it was below 200. It's really transformed. As you said, not only have the raw numbers gone up, but also has the market share. Now about 12 percent of movies are horror films. That's a large percentage.

It's a number of factors. Certainly all genres have grown in raw numbers, because it's easier and cheaper to make a film than ever before. Every device I own has some sort of HD camera on it — you can do it on a doorbell. It's possible to do that. You also have the ubiquity of information. I went to film school in 2001 and there was education from tutors, there were a few hardback books, but that was how you learned how to do stuff. Now there's so much content online telling you amazing stuff from awesome people for free. That has an effect.

But that's across all films. With horror itself, the market share growth is, as you said, the more interesting part of it. There are a few factors. One, we're more accepting that a film is a horror film. A film that we might think of as horror now, if it had been made in the '80s, it might've been pitched as a psychological thriller. There's more acceptance; there's no shame in it. People are like, yeah, it's a horror film, whereas in the past they might not have done.

There's also that generation that grew up with VHS horror films, The Evil Dead generation — and maybe even the generation after that, when it comes to executives — where people have grown up loving horror, but also knowing that it does well. Therefore, if there's no business shame and there's no art shame and there's no personal shame, why not say, yeah, I'm making a horror.

There's still a bit of way to go. The awards are pretty poor for horror, and the trade press doesn't cover it properly. It's still not as fully accepted as other genres, but production-wise and audience-wise, it's really evolved and grown and, in the last 20 years, really matured.

It's so funny that you mentioned the award stuff. I remember when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought it was actually really special that she took a moment and shouted out the horror fans. That's a constituency in movies that does not get a lot of shout-outs from award stages, but nevertheless really did keep her in business for a few years.

And it was keeping her in business because it was delivering to audiences. There's no hiding from that. It's the most audience-connected genre, in my opinion.

All my stuff is from raw data and from doing my own research, but sometimes I'll do a bit of Googling around to get a context before or after I do the work. With the awards, I found a few blog articles about how horror does at the Oscars, and all the numbers were wrong. They were all different, and they were different from mine. I was like, what is going on?

It turns out there is a very, very small number of horror films that do well at the Oscars. Most of them are quite questionable horrors, as in, is it a horror or not? Silence of the Lambs. Jaws. Those are two films that IMDB says are not horror films. You can argue either way, and it doesn't matter what my opinion is, but there are a few like that. Or Black Swan, which is very much a horror film, but because it's female led and about a female perspective, people often go, “Ah, it's a psychological thriller,” in a very misogynistic way.

A small number of films that have outperformed have really changed that data. You end up almost immediately talking about existential questions of what horror is. I love that. That's what the data immediately suggests we should chat about.

I want to talk a little more about that audience for horror. You had a stat in here that was really interesting to me about how horror is the only genre where the audiences that actually go to the cinema to watch it are direct reflections of the actual national audience. I know you write about the UK in there, but also in general, one really interesting thing about the cinema is that you do have quote-unquote “four quadrants” for movies. For the most part, you're going to see a gender skew or an age skew in terms of who attends a film. But I'd love to hear you speak to how horror is really one of the most universal genres.

It really is. It's interesting, because as you've mentioned, there are a few different ways we can cut up the data. The one way that horror is not like the population is age. It has the largest percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. If you split them into the different buckets, as they often do, horror has the lowest percentage of people under 18 and the lowest percentage of people over 45, which is fascinating. It's really condensed within your 20s. However, it's a good gender split, and also crucially, in the UK, they do just the most British thing ever and do stats around social status.

Interesting.

It's a rabbit hole. If ever you're looking for a rabbit hole, Google social status. Everyone's classed into different groups, usually based on the job they do or that their parents did, or whether they went to university — things that are sort of falling apart. But it does mean they put people in different brackets. They do that for all the different audiences because it's part of the cinema business' advertising: They want to know whether to sell Rolex watches or lager. And when you compare it to the UK population, every other genre is posher. To a large degree, things like biographies are unbelievably posher than the average population.

Horror is the one that just reflects the public. Also, almost every genre has a very strong correlation between what critics think of the movie and whether it makes money or not. In almost all genres, it makes sense; if you can make the film better, according to critics, you'll make more money. Horror has little to no correlation — functionally irrelevant correlation. Critics are irrelevant. Horror always gets poor scores from audiences, even, but I think that's because it delivers something different. It still is a film and it still is in the film genre space, but it's the weird cousin that's there delivering because it doesn't have the snootiness. It doesn't have the credibility. It only has the fact that it delivers, so when it does deliver, it does stunningly well. And the audience has a different criteria for what they'll put up with, whether they'll tolerate junkie effects or a bad idea or bad acting. I love that. It has its own identity.

I love it, too. I'm glad that you mentioned that, because when I was doing my book, I was really interested in horror. I'm not good at horror movies; I am very easily scared and I don't have fun during them. I'll see them if I'm dragged to by my husband, but nevertheless, I am a gigantic weenie. There's no personal affection for this genre, but I was obsessed with it because, to your point, the first thing that people start messing around with when a new medium is invented is spooky stuff, right?

When the novel was invented, you were very quickly after that getting stuff like Dracula, or Frankenstein. Once the medium has ossified, you start getting people experimenting with scares. Some of the earliest films that we have, whether it's Nosferatu or things like that, are people trying to spook one another. It's almost like the stuff that came before the dinosaurs.

You're absolutely right. What's fascinating about it is that as soon as there's a new medium, people use it to scare other people, but then they take a long time to acknowledge that. The idea of a horror film as a nomenclature, as a name for it, didn't emerge until the early '30s, when you started to have universal monsters. We had horror films before that, but they didn't call them that. They might be called Gothic. So, there is a very quick move to scare ourselves, but then there's a very slow realization of acceptance, of publicly going, yeah, I don't mind being scared. Which is fascinating, isn't it?

It is. It's so cool, and it's cool seeing it replicate itself. Online, you used to have jump-scare videos as some of the first stuff. Some of the earliest viral videos were that. Even with podcasts, a lot of true crime podcasts are horror podcasts.

One hundred percent.

There's another thing you write about in here that I genuinely just love, which is that there's no link between a filmmaker's experience and the actual profitability of the horror film. This is one of the things that makes this genre so cool, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it and some of the data from it. It's a really approve-yourself kind of genre. A lot of the time, you can show up with a little bit of money and some corn syrup and red food coloring, and they've been really special.

Totally. It is the most accessible genre, partly because it has the lowest cost but also because it doesn't need gatekeepers. It doesn't need stars. It doesn't need visual effects. So it's immediately open to more people, but then on the other end, the audience is also willing to go with something great. They're not going to go, “Well, who made it?” They'll just go, “Ah, that was great.” You're right.

I looked at the correlation between the number of films that someone had made before and the profitability of their films. I looked at it for writers, producers, directors, and exec producers. What we found, when we were looking through this, is that with writers, producers and directors, there's little to no correlation. Really. That's staggering when you think about it, because most horror films do nothing — that's what films do — and if you have a lot of microbudget films, that's 1,500 a year and not all of them making money. But the ones that do make money can do staggeringly well. You would imagine that experience is a factor, but it's not.

Except for the exec producer. There was a correlation, though it's not the strongest. It's not make-or-break. I don't know which way around that is, whether it's exec producers being very good at spotting the right projects, so they become an identifier, or whether they transform the project and therefore become the transformation.

Functionally, it doesn't matter. It's a bit of both: a bit of column A, a bit of column B. The horror producers I've spoken to often say it's a mix of those things, that they're not going to come aboard a bad project. But at the same time, it is about having the right relationships to know how to get distribution or how to retitle it or basically how not to eff up one contract that could ruin everything. Sometimes it is just a steady hand.

If you're making a horror film and you've never done it before, I don't see that as any kind of problem, but maybe have at least one voice who's experienced that you can go to — infrequently, so they don't have to do a huge amount. The exec producer is not on set picking up trash.

It's almost reminiscent of the Roger Corman film school stuff.

Totally. The things that the really experienced person will do are basically, here's the big picture, here are some connections, but the bits the audience is actually going to love if they're given the chance to watch the film — the story, the acting, the moments, the editing, the sound — that's all going to be done by the creatives. And that doesn't matter about your experience.

I remember an interview with Wes Craven a long time ago where they said to him, why are there so many bad horror films? And he said, because they're made by people who don't love horror. I've got to say, that's probably true. You can't make it cynically, but if you make it with your passion and heart, you have a good chance. Make a Western or a sports movie with your heart and you're not getting the money back. But if you make a horror film with your heart, there's a chance. I'm not saying there's a big one, but there's a route to success and establishment and franchise and all that.

Sam Raimi very notoriously tread that path. Even folks like James Cameron. It's interesting to look at filmmakers who really did make their bones by being very passionate about a horror film and getting it done and learning something very cool.

The Terminator might be a horror film. I don't know. It certainly doesn't have the money to be what Terminator 2 is, which is solid action.

Absolutely.

It's not really sci-fi; there's a bit of sci-fi in it, but it's just a man. It's too cheap to have any of the expensive things you'd expect. It's a torment film, or maybe even a slasher, almost. There is an infamous killer.

There's another element on this that I wanted to bring up, which is that you have this really cool stat about horror films and shot length. You were able to compare them to other mediums, and horror films just have so much more room to breathe. Can you speak to that?

Before I study something, I tend to have a preconception of what it's going to be, which you can't help because you're around. But what I love is that I'm sometimes completely thrown off-kilter. Then I'm forced to go back and be like, what happened there? Why was I wrong? Is my data wrong? Because, as you know, sometimes when you find that anomalous result, you have to double check or even triple check it.

This was one of those things. What I found when I was looking at this was that, unsurprisingly, action and sci-fi films had the shortest shot lengths of about four seconds on average, or something like that. That's short, and that's the whole movie. That was across all films. Drama had the second highest, and it was something like 12, 13, 14 seconds — I can't remember, I don't have it in front of me. But horror was 16 seconds on average per shot.

That's a long time. And that's an average. First of all, I thought it was an error and I went through it, but no, this is true. Then I thought about it, and of course it makes perfect sense, because horror is about what you can't see. It's about the lack of control. Action is about sound and fury and it's a firework show. You don't really need to know what's going on; you're just excited to be involved. Whereas horror is like, no, you're going to sit there and you can't see what's behind that thing. Or the reverse, which is that you can see it's approaching whoever's on screen, and they're getting closer. No, you can't look away. No, you can't warn them. It's about the control of the image.

It might be one of the quintessential genres for film. You watch some films and go, eh, I should have read the book. But with horror, it's not on the page. You have to have the required elements, but it's made on the screen and it's made in the moment of the interaction between the screen and the audience. That's what shot length does. It's control. It's awesome.

It is. You also think about Hitchcock movies, where there's an absolute control of the camera. That got boiled out of a lot of dramatic filmmaking and a lot of action-thriller filmmaking, but it's still there in horror because it still does something to us. That's an amazing stat. I like it a lot.

It speaks to the medium. It's not a play that's been filmed, which is what drama can be sometimes. It's used entirely differently than in drama, where the camera's just rolling so you capture it. In horror, and in a good horror especially, it's being used by a craftsperson to paint a picture, to force you to feel. That's the bit that horror fans like: the strapping into the rollercoaster. Make me think I'm going to die, you know? That's it.

I want to talk a little about content. You're able to do some really awesome content analysis on this stuff, and there are a couple different angles that you've tackled in the book. Some are about the kinds of monsters we see on screen. There was a cool stat in here about aquatic-based monsters and the rise of water as a medium of fear, which I'd love for you to speak to, but what are some of the monster stats that popped out at you? What are some of the things hunting us now that have evolved over time?

Well, let's be clear. They're not actually hunting us; this is movies. It's so funny, because sometimes I have reflected and thought, oh my god, the world is — oh, no, these are the stories we're telling ourselves about ourselves.

I did see a parallel between serial killers on screen and serial killers in the real world. That was one of the things I found. I was looking at serial killers in the graph over time, and there's a big peak in the '80s, and then I showed it to one of my colleagues at Guinness World Records. They nerd-sniped me and went, “I wonder if that correlates with the real world.” And I was like, well now I have to go and have a look, don't I? Thanks. I thought I was done with this topic.

Going back to your monsters, it's interesting. Monster horror movies are two subgenres: There are horror movies, and then there are ones that have to do with monsters. Within that, I classified the monsters where they were flying, aquatic or land-based mammals. There are other bits around the edges, but this has to do with monsters rather than little creatures. I found that the land-based category is the biggest, but has been declining quite quickly over the last two or three decades. Shooting up almost out of nowhere — well, out of the ocean — are aquatic monsters. It's such a clear trend. It's definitely happening. Because I'm looking at decades, and the whole report looks over 27,000 films — not all monster films, but still, monsters is a big genre. So, this isn't an anomaly of the data of just two films.

I've got two theories, but they are only theories. This is what I love about this data stuff: I'll do the data stuff, I'll present it to you objectively, and then we'll all sit around over a drink or some food and disagree about the why. My current two thoughts are, one, that environmentalism has changed what we think of as villains and what's unknown. It's changing our understanding of monsters and nature, and the ocean is more unknown. But two, a more practical answer came from a producer friend of mine. I was talking to her about this and she said it was quite expensive to make an aquatic monster without visual effects.

What were the monsters you could have in, say, the 20th century? For most of the 20th century, it was a bloke in a suit, or it was ants on a small model. That's it, right? It looks cool, but it is a certain kind of thing, and water doesn't scale. You can't have a miniature because it just looks different. Water is incredibly complex from a visual effects point of view, as well as the way the beings move. If you put a guy in a suit and put him underwater, he's going to drown, because that suit's heavy. But you're freed up in the 21st century to use more visual effects. More are freely available, so now we can live out our aquatic dreams — and nightmares. And, because we haven't for most of history, there's loads more space. There are plenty of more dangerous fish in the sea.

Those are my two working theories, but I have no idea. I would happily talk with people about it for hours, because it doesn't matter. That's what I like about this. This isn't instructive. It's not like we must figure this out because it's going to change what people invest in or anything. No, let's just have some fun and talk about movies.

There's that scene in Ed Wood where they're like, all right, Bill, just get in there and flail.

Exactly.

The tech has got to be a part of it. I also thought it was really fun to dive into some of the stuff you had about clowns, because we are in the week where Terrifier is a box office champion. Unforeseeable, unless you potentially foresaw it.

Well, it's at least the third in the series, so there's a certain amount of success that's gone on before. But I don't think anyone expected Terrifier 3 to do the kind of business it's done and Joker 2 not to. Those two coming out a few weeks apart have had such different journeys that it's quite dramatic.

Terrifier 3 has done exactly what good horror films do. They've got a very clear idea that's been tested before and gone big on it. They know what they're delivering to their audience, which is shock. They've also got a great advertising campaign. From what I understand, from what I've read around, they did test screenings in some cinemas where they didn't tell the audience what they were going to watch. They were like, “It's a holiday film!” and then showed this grotesque film. Lots of people walked out. Some people threw up, apparently. Then, with the remaining people that stayed, they did the piece to camera afterward. Like, “What did you think of the movie?” But loads of people walked out. The viral marketing is spot-on.

Clowns weren't a big feature of horror films until about the 2010s, when we started to see them creep up to 1 percent of films, which is quite a lot. I'm not that bothered either way by clowns. I certainly don't think they're fun, but I'm not terrified of them. In reading around, I found a study — I don't have it in front of me, so I can't quote it exactly — that they did on the fear of clowns. It was across many, many people across multiple countries, and they found that over half of people reported some fear of clowns. So I think clowns are inherently scary, and most people, like me, are ambivalent. Someone will get a clown for a kid's birthday party, and I'll go, oh, okay. Whereas some people are actually like, why?

That's also what horror is supposed to do, right? Horror is supposed to take something that you feel is safe and make it unsafe, but then in playing out the unsafe, you'll have exorcised the demon that worried you. Therefore you now feel safe, perhaps, because your body thinks you've played with that demon. You've played with that thought.

I don't know. It'll die down, it'll get tired and something else will come along. I can't even think what the next thing is. Probably an IT engineer, or something that doesn't feel scary. Though, mind you, you'd have to call that “IT,” and they've already done that with clowns.

The SEO on that is quite bad.

We'll work on that together off-pod so we can keep the copyright.

Terrifier is great, though. It's not my kind of film, but they've done such a good job. Everything they've done, they've delivered to their audience, and they've also created a franchise and a character, so they will be making a lot of money. They've earned it, as far as I'm concerned. Not mine, though; not my money.

I thought some of the stuff you wrote in here about survival as an increasing theme in these films was really interesting, which also goes well with what you had about body horror films and infection as a prominent way we deal with that. When the pandemic hit, a lot of films that saw quite a bit of pop were the ones that pertained to this idea of survival during infection and things like that. You had some really interesting, decade-long data.

Before we wrap it up, what are some emerging trends? What are some of the charts that have been going up? As we think about the evolution of this really durable genre, where do you see this stuff going?

You're absolutely right. The pinnacle of infection movies wasn't actually postpandemic, though we'll see what it will be for the rest of the current decade. 28 Days Later might be patient zero for that kind of movie. But you're right. What we saw during the lockdown was that we wanted to find meaning and structure to the narrative that was playing out in our lives. It wasn't coming from the media, and it wasn't coming from the scientists, because we didn't know. So there were films like Contagion that did such a great job.

It's kind of spooky when someone predicts the future. We forget all the ones where they failed to predict the future, or they did a terrible job. Out of however many it was at that point, 20,000 horror films, one of them nailed the future. Mathematicians are rolling their eyes, but at the same time, we're in this emotional experience saying, oh my god. Gwyneth Paltrow went through that, so I can.

But it was interesting, actually. There was a film that was shot before the pandemic called The Pink Cloud, a Brazilian film. It was shot in 2019, but it was then edited and ready just as the pandemic was happening. It was relatively low budget, and it's about a big pink cloud that comes over cities and forces everyone to live in lockdown. It's a film about being in lockdown and it was just coincidence. It's great art, but it was just coincidence. It played at Sundance the year it was not physical — either 2020 or 2021, I can't remember. But it was amazing. The timing was sort of weird, and I think that adds an extra spookiness to it.

Speaking to your point, obviously there are loads of films that talk about lockdown and infection, but not nearly as much as you'd think. We're done with it. “I get enough of that at home,” if you see what I mean. What is interesting in the trends is that, you're right, survival has gone up, but one of the biggest things that's gone down — which I think is really interesting. This is over almost 100 years of content — is how people are thinking about the brain or the mind.

We're seeing fewer films where the brain is being attacked or madness is the cause of the psycho, and we're seeing far more understanding, like maybe they had a bad childhood. I think it's a strong story of mental health moving on from being the thing that you're scared of. You could read Foucault, you could look at 12 monkeys — there are lots of films that have played with this idea of madness and what sanity is. But largely we've moved away from, “He's mad, run away,” to, “He's mad. Let's listen to what he's got to say and try to understand him as a real human being.” That's really interesting. I don't know where that goes, but that's been a very clear trend over almost 100 years of horror films.

That is fascinating. Again, so much of horror is interior-looking. A lot of the things that we're scared of and that are played up are more reflections of our own state of mind and our own fears. If we're not worried about madness being contagious in a Lovecraftian way, that is super interesting.

Exactly. Throughout all of literature and all of art, madness has been fascinating. Up until a certain point, maybe 500 years ago, it was seen as a root to the divine or harmless. Then at some point, when you start having authority figures in certain ways, you need to shut down the anti-voices. It started to become something terrifying that you lock away, like it might be infectious and a problem.

Then, more recently, we start to think about how actually we're all a bit effed up. There are reasons behind this. We can do something about this. It's not mad to go and see a therapist, or a psychotherapist, or whatever it might be. That then speaks to, well, you can't have the motivation of a slasher be that he's mad. It doesn't work; it's just not credible.

You need to have a different origin, and you go one of two ways: You either give a lot more context, like he went through this horrific thing as a kid, or you say it's unknown. It's just unknown. It's a man in a mask. What's terrifying is the lack of knowledge, or it's too much information. Each film takes a different route on that.

All right. This book is really good. It's called The Horror Movie Report, and it looks at all those different ways these movies take and the history of this stuff, which I think is one of the most fascinating things. Horror in general is just such a cool genre.

Stephen, I would love to hear you pitch where folks can find you and where things are going. Tell folks a little about the book and where they can get ahold of it.

Thank you. That's high praise indeed, because you're someone whose work I respect a huge amount. That's really cool. You're someone who actually can find the holes in it.

If you go to HorrorMovieReport.com, you can get there. It's all digital at the moment; I'd love to do a coffee-table book of it, but that will take a bit of time. I've put it out in two editions. One is for film fans, and it's much cheaper, like 20 bucks. That'll give you the 400 pages and all the charts and graphs. If you love horror films, that's enough. If you're a filmmaker or a data geek, you'll want the film professional version, which is only a little bit more. That gives you all the data as spreadsheets, as well as some bonus reports.

I've got different constituencies. Some people just want a pretty graph and then argue about aquatic monsters; others are like, give me the data. So here you go! And by all means, reach out to me if you've read something you want more detail on. I love this stuff, and if you love it, too, we're going to get on. Grab a report, and if you want to reach out, I'm not hard to get hold of.

Terrific. Again, your stuff is always so good. People will know it from the newsletter if they've read it long enough. It's great stuff. Thanks again for coming on, I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. I'm always here. And if anyone listening has a question about the film industry, if you think there's some data out there somewhere but can't bother to do it, someone else will do it — contact me. The best stuff I do comes from readers, the 4 o'clock in the morning ideas, the shower thoughts. Reach out, I promise I'll give it a go.

Amazing. Stephen, have a spooktacular day.

Nice.

Edited by Susie Stark.

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