Now typically you see me go to comic con style or anime style conventions and this was the first time I went to a Horror themed event.  Honestly, while I do enjoy some Horror films, this event was mainly for my fiance.  She had a marvelous time and I found the event to be really enjoyable, but it was not without its flaws.

Guests:

I was very impressed with the guest list.  It had several members of the cast of Scream, Saw you also had musicians, director and people in all roles of your famous scary movies.  My fiance was going gaga with the variety of people to choose from, it kind of made me wonder if that was what I look like at anime cons with a variety of guests I’m excited to see.  Overall the guest list was massive and full of tons of amazing people.

Panels:

Panels were a lot of fun.  You got to see interviews with people being the music of scary movies, indie developers, enthusiasts and cast and crew.  I do have a few hiccups in this area though.  First is the fact that the rooms are not cleared prior to the next panels.  Now for most panels it wasn’t hard to get a seat so this wasn’t a huge problem; however, for the really popular panels this makes it difficult for people to attend them.  The next problem is the VIP excluded rows.  I’ve seen the first couple of rows reserved for VIPs but I’ve never seen the first SEVEN rows.  I honestly thought I heard wrong when I heard this the first time but no, SEVEN rows reserved for VIP and the panel room really wasn’t very big so that took up a significant portion of the seats.  Now if the seats were not taken right before the panel then people could move up but it just felt really excessive to reserve so much space for them.  That’s just me though. Honestly, unless I want really good pictures, I’m not picky about my seat.

Then for my final concern was in regards to one panel, the indie developer panel.  In this case, it really felt like the moderator was trying to strong-arm the panel.  She would introduce talking points and really good talking points, but if the panelists stopped talking about that topic you would see the moderator whisper something in one of the panelist’s ears and all of sudden that person has a remark regarding the moderator’s topic.  Furthermore, during the Q and A part of the panel she was sometimes providing more answers than the actual people on the panel.  If a panel has heavy involvement from a moderator then it is usually made clear in the schedule; additionally, this moderator was not an indie developer so once it appeared she was strong-arming the panel I lost all interest because it was not focused on the people I was there to see.  All of these problems are very minor and only made me fail to enjoy one panel, but perhaps they should be addressed for future years.

Vendors:

Now I’m not really sure if this convention had an artist alley as everything was all together, plus this event had a lot of prop sellers.  I’m not really sure if props fall under artist ally but that’s a semantics thing.  Overall tons of variety and so many fun things to see.  The photo ops, vendors and autographs were all in this one room.  In theory, this would make for one very crowded room; however, it was very spacious and I loved it.  I walked around with ease and saw everything I wanted to see.  With such an amazing guest list I was actually quite shocked.

Overall:

While I am not a huge fan of horror, I cannot overlook the care the owners of this convention took to create an amazing experience for fans of the genre.  I honestly wish I was able to take my fiance to this event earlier because she was beaming from ear to ear the entire time.  It has a few hiccups with panels that can be changed with a little effort from management, but even if those problems are not fixed they don’t ruin the experience.  I’ve got this event on my radar for 2020.