The Boris Karloff Blogathon : Wrap Up

I’m still pulling myself together after hosting the Blogathon last week. It was a great and thoroughly overwhelming experience. When you’re in it, you’re sort of running on adrenaline, just getting all the links posted and trying not to mess up, and when you’re done, you’re happy and you’re fried.

I tried writing a wrap-up post this week, my own thoughts about Boris Karloff, but it wasn’t happening. I realized that so many others had said it so much better than I ever could. Go click some links, see for yourself. There’s tons of info posted, new ways of looking at Karloff’s pictures, fresh perspectives on an incredible career, and sincere, touching tributes.

Here are a few stats, for the record…

There were 105 participating blogs, many of them making multiple posts, a few contributing on a daily basis. We had bloggers participating from France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan, Spain, Canada and the USA.

In total, I posted 292 links. I’m still finding the odd blog who either contributed without telling me, or promoted the Blogathon with a few lines of original text and a photo, so there are actually a few more Karloff-related posts out there. It’s impossible to actually tabulate everything, but with over 100 bloggers and certainly more than 300 individual posts, I think we can pronounce the Boris Karloff Blogathon a success!

Reader-wise, this blog recorded well over 8,000 hits between November 23 and 29. My hits are sky high this week as visitors are still discovering the Blogathon or returning to catch up with everything. There’s so much to read!

As to content, we had posts about Karloff in movies, radio, TV, recording and advertising work. A number of bloggers posted original art inspired by Boris. Sorting it out, I find that a lot of fans, it turns out, were first introduced to Boris through the Gold Key comic books*. We had the most posts of any category about those, 9 in all.

The films that got the most coverage were The Mummy (1932), and Targets (1968), with 7 posts apiece, and the Val Lewton trio from 1945-46 combined for 13 posts: 5 posts for The Body Snatcher and 4 each for Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam. The Mr. Wong series also got a lot of attention, mostly due to the films being freely available on the net. In all, fifty-eight films were reviewed.

I knew going in that Boris Karloff was a beloved actor. Through the Blogathon, I learned that the admiration ran deep. Karloff was an intensely charismatic actor who earned himself lifelong fans. Digging through the Blogathon posts, I found an actor with the chops to impress the toughest critics. I read about an artist who was versatile and enormously talented in all his endeavors. I saw how he charmed us with humor, generosity and genuine humility. I’m glad we paid homage to this extraordinary man.

The only thing left for me to say is Thank You to all the participating bloggers and Thank You to everyone who visited here, who clicked around, read about Boris Karloff and discovered great blogs. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I’ll keep a link to the Blogathon archives on my sidebar. Click the Boris image and see all the posts that were made.

Illustration above: A Karloff caricature by Hirschfeld.

* Dark Horse Comics have collected the entire Boris Karloff Thriller/Tales of Mystery comics, available through (plug!) the Frankenstore: Volume One, Volume Two.