FANGORIA CONVENTION – DAY 2

11:00 HOME

I wake up late.  It’s my birthday today, so, at midnight, I popped open a bottle of champagne, realizing too late that it doesn’t keep, and the cork doesn’t fit back in.  Needless to say, I tried to drink as much as I can before I passed out.

This means that I miss the panel for The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond, which I wanted to see, if only because the poster is the bitchingest thing I’ve seen so far at the Con.

12:30 CONVENTION

I arrive to a packed house.  All the people who had to work on Friday can make time today for gore, swag, and previews of movies that look really, really bad.

Since I’ve already worked my way through most of the booths, today’s going to be a panel day.  Buckle your seat belt.

1:10 ROB TAPERT PANEL

What do you say about Robert Tapert?  On the one hand, he’s an unabashed fan of the genre.  On the other hand, he seems eager to dilute it any way he can.

Here’s an example.  One of his first announcements is that the following films are on the way: The Grudge 3, Boogeyman 3, and The Messengers 2.  And right when you’re ready to strangle the guy as you shout, “You’re killing our genre, damn it!”…he cops to his deep appreciation for Takashi Shimizu and Hideo Nakata, and his desire to get them back into Ghost House.

Speaking of the distribution arm, Tapert and Company plans to add a new limb to the branch, entitled Ghost House Underground, which might be so offbeat that it flips right back into normalcy.  Among GHU’s latest acquisitions is an indie feature called Room 205.

Let’s face it, though.  We horror fans are a predictable bunch.  When Rob Tapert’s on stage, we want to know about Evil Dead.  That remake was coming up a few years ago, but new projects like Evil Dead 3D (exactly what it sounds like) and Evil Dead: the Musical have the property covered for the time being.

Given the segue into the inherent goofiness of his camp classic, I take the opportunity to venture a question: how much of the Three Stooges quality in Raimi and Tapert productions is you?  “Most of that came from Sam and Bruce’s early movies.”  He goes on to discuss Raimi and Campbell’s Super-16 history, which acolytes should be familiar with.

But it’s time to stop living in the past.  Tapert also wet the audience’s collective whistle with a few comments on Drag Me to Hell.  Apparently, Raimi’s involvement was pretty quickly decided.  As Tapert describes it, “We approached Sam about it and, after a second or two, Sam went, ‘Why not?’”  The dark morality tale – seemingly a Faustian descent into madness – has Tapert excited, because he finally got Sam back into horror.

And now I’m back to loving him again.

1:45 PIG HUNT PREVIEW

Jim Isaac, the director of Pig Hunt, introduces footage from his new feature, which sounds awfully dirty if you don’t sound it out properly, and awfully stupid if you do.  But the footage showcases a bit of fun, as people are (once again) stranded in the middle of nowhere, (once again) stalked by a bizarre creature.

In this case, it’s a really big pig.  A three-thousand-pound pig.

O-kay.

The massive genre cast of Brutal.

2:30 BRUTAL MASSACRE

The trailer doesn’t look funny at all, but, thank God, the clips shown for this horror mockumentary are genuinely funny.  And what a roster!  After the footage plays, the following people walk out on stage: Ken Foree, Gunnar Hansen, David Naughton, Brian O’Halloran, Mick Garris, and the three Ladies of the Evil Dead.  I’m concerned that the stage can’t hold the weight of all that awesome.

Once they sit down, a fight breaks out between Ken Foree and Gunnar Hansen over their star power, and it’s up to Brian O’Halloran to separate the two, which requires two pratfalls.  It’s an inspired moment of silliness that preludes the warm reflections of the cast on the film, which follows a horror director (Naughton) in his effort to create a successful film following previous turkeys like Sasquatch in the Mall.

Mick Garris looks a little out of place, but he’s a good sport.  His involvement is limited to a cameo in the film as a horror director, and he admits that he didn’t think he was the first choice.  Stevan Mena objects: “Hey, only a few other directors turned it down.”

Ellen Sandweiss opines on her involvement with the picture, and an unexpected exchange between her and O’Halloran culminates with them riffing on her infamous arboreal encounter from The Evil Dead.

O’Halloran: “I heard you’d been on the lookout for some wood since then.”

Sandweiss: “Well, I don’t want to go out on a limb…”

O’Halloran: “You ever find a good piece of ash?”

Sandweiss: “The good news is that I don’t have Dutch Elm disease.”

Diminishing returns from the audience force them to stop, but I wanted more.  I find this much more fascinating than memories of the weather during the shoot. 

 3:00 “FEAR ITSELF” WRITER’S PANEL

Victor Salva, Jonathan Schaech, Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan, and Dan Knauf head up the panel on NBC’s upcoming Fear Itself, which looks pretty hardcore for a network show – the preview includes impromptu nose surgery.  The censorship by NBC wasn’t a cramp on their style.

McWeeny says, “It forced us to think more creatively.”  Victor Salva concurs, likening their anthology to Alfred Hitchcock Presents from the sixties.  The difference being that the latter show didn’t feature cannibalism as a recurrent theme.  I later spoke to McWeeny about Mick Garris jumping ship on the program a month ago.

“It wasn’t his thing, that’s all.  His thing was Masters of Horror, and they’d changed it.”  Hmm, implying that everything was relatively amicable.  I find this answer utterly unacceptable in its lack of drama and artist/moneymen brouhaha.

Overall, the panel mostly peddles the wares of the upcoming series, but a few comments allude to future works.  Dan Knauf, creator of Carnivale, takes a moment to dish on an upcoming project called Exodus, a miniseries about people attempting to escape Earth in the face of global apocalypse.  And Victor Salva apparently wants two more sequels to Jeepers Creepers, since his latest script is too enormous for one.  Was there so much left untouched in the Creeper saga?

From left: Dan Knauf, Jonathan Schaech, Victor Salva, Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan

4:00 CLIVER BARKER

The man, the myth, the throat.  Aficionados, fear not.  Barker’s voice is a bit clearer.  “I had benign growths in my throat,” he announces, following up by saying that more than just his throat is restored.  “Now, when I wake up, it’s Mount Fuji down there.”  The audience roars with laughter.  I join in, but I have to admit: the guy still sounds like an asthmatic toad.

Nevertheless, Barker’s cinematic legacy is finally kicking into high gear, although he recently tussled with the studio over The Midnight Meat Train, and not just because of the faux-gay-porn title.  “They wanted it to open against Indiana Jones,” he laments.  “The studios love horror films, but they’re ashamed of them.  Back in the thirties, James Whale had the same problem.”

That’s high company to place yourself in, but Barker has some merit in doing so, mostly because his films are so undeniably the works of Clive Barker.  There’s an artist’s spirit in him that goes beyond his fabulous paintings and fascinating imagery.  His aesthetic knack validates his high praise for Ryuhei Kitamura, whose first American film “has a nice flavor to it.”  Following Midnight, the next two films up are Book of Blood and Dread.

As for literature, Barker’s focusing right now on The Scarlet Gospels, which must be ten thousand pages long by now, and Abarat, his young adult series that’s actually pretty damn good.  But don’t think he’s going soft in his old age.  He has at least one more “humongous novel” planned “that mingles horror, fantasy, and sex.”  And what does he think about those new PG-13 horrors that are so popular with the kids these days?

“Well, PG-13 and horror is a contradiction in terms,” he rasps.  The audience roars.

NOTE: I fell ill and was unable to attend the third day of Fangoria.  I briefly considered writing an utterly false piece about me fighting monsters with Joe Dante and Robert Picardo, but honesty is the best policy.