All right, I'm comfortable enough with my slightly re-edited intro now to begin doing this.  Updates will be irregular as I'm not sure how many parts this is gonna be or how much proofreading some of these sections will need.  All will be put into the same category though on my blog, so you should be able to find them there.  Now then:

For this first part of this, I just wanted to give a touch of background in what lead to this project.  The program I was a part of in college forced us to do academic research papers in both my Freshman and Sophomore years.  I remember doing one on Donatello and his works, I remember doing one on the evolution of Freedom, Equality, Slavery, etc. in Enlightenment literature, and I BARELY remember writing a paper about Martin Luther King, Jr. and how his preachings were based in Judeo-Christian philosophy that he had read and in his upbringing.  (Riveting, no?)  So time rolls on, and in Junior year they let us go into Seminar classes on more localized subjects.  I took one on Southeast Asian Culture and Anthropology which was very interesting and a class on human sexuality. 

That was where the seed of this was planted:  The Human Sexuality and Gender class.  At the end of it, we were to write an essay relating to the subjects we'd discussed in class.  There was no set rule of what we had to do, it just had to relate to the class and show that we could apply what we'd learn to something important to us outside the class.  By that time, I was becoming more and more horror-loving, so I thought about androgyny.  I thought about why certain characters in horror are gay, or why some male characters have feminine qualities, or why a director might use transsexualism as a plot device.  So I banged out a relatively quick 7-pager hitting Silence of the Lambs, Stephen King's IT, Sleepaway Camp, and the "Spoiled" and "A Fatal Caper" eps of Tales from the Crypt.

I actually enjoyed writing that paper so much that when the time came for our senior thesis, it was still on my mind.  We were told that we had our choice of what to do.  I still went in thinking that I had to do something classically academic.  Until someone stood up and said they were doing it on the process of opening an art exhibition.  Someone else had done it on the process of opening an AIDS musem in NYC.  And I thought....if they can do that, then I should be able to....and thus this was born.

But not anything like this.  The original outline was an unfocused mess.  At that point, the thesis was about just how sex was used, it didn't prove a point or anything.  It was going to cover how adult film stars cross over into mainstream film usually through horror, androgyny and homosexuality(expansion of the first paper), sex as an amplifier of unsettling scenes, sex and religion, sex as a marker of the victim, sex as it relates to famous movie villains and their characteristics, and sex as a trap.  The number of movies used wouldve been astronomical and I'dve prolly had to deliver it with a crane.  My main professor in this class though pointed out the unfocused aspect and told me to look back over the books I was using for support.  Which was when I started to see that people kept using phrases as "Shift" and "inaugurated" the modern era in discussing Psycho.  And by that time, I'd seen Psycho and I could tell it was good, but I knew other movies came after that changed the genre as well.  And thus I pushed for a fluid timeline of modern horror rather than the Psycho dividing line theory (as I started calling it) and everything else fell into place.  It led to the chronological structure, the idea to use fewer films, etc.

I'm very proud of it and soon, I'll begin serializing it in earnest, but for now I just wanted to let everyone know what led up to the paper in my life.

And yes, that is the title page I used.  I had the idea to use a picture of each main female protagonist pre-2000 I focused on in it.  Jeryline was pretty hard to find a good photo of.