Deathrock.com began in 1998 as "The Deathrock Graveyard", a lone site on the internet focusing on all things creepy culture, from music to art and movies and links on the internet. Having come from a fanzine background, building an online publication came as a natural step forward into a new media.

That presence, along with chatrooms, message boards (all before social media) helped gather like minded people as avid about the music scene as I was, record labels like Reanimator Records, promoters like Release the Bats and Pagan Love Songs, even bands like Cinema Strange were all finally gathering into an international online phenomena.

The next iteration of deathrock.com was launched as a webzine with more focused content of music reviews, band interviews, feature articles, link directories, and a message board. Even a streaming radio station, Radio Ghoul School. Each new launch would feature a new band on the "cover", with integrated artwork into the site's structure. These were Bloody Dead & Sexy, The Vanishing, Joy Disaster over the span of about 10 years.

One of the other main features of deathrock.com was its band profiles. Dozens of bands, like Ausgang, TSOL, The Mob, Kommunity FK, UK Decay, 45 Grave etc saw their first web presences (outside of eBay auctions for obscure goth records) here. Many of them even used those profiles as official homes on the internet. Rare clippings, flyers, and biographies composed by yours truly, Mark Splatter were all made available to those who had the appetite to look.

The connections and relationships I made as a result of that growing community saw me change locations from New York to California, then to Germany and back to New York. After 2010, the nature of the internet had evolved with the advent of social media, css and WordPress. The later were skills that I didn't manage to develop, and when the service provider for the site disappeared overnight, so did deathrock.com. Things went silent here throughout the 2010s as I tried several times to relearn the new skills, sitting on this dark domain with an urge to rejoin the web community, but life was always getting in the way.

What is deathrock? Don't ask me that. I might try to start with: "Deathrock is music", and even that isn't completely accurate. It could just as easily be a graveyard scene in a horror movie or a captivating stain on the sidewalk. Those that try to define a thing with rigid terms do more to disparage and divide a thing: Gatekeepers. This isn't science, this is art - don't try and put it into a box.