Malcolm McDowell was one of a couple marquee celebs who stopped by Texas Frightmare Weekend.
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Weekend of the Living Dead
The third annual Texas Frightmare was anything but heartless, though.
By COLE WILLIAMS
Think people dressed as superheroes and anime characters are a little, how you say, totally nucking futs? Well, you’ve never seen a room full of zombies then. And there were plenty of them last Thursday through Sunday at the third annual Texas Frightmare Weekend, at the Hilton DFW Lakes Hotel. An estimated 5,000 fans packed the place looking to snag autographs, buy memorabilia, and share in their love of horror. They couldn’t have been more, uh, ravenous.
The reason for the enthusiasm? “They’re glad to have something like this down here,” said Loyd Cryer, founder of Texas Frightmare Weekend. As opposed to the East and West coasts, Texas, much like the rest of the in-between states, usually gets left in the dust when it comes to fanboy conventions. But two years ago Cryer, his family, and a few volunteers made some industry contacts and set up the first Frightmare. This year’s event revolved around the 40th anniversary of the legendary fright Night of the Living Dead. Previous Living Dead guests George A. Romero and Tom Savini came back, along with several actors from the series spawned by the 1968 film. Also on (severed) hand were Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Heroes, Halloween) and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Things started out well Friday, when the convention floor opened and celebrities started showing up. The celeb contingent was a mix of stars, like the abovementioned Romero and McDowell, and lesser-knowns, like Dead cast and crew members and Courtney Gains from Children of the Corn. (“Outlander! Outlander!”) Vendors were everywhere, some from as far as New York, selling everything from bootleg DVDs to action figures. Some unusual fare was also on sale, like subDELETEions to ScreamTV.net, a site put together by two locals that streams horror movies online. All the while, sales-models, including lasses with names like Mistress Malice and Zamra, plus some Suicide Girls, strutted around in their most revealing goth-wear, hoping to draw attention to t-shirt sellers and small movie companies, and stopping seemingly every other second to pose for pictures, mainly with guys but also with quite a few tweener girls.
Around 4:30 p.m., the festival began in earnest, kicking off with the Zombie Walk, a mass migration of a hundred-plus fans, all decked out in gruesome prosthetics and corn-syrupy blood, who stumbled and groaned from a nearby bar to the hotel. Throughout the day, mostly indie movies played in an event hall on the third floor. At 10 p.m., after the vendors closed up shop, B-movie director Jim Wynorski was in the house for a screening of his cheesy ’80s gem Chopping Mall, and he was joined by the movie’s star, Kelli Maroney. The audience ate it all up, as well as the following movie, the luchador-slasher flick Wrestlemaniac, starring star professional wrestler Rey Mysterio Sr.
Saturday, the liveliest day of the con, brought more fans, a few more screenings, and the hotly anticipated Q&A panels. Close to a dozen actors from the Dead movies took part in “I Was a Romero Zombie.” For “Anti-Christ Superstar,” Harvey Stephens, who played Damien in The Omen (1976), drew a smaller but seriously more devout audience.
The panel on Romero’s latest movie, Diary of the Dead, had to be cut short — Romero opted to stay downstairs and continue signing autographs and talking with fans, leaving stars Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts to take on the audience. The whole thing, unfortunately, lasted only about 15 minutes.
Malcolm McDowell’s panel began at 5 p.m. and was probably the biggest draw. In his distinctive, charmingly arrogant voice, he recounted a ton of insightful stories from his life in film and TV. A highlight was when he recalled asking Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick, “Do you want me in the movie or not?” There also was a great story about McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and a trailer full of white smoke during the filming of the epic disaster Caligula. (Long story short: When the two men stumbled from their trailer to the set and saw all of the decadence on display, including naked little people, O’Toole blurted, “Jesus Fuck!”) (OK, maybe it was funnier when McDowell told it.)
There were only four Saturday screenings. Fingerprints, a ghost story-slash-slasher based on some “real” haunted train tracks in Houston, delivered some genuine scares and impressive gore and looked much better than its half-million-dollar budget would have suggested, especially considering that marquee Hollywood actor — and University of Texas-Arlington alumnus — Lou Diamond Phillips co-starred.
The best fright, though, was Red Victoria. Made for about $5,000, the flick is about an uppity screenwriter who’s assigned to write a horror movie DELETE and, in the throes of writer’s block, wakes up one day to find a rotting, velvet-voiced cadaver walking around his home, trying to inspire him. Witty and horrifying, the movie killed, and its after-party more than made up for those of us unable to crash the celebrity bash.
Sunday found things winding down, but even after all of the celebs had decamped and the vendors had scurried away, there was Romero, still sitting at his booth and chatting up the volunteers, most of whom had been too busy working to actually get to be fans. l
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