Even battling the massive draw of San Diego Comic-Con, Midsummer Scream 2024 — the latest edition of the world’s biggest Halloween convention — had record attendance with well over 50,000 guests. Horror fans and fiends packed the Long Beach Convention Center in Southern California for three days (July 26-28) of pre-spooky season celebrations, including activations from Paramount, Universal, and Lionsgate, among others. That’s proof, coordinators say, not just of the loyal fanbase still making scary movies and haunts lucrative year-round, but also of the thriving professional community keeping the genre alive for film and TV workers facing extreme uncertainty within the industry.
“The horror community is an extremely supportive and inclusive community,” Norman Gidney, executive director of The Screaming Room Film Festival at Midsummer Scream, told IndieWire. “It’s not just a life raft in economic times. There’s a tremendous catharsis and emotional and mental support from horror and its people that we lay claim to. That’s what we love.”
Also the creator of HorrorBuzz.com, Gidney has been a part of Midsummer Scream since its co-founding in 2016 by David Markland and Rick West. The annual event is currently produced by Markland, West, Claire Dunlap, and Gary Baker. Born out of ScareLA (a similar concept, since shuttered), the convention exceeded the capacity of its original home, the Pasadena Convention Center, shortly after its creation and reached 30,000 attendees in 2019 before taking a year off for the pandemic. It came back stronger than ever after and sold out all three days for the first time this year. That’s up by 5,000 visitors when compared to the event’s headcount from 2023.
“We had our date set for this coming weekend at least two years ago, and then Comic-Con switched their date,” Gidney said. “We were panicking. At first, we were like, ‘Is it going to affect us that badly? Should we just change the date?’ Then, we said, ‘No, there’s enough crossover and enough interest here.’ So we put ticket sales out, things blew up, and we were like, ‘Oh, OK! We’ll be fine.’”
Halloween and, in turn, horror’s undying popularity as both fodder for film and inspiration for profitable seasonal fun continues to help genre creatives who are looking for steady gigs, albeit inside-out these days. As Hollywood jobs keep dwindling — and surging real estate and rent prices in Los Angeles make matters more dire — Gidney says he has “100 percent” seen more filmmakers and crew who might typically work on horror sets taking their talents to help produce live Halloween events instead this fall.
“There’s a long history of crossover between people using their horror talents and production talents for other things,” Gidney said, naming Creep LA (via JFI Productions) and Jeff Schiefelbein’s Sinister Pointe Productions as notable examples of horror groups managing scares both on and off screen.
As for the future of just film, Midsummer Scream’s shorts competition — divided into a series of themed programming blocks that screen throughout the weekend for audience awards and jury accolades — emerged in 2017, a year after the main event started. Although the convention was already overflowing with haunters, merchants, and other skilled Halloween obsessives (think pro monsters from local favorites like Knott’s Scary Farm and Fright Fest at Six Flags Magic Mountain), Gidney identified a glaring need for more direct movie appreciation.
“Everybody at Midsummer Scream could always tell you what their favorite horror film was and things like that, but nobody from the film community was really being represented,” he continued. “We needed to set up a space for the indie horror filmmakers that need exposure because there’s a lot of people creating [short horror] just like the haunters do — working on a shoestring budget and shooting something for absolutely nothing just for the passion of it.”
The festival got a decent number of submissions in its first year, but the 200 or so entries from back then would pale in comparison to the thousands Gidney says The Screaming Room receives now. The executive director attributes the spike in interest to both the wider horror boom still impacting green lights at the highest studio level and improved tech and creative tool accessibility for new artists.
“But what’s interesting too is that it’s global,” said Gidney. “We had people coming from Spain, from Japan, from Mexico, and what’s so much fun about it is that we frankly didn’t even have to aim for that. We just opened it, and people everywhere started submitting things.”
With the help of festival coordinator Jessica Merino, festival directors Eric Ryan and Amantha Ryan ensure every short sent to The Screaming Room is viewed at least twice. That rigorous process helped successfully launch the careers of filmmakers Erik and Carson Bloomquist. The brothers, whose latest was the tongue-in-cheek political slasher “Founder’s Day,” developed one of their earlier features from a script that started as a Midsummer Scream short.
“They submitted something years ago called ‘She Came from The Woods,’ and then we kept in touch and we knew there was something very special with those guys,” Gidney said. “So we’ve actually seen that talent develop for years which is really what we wanted. We wanted to be a place that nurtured the creativity and the craft.”
If you’re interested in participating The Screaming Room next year, submissions open annually on October 31 and run until a set of staggered deadlines in the spring. Here are this year’s top three winners:
The Screaming Room: Jury Winners
Palme d’Gore: “Bookworm” — Awarded to the Best Overall Short
Jack-O-Lantern: “Les Bêtes” — Awarded to the Best Halloween-Themed Short
Mary Shelley: “Alicia” — Awarded to Most Creative and Ingenious Short
