I got addicted to Lifetime movies during an uneventful visit to my mom a few years ago. It was the first time in ages I'd gone to see her on an ordinary week rather than for Christmas or Thanksgiving. It turned out that when she wasn't busy with holiday activities, and the tv schedules were running normally, she more or less organized her days around Lifetime movie time, one at 6 pm and another at 8 pm. I watched them all with her, and ended up not stopping just because I went home.
Sadly for my mom, Lifetime now only shows a movie every night at 8 pm Central, the 6-8 time slot is just sit coms, so she's had her supply cut back. But I have a digitial cable package that includes the 24-hour Lifetime Movie Network and TiVo, so basically I'm unstoppable.
Lifetime movies are clearly pretty fascinating to many women just on their own, but I was amazed at how much of the content seemed to be borrowed from several genres that already interested me, like gothic literature, horror movies, and true crime drama, or at least the subsets of those genres that are organized around more "feminine" concerns. A lot of the story elements in Lifetime movies have been the stuff of compelling fiction aimed at women for hundreds of years; others reflect more recent anxieties.
The purpose of the blog is, first and foremost, to compile a review database of Lifetime movies (not least in order to keep track of what I've already seen; it's amazing how hard it is to remember whether you've already seen a particular movie out of a collection of hundreds that all have titles that are various combinations of words like "terror" and "deception" and "family" and "secrets" and whatnot), and secondarily to keep some sort of track of how the thematic elements in Lifetime movies relate to themes from other genres.* I'd also like to post some reviews of my favorite gothic novels and true crime movies. I hope to use the blog as motivation to make time to expand my reading in gothic and classic horror also, something I've been meaning to do for a while.
*Not as pretentious as it sounds! Not with themes like "stranger danger" and "kill my husband," anyway.
