Welcome, all Chucky fans and blood-thirsty Cenobites. Please enter this way, office cubicle goth chick, and mom’s basement pizza delivery guy. Come one, come all to the thronging masses of warm sweaty flesh, children terrifyingly obsessed with Jason, and Instagramers hoping for their 1000th follower posing as Deadpool Pancho Mexican Man or a Skeleton T-Rex with tiny arms. This is Texas Frightmare Weekend for all lovers of horror, cosplayers, torture porn addicts, and lusters of fame who crave the “easy” open door through Hell, blood, guts, and gore.
This year, the convention was hosted in the lower level of the Hyatt Regency Hotel at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Seven dollar beers and four dollar pretzels, vendors of posters and morbid-bilia such as carnivorous plants, brain-shaped cookie jars, and snakes in formaldehyde jars. T-shirts, tattoo, and wound artists, lines for the writers, directors, and actors, including even the original Jason, feeble and tottering, whose name and costume design is virtually unrecognizable to anyone except the most ardent followers. Hawkers and gawkers draw one another with an irresistible force, both willing to play their parts in this pleasure freak show fantasy.
What is the love of horror all about?
Sure, there are always unique demographics who will show up for the strange, the morbid, the unusual, the niche curiosities. We could just as easily be at a convention for PhD-level, BMW-owning, pretentious psychologists and make similar observations about the human instinct to rubberneck the peculiar and bizarre. So, when the horror crowd cheers for coagulated blood sludging thickly down a greasy drain, is it really any different than Harvard doctors thrilling one another with whispered tales of terror while casually swirling their expensive glass of blood-red wine, the legs slow and thick and mesmerizing? There is a raw humanity in it if we are willing to peel back the flesh and look honestly at our deepest fears; few do this better than the fans of the darker terrors.
Like anything, there are layers of truth to exposing the underbelly of the human dread of death and also the lurid fascination of it.
Fame and Acclaim
Perhaps just as dark, is our willingness to sacrifice anything sacred for a shot at fame. A Q&A panel around the topic of making horror films was headed by the ostentatious bearded Texan, Billy Pon, where he entertained wannabe horror writers and filmmakers with his vulgar bits of wisdom. He was a great choice for the Dallas crowd as he is a sum’bitch who can speak their language and fully embody the character of someone who “don’ give a good goddamn.” He made the genre of horror feel easy, a cracked door in the back alley to the seedy halls of fame, but fame nonetheless. He cautioned questioners to go over their presumed contracts with a fine-toothed comb and a sharper-toothed lawyer. He bared his own attachment to his work, commiserating with his fellow panelist about how hard it was to cut a film back from over two hours in length to under two hours just to make audiences happier. And he admitted that having a great execution is better for overall success than the cleverness of a great story. Pon pontificated that you can only do this genre for the love of it, but I suspect there is a deeper love for the fantasy that somehow we can all shoot a low-budget film in as few as 18 days, using only rehearsal takes with terrible acting and have it turn into the same success as the Saw films. We all want to take the easy shot. And death and suffering is a guaranteed earworm, talent or no.
Money and Marketing
Katie Featherston from the Paranormal Activity films had almost no one in line at her table and yet, when we ambled up to chat with her, she seemed interested in little more than having us return when her credit card assistant would be available. She did, however, indulge us with a few answers to our questions.
She called the collaboration process of the paranormal films “a pure joy” despite their intent to create a product that would fill the viewers with a sense of foreboding and alarm. Interestingly, she alluded to the nature of the human psyche in crediting the film score and the editing as being what truly elicits fear. Even so, she did admit to her own fear weaknesses in that she never watches the movies herself.
Reality and Relevance
We stood in line to meet the affable Matthew Lillard. Older, with a graying goatee and a baseball cap, he hugged a lot, smiled more, and never made kids wait in line to see him. Scream was the first horror film I ever saw in the theater and his character was particularly memorable to me as he embodies a quirkiness that always keeps you wondering if it’s endearingly loveable or darkly deranged. As a businessman, he understands that he supports his family with these decades-old versions of himself and so he shows up to horror conventions across the country to sign posters and smile and be the tangible experience for lines of long-time fans and selfie strategists.
We paid the forty bones for a selfie with Lillard and I used the opportunity to push the acceptable protocol by popping in one question:
“Out of all of your character roles as the quirky oddball, which one was your favorite?”
Immediate answer: “SLC Punk.”
A slight pause where I realized my question was probably a tired one. And then he threw me a little clue to his underbelly: “That role had the most lines.”
He knows that most of these fans are in his line because of “Scream,” but below that is the desire to be seen as more than the oddball, to be valued as a true actor, someone who is more than just the funny sidekick. He’s not a skinny kid with silly faces and crazy hair anymore. And maybe, just maybe the fans will also appreciate him for some of his other roles, like Brian Speer in “Descendants” where his character development involved more than his trademark vocal exaggerations and facial elasticity.
But this is a horror film convention
These are people who revel in the terror and idolize death. Maybe it’s a way of coping with their instinct of fear or maybe they are able to act out pieces of their secret and twisted fantasies in a manner that society allows. Then again, maybe they just inexplicably love the rush of adrenalin and the thrill of disbelief. One man was overheard raving about Ron Perlman, almost in tears of ecstasy after finally meeting his idol. Another fan, a Chucky enthusiast, spent several years creating an animatronic puppet costume that he himself wears while walking around on his knees to appear as a three-feet-tall version of the infamous doll. In the end, it may be that we would rather be grotesquely entertained by numerous improbabilities of death than intimidated by its single inevitability. There is no moral absolutism to relishing or despising the horror film genre any more than there is for the genres of action or romance or comedy. Each storytelling method is simply a reflection of our capacity to balance life and death and our struggles to make sense of the known and unknown in between. Horror films are a great way to die of fright yet live to tell about it.
