Horror-ific weekend

Spent much of the weekend at Rock and Shock, more for the shock than the rock. Neither of us recognized any of the bands playing, and the kind of music that usually accompanies horror conventioneers isn't usually my style anyway.

It was definitely a Romero-fest, which why I was surprised that I didn't see my zombi-phile buddy there, because I first heard about it from him.

Since I've never been to a horror convention before, I was interested, not only in the offerings of the convention, but in fan watching as well. There's something about genre fans that fascinates me - the whole identificatory emulation/adoration that seems to be driven by a desire for power. What's interesting about horror fans, is that unlike sf/f fans, who identify with the hero, in order to identify with the power, the horror fan must identify with the monster. If you know me in real life, I've probably yakked about genre fans before, but this up-close and personal view gave it a new twist.

There were definitely some fun bits - we went to a few Q&A's - Day of the Dead cast, The Fog cast (original) and Land of the Dead cast + Romero, where the man said some very interesting things about the politics of Land (you can catch them on the extras section of the upcoming DVD), and the philosophy of, and I quote, "You stop killing us and we'll stop eating you" that drives the ending of the movie. And yes, he left it open ended in the hopes that there would be demand for a sequel, though the box office numbers have likely ruled that out.

We also watched the original The Fog introduced by Adrienne Barbeau (which yes, I realize I could've just gone and rented), the unrated original version (not the sanitized DVD version) of Re-Animator, which had a couple of shocking extra scenes, and the slightly longer than theatre-version of Land of the Dead that will be available on DVD next week. So overall, it was worth it. I especially appreciated being able to see Land, because when it came out, I was busy enough in the two? weeks that it actually played around here, that I didn't get to see it before it was gone.

A fun weekend, considering the weather was horrific the whole time!