Award-winning adult film star Leana Lovings displays her vast knowledge and deep appreciation of the horror genre in an exclusive interview for Dr. Gore’s Movie Reviews.

Gore, a self-described “serious B-movie fan with a leaning toward the sordid and the sleazy,” launched in 2005 one of genre-film fandom’s most popular — and entertaining — horror & exploitation movie review sites, a place where many indie filmmakers found the very first review of their work and participated in the thriving comments section.

But Gore left a void when he began drifting away from the once-mighty site a decade ago.

“I had let Dr Gore’s Movie Reviews go idle because I was over-thinking what content to write about and lost sight of having fun with it,” the reviewer admitted. “The internet doesn’t need another review of Spider-Man 3 and even if it did, Dr. Gore doesn’t need to do it.  It’s the smaller horror and exploitation movies that need to find an audience. That’s where Dr. Gore can have the most impact, and be meaningful both to the readers and myself.”

Leana Lovings was already an immensely popular webcam performer with over 200,000 followers on Chaturbate before taking the plunge into the World of X in September 2021. Her loving fan base made the journey with her and, in that short interval, the all-natural, 5-foot brunette beauty has reached the top 0.3% on OnlyFans, the 30 Most Popular Porn Stars on Adult Empire, the 15 Top Selling Porn Stars on AEBN, number 1 on FreeOnes, and ascended to the top 20 adult stars on Pornhub, with over 240 million views and 191K subscribers on that platform alone.  She also won a 2023 AVN Award, and was crowned Adult Empire’s 2022 Pornstar of the Year and Best New Adult Star in the Alternative Media Awards.

Gore met Lovings at July’s Vice is Nice animal rescue charity event in Los Angeles, and credits the young beauty with helping revive his passion for sharing the good word about genre cinema.

“As a veteran movie reviewer, it was refreshing to meet Leana, whose genuine love of all things horror inspired me to reinvigorate the blog. I needed a kick-start, and her vast horror knowledge reminded me that there is a whole audience out there seeking thrills in horror and exploitation that I need to reconnect with.”

Published on September 7, “Leana Lovings Loves Horror” has already become the most popular post on the site.

“Leana obviously put a lot of thought into her answers, and I appreciate it,” Gore added. “Clearly, other horror fans do too.”

In her interview, Lovings cites her seminal, passion-shaping encounters with genre films:

“As a child you might not consciously understand why your parents don’t want you to be awake while they watch a horror movie and your curiosity leads you to take a peek at what they’re viewing. I stood in my hallway, peeking over the corner to see Maximum Overdrive (1986); there is nothing more intensely gripping than watching a killer ghost clown possess a semi-truck for their gory murder spree. My second defining movie was when I was old enough to appreciate my mom’s VHS version of Tales From the Crypt.”

Counted among Lovings’ favorites are The Changeling (1980) (“haunted homes are so personal, because it invades the space you’re supposed to feel safe in. I love the complex feeling that kind of horror stirs, because there is truly nowhere to run); Cronenbergian body horror (“Videodrome terrified me and plagued my mind for months after watching”); “gory movies” such as 30 Days of Night (2007), Terrifier 2 (2022), Jeepers Creepers (2001): the suspenseful A Dark Song (2016); and 2013’s The Conjuring.

“A lot of the horror movies in the years preceding [The Conjuring] had felt so modern that they lost the ‘feel’ of what I wanted: a good old classic possession story,” Lovings reveals.  “The Conjuring reveled in the 1970’s aesthetic, and the presence of Ed and Lorraine Warren blurred what felt ‘real’ or fake. You wanted to think some of it actually happened.”

Confronted with producer Sean S. Cunningham’s famous assessment that the enduring appeal of horror lies in the fear of “premature death,” Leana counters, “I think that there is another appeal to horror movies. My favorite appeal is the perseverance at the end through inhuman, almost impossible odds. The enduring appeal is being able to go in movie after movie and see the ending fates. For me, premature death is an aspect, but the people that survive will linger.  My mind always sticks on what their life will be like after living through a horror movie. How long until they no longer sleep with the lights on?”