“One day I was complaining to my mum about how there are no good horror conventions nearby,” says 16-year-old horror fan Annie. “I was looking on Google and I saw this one called For The Love of Horror. I was like, ‘Well, I’m sure the guests will be bad because there are never any good guests in England…”
She was astonished that VIPs at the nightmarish knees-up, which took place in Manchester’s BEC Arena earlier this month, included actor Shawnee Smith of the Saw franchise. “I begged my mum to let me go.” So, the pair made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from their home in Grimsby to the 12,000-capacity event, which featured talks, autograph signings and some serious cosplay. “I absolutely loved it,” she beams.
Annie is autistic and has a ‘special interest’ – a common feature among those with her condition – in all things horror. She began watching Dead Meat, a YouTube channel focused on ‘kill counts’ in scary movies, before graduating to the real deals. “My mum is very supportive of my special interest and I’m glad she is.”
She particularly loves the Saw films, which see victims captured in elaborate traps. “Horror changed me as a person. I knew when I was younger that I wasn’t gonna grow up to be very normal. I used to get bullied quite a lot and horror really helped me escape from that.”
Annie’s might be a specific case, but horror fandom is more all-encompassing than ever. Ultra-violent independent gore-fest Terrifier 3 recently dismembered Joker: Folie à Deux at the US box office, taking the top spot despite having been made for just $2m – one per cent of the budget for Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga’s courtroom musical. Unlike most genres, horror movies have spawned a multiverse of collectibles and merch that fans covet and drool over at events such as For The Love of Horror.
Bloody Disgusting, the US multimedia company that started as an editorial website in 2001, recently launched its Horror Fan Store in 1700 Walmart stores across the country. The blood-splattered shop-within-a-shop offered limited-edition items such as figurines, charms and masks.
“You walk into any major retailer or look at online shopping and horror is everywhere,” says Tom Owen, Vice President Network Strategy at Cineverse, Bloody Disgusting’s parent company (which distributed Terrifier 3). “It’s a lifestyle genre. That’s one of the things we always talk about internally at Bloody Disgusting: being a horror fan influences every aspect of your life.”
Speaking from his Illinois office via video call, he gestures behind him to a wall adorned with a skeleton, a Frankenstein bust and a poster for George A. Romero’s zombie classic Day Of The Dead. “[This includes] the clothes you wear, bumper stickers in your car, the music you listen to.”
That lifestyle wrapped its bloodstained hands around the neck of the mainstream this summer, with novelty popcorn buckets becoming the must-have pop culture item. The most buzzed-about might have been a tie-in for the fantasy epic Dune: Part 2, which went viral and even inspired an SNL skit because – quite frankly – it looked like a sex toy, but a striking number were horror-themed or adjacent. There were buckets for Alien: Romulus, Chucky, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and, of course, Terrifier 3.
Was it like seeing your favourite underground band reach Number One, with all the jealousy that can entail? “No, I don’t think so,” laughs Owen. “The more the merrier. Horror’s for everybody. We definitely don’t wanna gatekeep any of this.”
Why, though, are horror fans so enamoured of collectibles? Music fans will commonly collect records, but less so figurines of their favourite artists. “Horror is a very nostalgic genre,” says Owen, who explains that Walmart were enticed by the “size of the market” for horror collectibles. “There has been a lot of renewed interest lately in a lot of those physical products that you can use to put yourself in the genre and live it and breathe it.”
Indeed, a VHS of 2022’s Terrifier 2, featuring artwork and a scratch-and-sniff sticker, proved to be the breakout success from the Horror Fan Store, with 6000 tapes sold out in a matter of weeks. He heard reports of fans driving for hours to get their hands on Bloody Disgusting video cassettes. This is pretty extraordinary, Owen notes, “when you consider there probably hasn’t been a VHS sold in a major retailer store in 20 years”.
He adds: “Horror is a very visceral, intimate experience. Formats and collectibles like that play to that same sort of feeling that you get when you experience a horror. It’s real: something you feel. I mean, a VHS tape is way more intimate than clicking ‘rent’ on your TV, right?”
Huge VHShout out and congrats to our radical friends at @WitterEnt and @brokehorrorfan!!
Their new VHS release of TERRIFIER 2 is on the shelf at Wal-Marts across the nation!
VHS is now officially back on the shelves at mainstream retail stores. A VHSurreal time to be alive! pic.twitter.com/9JOtvpyz7Z
— LunchmeatVHS (@LunchmeatVHS) June 22, 2024
This month, the US collectibles company Mondo unveiled the ‘Nightmare Vessel’, a plastic pumpkin head filled with faux pumpkin mush and a tiny figure of Michael Myers, the impassive killer from the Halloween movies. The $105 item looks suspiciously like a popcorn bucket, but the company’s creative director, Peter Santa-Maria, describes it as an entity to be enjoyed for its own sake: “We decided to bring together our love of vintage, blow mould decorations from our youth and the aesthetics of Japanese soft vinyl toys from the ‘60s and ’70s.”
Thirty-nine-year-old, Liverpool-based Neil Hibbert, who hosts the For The Love Of Horror Live Show, agrees that nostalgia is a big part of horror fandom. He remembers hearing friends at school excitedly discuss an upcoming TV broadcast of A Nightmare On Elm Street. His mum, nan and grandad were so opposed to him seeing it that they removed the telly from his room. “So who’s gonna fall asleep first?” he chuckles. “Me grandmother. I sat down next to her like a little angel. Five past 10 on Channel 4: she was asleep and I put Freddy Krueger on. After that, that was it – I was hooked.”
Almost 30 years later, he spent £550 on a full-sized bust of Krueger’s disfigured head at this month’s For The Love of Horror. The first thing he now sees when he leaves his bedroom is an Evil Dead poster signed by actor Bruce Campbell: “It’s a good start to your day – you’re thinking of a happy moment in cinema that you’ve watched.”
Some fans might look to recapture their youth with horror collectibles, but for 16-year-old Annie it’s about a sense of community. She has made “a lot of friends” through Saw: “I was in this Discord group chat for a completely unrelated thing, but then someone else joined and they had a profile picture of Adam from the first Saw film. We just clicked instantly.” She now enjoys chatting with pals online about their favourite Saw traps and characters.
Neil echoes Tom Owen’s aversion to ‘gatekeeping’ in the fandom and fondly says that “horror people are weirdos”, whom he differentiates from “normal” people. “The horror crowd is the best. You could walk into the convention on your own and – I guarantee you – by the end, you’re walking out with friends for life.”
Annie only started collecting last March and is proud to own “a little piece of razor wire and a bathroom tile” from the set of Saw 3D. She still experiences some bullying, but recently started college, where she overheard a boy talking about Freddy Krueger, whom Neil heard whisperings of back in the ‘90s.
The boy couldn’t quite remember the name of the film in question. “I chimed in, ‘Are you talking about A Nightmare On Elm Street? And we’re friends now.”