HorrorCon has just shut its doors on its second successful year. It took place on the 9th and 10th July at the Magna Science Centre in Rotherham. The building is fantastic, it used to be a steel mill and bears a lot of features from those days, and so has a very eerie, industrial feel to it. It apparently was also built on the site of a Roman Fort and thus rumoured to be haunted, so a brilliant place for a Horror Convention! Last years HorrorCon was kind of a tester to see how popular it would be and if they would be able to do it annually. I can’t remember how I came to hear about last years but I do remember the guests that drew me there. There was Ken Foree, Bill Moseley, Tom Savini and was one of the last UK appearances of the late Gunnar Hansen. I had an amazing time there and really hoped that it would return the next year and it appears I was not the only one! The organisers, sisters Wendy and Gill Bell, local to the Sheffield/ Rotherham area, themselves huge Horror fans wanted to develop and organise a Horror Convention on a similar scale to the larger Comic conventions to appeal to all horror fans, and after the response to last year brought it back for an even bigger and better event this year.
The venue is set out into lots of individual areas. There is The Big Hall which holds a vast traders market, bar, guest signing tables and has the Q&A area. A separate room for photo ops, a room for Body Art live demonstrations, a fantastic area set aside which shows the bare steel bones of the building, which last year was the venue for the scare experience known as THE PIT (which was really fecking scary I might add) and this year called THE ZOMBIE ROOM where you could have your picture taken with a caged zombie (very Land Of The Dead esque…. love it!!) , attend Zombie Survival School which involved target practise with knife throwing, crossbows and rifles or maybe have a bit of a mosh to the crazy covers of their resident band Iron Sphincter, zombified to the nines and feasting on brains!!. There is The Phoenix Room theatre that screened various independent short movies with a chance to quiz the directors after and a small room next to the photo ops that housed the amazing artefacts, antiquity’s and oddities of Mr. Punch’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The first room you come to is called The Red Hall which is where you find the SPFX make up artists, demonstrations and props, a small scale market bizarre and this year there was a bunch of weird and wonderful creatures (Pythons, Tarantulas and lizards) you could pet and have your picture with. So I think you will agree there is an awful lot to see and do. As well as the guests last year they mixed it up a bit by introducing lecturers, we had Dacre Stoker (the great grand nephew of Bram Stoker) come to talk about the mythology surrounding vampires and werewolves. We also had hilarious lessons on how to survive a Zombie Apocalypse from the guys at The Zombie Institute for Theoretical Studies. This year we were treated to lectures from Jason B Love a world renowned Demonologist recounting tales of true demonic infestations and Magician Ashton Carter who has a passion for the paranormal and story telling.
Anyway, I’m sure you want to hear about the guests that attended this year, well we were certainly in for a treat; in fact I spent the majority of my day in the Q&A sessions. First up was Ian McCulloch who played Greg Preston in 70’s TV series “Survivors” and went on to play Peter West in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), then again as Dr. Chandler in Marino Girolami’s Zombie Holocaust (1980) changing briefly from zombies to aliens in Contamination (1980). A very chatty man and talked a lot about the “video nasty” era and how he ended up playing the characters he did plus how he is still amazed and humbled at the popularity of these movies, not being a horror fan himself. Next up we had David Naughton who played David Kessler in An American Werewolf In London (1981). He gave us great insight into the SPFX and the length of time it took to create his transformation. Plus his career beforehand working in theatre productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and dancing in Dr. Pepper adverts! After Mr. Naughton the room started to fill up even more in anticipation of the next guest, Kane Hodder. Despite his intimidating size he is of course a lovely guy and over the moon to be at HorrorCon. He talked about his career as a stuntman which subsequently led him to take on the role of Jason Voorhees from part 7 onwards of the Friday 13th movies, Victor Crowley from the Hatchet franchise and many others. He was asked at one point, if there was any iconic character he hasn’t played that he wished he had, who would it be? Pretty much as soon as he said the name Michael Myers then he appeared (cosplay of course) and spent the rest of the Q&A lurking in the corner waiting for Kane.
After that the next guest was the fantastic Doug Bradley, very well known as the lead Cenobite, Pinhead, of the Hellraiser movies and has since acted in many other horror films and had parts in TV series such as Judge John Deed and Doctors. He has also lent his voice to spoken word tracks and introductions to tracks on Cradle Of Filth albums. A very open and talkative gentleman he went into a fair bit of detail about how and why he won’t be in the newest Hellraiser offering and despite his dislike of any type of Heavy Metal he is delighted to help out on Cradle tracks and is incredibly envious of Dani Filths voice. The room emptied a bit for the final guest, but Linnea Quigley was a delight and spoke about her roles as Dolores in slasher Graduation Day (1981) and Denise in Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) before landing the role of Trash in Return Of The Living Dead (1985). She described how she literally froze her tits off filming her nude scenes in the pouring rain and the stick she got from the extras on her apparent exhibitionism which was completely uncalled for. She went onto how she came to collaborate with Hal Kennedy on the hilarious Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990). Still very passionate and enthusiastic about modern horror today, she approves of the CGI approach especially the blood but only from the actor’s point of view of it being a lot less messy! As well as the guests, the comperes of the sessions were also well known in their fields. We had Gary Baxter (Actor, Director, Writer and Composer), Tony Earnshaw (Author, Broadcaster and Film Festival Director) and Darrell Buxton (Film Critic, Writer and Editor) who were there to get the ball rolling to ask some in depths questions and field ours. This is the first time at a convention that I have sat in on every single Q&A as I was really interested in what they all had to say. Unfortunately, due to this fact I missed out on watching any of the short films playing in the Phoenix Room theatre apart from Metamorphosis. A four minute gem about a genetic experiment gone wrong, written and directed by Robert Nevitt and features Nicholas Vince (the Chattering Cenobite from Hellraiser) and Tony Earnshaw also plays a few of the characters. The other shorts were Vampire flick Seize The Night, written, directed and starring Emma Dark. Dead Town: Episode 1 Road To Nowhere, a zombie comedy originally designed as a web series by Peter McKeirnon and Psychological horror short The Railway Carriage by Dean Sills. As well as all the guests mentioned already also in attendance was Fenella Fielding, best known for her performance in Carry On Screaming, and Scream Queen, model and Horror channel presenter Emily Booth who were there signing autographs and posing for photos. Horror authors Matt Shaw and Shaun Hutson were also in attendance in The Big Hall ready and willing to answer questions, sign books and sell their wares. Graham Masterton was scheduled to appear but unfortunately could not due to health problems.
Of course no Horror Convention would be complete without a Cosplay competition! Known as Scareplay it was sponsored by the Smart-FX team with many awesome prizes. It seemed to me to be a very hard decision for the judges as the costumes were outstanding and ranged from popular Horror icons such as Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers etc to people who had really used their imagination and created their own monstrous characters. There did seem to be an abundance of scary clowns this year though with at least two really well done Twisty’s from AHS Freakshow who I adore!!
I can hold off no more about the traders markets my friends, no word of a lie the shops are to die for!! I was like a woman possessed buzzing from stall to stall spending my hard earned cash on so many beautiful things!! There were stalls selling Horror movie t-shirts, prints, paintings and posters. Stalls selling weapons (if you’re into that kind of thing), masks, intricately drawn independent comics, horror themed cup cakes and fudge even cute, cuddly, zombiefied, crocheted animals!! There were of course an abundance of DVDs and Blu Rays of everything from Action, Comedy and Monsters to Splatter, Supernatural and many, many Zombie movies!! What I didn’t see a great deal of though were soundtracks either on vinyl or CD but maybe, by this time, I was blinded by everything else going on and just overlooked them, they certainly weren’t obvious any way. There were stall for businesses to promote themselves such as local film festivals. The main sponsor of HorrorCon 2016 was Horror/Dark photography company Horrify Me, who had their stall in prime location by the autograph booths and were there to chat to and showcase their incredibly vast, dynamic and beautiful collection of Zombie, Vampire, Autopsy and Dark Boudoir photo shoots available to us, if we dare!
The greatest thing about the shopping was the prices which I thought were exceptional, even the official merchandise was incredibly reasonable. T- Shirts were all about £12 and DVDs starting from around a fiver. Of course, if you wanted to you could spend hundreds on some of the paintings, masks and collectables. The restaurant and bar were also well priced as far as I could tell but because of everything I wanted to see and do I plain forgot to eat or drink anything; clearly breathing in the atmosphere and all the shopping was enough to sustain me!! Ticket prices for the event were very competitive compared to other conventions based down south. I got Priority Entry tickets which cost £24.90 each including booking fee, this was just for a day ticket though I think for a weekend ticket you were looking at about £40 each which is an amazing price!! I do however have a small complaint, the doors opened for priority ticket holders at 10am and we got there about 9.45 expecting to queue for a bit, it was pissing down with rain (which cant be helped I realise) but we were still stood in the rain at 10 with no hint of being let in. Eventually the doors opened and they started sorting out wristbands but we still didn’t get into the building till after 10.30, which was a little disappointing but I soon got over it!
This convention has pretty much nailed it all in a short space of time and I can see myself returning year after year, it’s a great location, amazing prices and has something for every kind of horror genre fan. On the Saturday night they even had an after show movie night at the local cinema just down the road in Sheffield where they were showing Return Of The Living Dead for a really good price if you showed your HorrorCon wristband which is a tremendous idea especially if you have a weekend pass! I remember leaving last years con feeling exhausted but happy I’d seen everything. This year I also had an amazing time but I feel like there was a fair bit I didn’t get to see enough of so its pretty glaringly obvious that for next years event I will be getting weekend tickets!!
Article written by Sarah Budd
Photos courtesy of Sarah Budd