Those of us here in the states celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, and I spent the day with my wife and sister-in-law, taking it fairly easy. As vegetarians, we still eat all the fixin's you'd expect to find on the Thanksgiving dinner table, and even one day later, I still feel like I ate too much of my wife's incredible garlic mashed potatoes! I had a brief, fleeting moment in which I considered heading out the morning of Black Friday, but ultimately, I decided that anything I'd want to find on sale in a brick-and-mortar store I would be able to find online as well. Say what you want about how this may impact our economy, but I find myself shopping online more and more these days, and as a horror fan, I think the internet is perhaps one of my greatest tools in connecting with other horror fans, finding horror movies I'm not going to find anywhere else, or just keeping apprised of what's happening in the genre I love so much.

I'm thankful for the internet.

I look back on my own past as a horror fan, and when I was growing up, there was no internet. Even in high school, I had to rely on microfiche machines to read old articles in magazines and in newspapers if I wanted to read something horror-related that I couldn't find in the local libraries. I remember repeatedly sliding the old microfiche film into the reader in my high school library to read some forgotten critic's review of Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead remake. (The critic didn't like it. I didn't care.)

When I started college, I gained access to the 'net, and stumbled across several horror websites that I would check every day I was in the library's computer lounge. (One of those websites was Dr. Casey's Cabinet of Horror, which I was happy to discover a few months ago was back online.) I found email lists (like the Horror in Literature and Film list, of which I've been a member since the early 90s), and over the years would eventually find message boards, blogs, online communities, podcasts and even websites set up to stream horror movies on demand.

The kid that grew up dreaming about monsters as his family moved around the country thanks to his dad's Air Force orders finally found a home online.

I have flesh-and-blood friends with which I interact in person, and I wouldn't trade them for the world. The internet, however, has put me in contact with friends around the world, and when my local internet provider has a glitch (like the morning of Black Friday!), I wouldn't say I feak out, per se, but I do get a bit nervous and start wondering about how I'm going to get connected and what I'm going to miss while Comcast fixes whatever the problem is.

My Google Reader is thick with feeds leading back to various horror blogs and news sites, and obviously, podcasting wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the internet. Through the internet, I can find information about horror movies that are either in production or are even available for sale in places around the world that aren't available at my local Best Buy. The movie The Zombie Diaries was released in the UK years before Romero's Diary of the Dead hit a few movie screens and sales racks last year, and if it wasn't for the might and power of the internet, I might not have even SEEN this movie, let alone come to love it as much as I do. By the time it was released in the US, I might have dismissed it as a knock-off of Romero's film, even though it was available in Europe before Romero even started his movie.

I've purchased more horror movie memorabilia from sites like eBay and HorrorBid.com, as well as more traditional, yet still genre-specific, websites. I've sent money to The House of Mysterious Secrets more than once! And now that Diamond Comic Distirbutors has tightened up their policies regarding what they'll carry in their monthly Previews catalog, while you can still find magazines like Fangoria on the store shelves, to find magazines like Scary Monsters or Monsters from the Vault, you may just have to hop online and order the magazines from the publishers' websites. You might pay a LITTLE more than you would have if you purchased the magazine from a traditional bookstore or newsstand (especially considering shipping costs), but I'm okay with throwing a little extra money at the producers of this media.

I mean, they're horror fans just like me, right? And they're horror fans I wouldn't have met if it were not for the internet.

So this past Thanksgiving (or this past Thursday, depending from which part of the world you're reading this), I'm thankful for the internet. While I'm positive I'd still be a horror fan if not for the magical pipes and tubes that take me to the darkened corners of cyberface on a regular basis, I know I'm a richer horror fan thanks to internet, which is, I'm sure, what the creators of the 'net had in mind.

Papercut is copyright Derek M. Koch, 2009. The opinions expressed by Derek in Papercut are solely his own; he can be emailed at derek@paperbackreader.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Derek M. Koch is the producer of Mail Order Zombie, a weekly podcast devoted to zombie and horror movies which can be found at http://www.mailorderzombie.com.