A look at Horror-Rama – Toronto’s coolest (and only) all horror convention

Separately, business owner Luis Ceriz and Chris Alexander have made names for themselves within the Toronto film buff community, and undoubtedly more than a few of those reading this from that community will recognize their names.

Filmmaker, musician and journalist Alexander might be best known as a former editor for landmark horror/genre publication Fangoria and as a writer for several other high profile outlets. Since leaving Fangoria late last year, Alexander has continued his writing and editorial endeavours over at genre publications Delirium and Shock Till You Drop and a lot of personal energy into his filmmaking pursuits.

Ceriz is known to Torontonians as the proprietor of landmark retailer Suspect Video in The Annex, tucked in on Markham Street just behind Honest Ed’s. For twenty five years, Suspect Video has been known as the go-to place for any number of hard to find oddities, foreign films, out of print titles, and just about anything one could imagine would ever be filmed.

Colleagues and friends, Ceriz and Alexander were doing alright by themselves, but for the past three years they’ve been brought together by a shared project close to both of their hearts. The third annual Horror-Rama – a horror themed convention for old school minded genre buffs taking place Saturday and Sunday October 15^th and 16^th from the Hyatt Regency on King Street – is the brainchild of the duo borne from similar concerns about conventions they had attended in the past. It’s a smaller convention made by fans and for fans that emphasizes quality of experience over quantity of amenities and events.

“I was actually at an exploitation movie convention in London called Shock Stock a few years ago, and that’s where I mentioned it to Chris Alexander and we started talking about it,” Ceriz says during a phone interview in advance of this weekend’s festivities about how the seeds of Horror-Rama were sown. “We had never done it before and we wanted to try our hand at it. Our backgrounds meshed really well because his background was in magazines, dealing with guests, and doing interviews and panels. He was a very active, social kind of guy. My experience was more the retail aspect. I knew the exhibitors and experienced a lot of conventions from that end. We were able to look at our experience from conventions on our end and talked about what we liked and didn’t like, and what we could see as making them better or what we thought were omissions from the experience.”

“I don’t like conventions, really,” Alexander bluntly adds while recalling some of his previous lacklustre experiences attending conventions as a fan, guest, or panelist. “I remember when I was with Rue Morgue and I was doing the Festival of Fear [at FanExpo], and I remember remarking to the person I was with that I would have rather been anywhere else on the planet than there. I love movies and I love weird shit and the atmosphere you can get from horror films, and to me sometimes conventions jettison that mystique into something that’s akin to an over-lit flea market. They’re exhausting, and this is very niche what we’re doing by concentrating all the stuff we love in one area with no distractions. What we wanted for Horror-Rama was to create something a little more fun, but with a bit more of a rock-and-roll edge that captures the love of cinema and movies full stop, and not just a place to be selling Freddy Kruger toys. We want Horror-Rama to be fun and interesting, and I think we’ve programmed everything with a real sense of intimacy and not have a place where people can interact with some of their heroes and friends without being treated like cattle.”

“I never necessarily wanted to create a convention so much as I wished there were a horror specific convention,” says Ceriz about how he perceived conventions not as a retailer, but as a fan of horror. “There was really nothing up here. There’s FanExpo, which is gigantic, but more of a comic book and gaming con with a horror element to it, but to me the horror element always felt like a red headed stepchild that was shuffled over to the corner. If you were to look in the backs of American or British horror magazines, you would always see these ads for these wonderful, awesome looking horror-only conventions, and I really wanted that up here.”

Although Ceriz brings a considerable amount of knowledge from the specialty retail sector, it’s Alexander’s connections to luminaries within the horror community that provide for Horror-Rama’s main attractions. The guest list isn’t packed with the current stars of major blockbusters, but rather performers and filmmakers with stacked C.V.s working in horror and otherwise low budget genre productions. Some of this year’s guests have fascinating careers.

Tovah Feldshuh might be best and most recently known from her role on television’s The Walking Dead – playing Alexandria’s head honcho Deanna – but she’s also a stage and screen veteran with a fascinatingly wide ranging career in every kind of film imaginable. Filmmaker William Lustig created the Manic Cop franchise with Larry Cohen and was responsible for the infamous slasher Maniac. Today, he’s taking a hands on approach to remakes of his older films by being involved on the production side of things. Cindy Hinds and Art Hindle reunite to talk about working on David Cronenberg’s The Brood. Dyanne Thorne is a horror convention favourite around the world with a dense and storied background in sleaze flicks. Prolific filmmaker David DeCoteau has helmed over 200 features under various pseudonyms and has worked on everything from pornography to monster movies to the modern camp classic A Talking Cat?!? For Alexander, who’s friends and colleagues with many of the people coming to Horror-Rama, it’s about choosing the interesting names over the biggest names and treating the guests better than larger conventions might treat them.

“I wanted to treat the guests a bit better, and make sure they were guests with a certain amount of energy they would devote to the event, because sometimes you go to these cons and see these artists, directors, and actors with established, fascinating careers just hanging out at a table playing on their phones and looking bored out of their minds. I find that all kind of depressing. I never really think about who would be a big draw, but rather who I think would be the most interesting. I think that makes for the most fun and pleasant experience possible for fans and guests. Going forward, who knows how the guests will be chosen, but for now we’re in a niche and under our own control, and we’re just choosing who we personally like and want to be around, and we can share that enthusiasm with our patrons and other guests.”

Just like retail growth comes day by day and doing it longer and longer, and just like running a business (an exciting make-or-break proposal in its own right) the preparation and considerations for the future never stops. The balance now for Horror-Rama is maintaining a cost effective sort of growth and a gradual increase in notoriety that will allow Alxander and Ceriz to exhibit a bit more control than larger festivals might allot them.

“It naturally grows instead of us forcing it to,” Ceriz muses about the gradual increase in the festival’s size from the previous two years. “The venue that we’re at now is bigger than the one we were at in our first year, and it’s a more costly venue, which means the cost for flights and hotel rooms increases, but we really wanted to make this a destination event for horror fans in and around the area every October. Reaction seems to be really good, and people seem to be having a good time, but there are things we do differently from other conventions, which is probably because we don’t come from convention backgrounds and we’re still trying to figure out what’s appropriate and what’s not. (laughs)”

“The first year we did this, we did it at 99 Sudbury, which has a bit of a warehouse feel to it so it would feel like a party,” Alexander begins when talking about how they envision the size and scope of Horror-Rama. “Then we moved it to The Hyatt so we could be right downtown and have more space. It was more of a learning curve to make that move, but I think this year we’ve hit the happy medium between the feeling of a hotel convention and that of a party. And if it grows too big too fast, I don’t think we could keep creative control over it, and I think for both of us in what we do, that’s an important thing. If we grow it at our own pace, we can maintain that mom and pop feeling and I think this will always be that. Luis and I are friends who love this stuff, and I think the festival reflects just the kind of things we like by default. We’re not convention people. We don’t throw these things together like carnies trying to put on a show. We certainly don’t do it to make money. It’s just something we do to keep the blood running while working on the other machines we run. Our personalities are all over this show from stem to stern.”

While both men are working tirelessly to make sure things go off without a hitch for fans and special guests alike, they still have to juggle their other endeavours. Alexander writes and edits full time, but Ceriz is currently juggling the convention with the eventual and much maligned closing of Suspect Video’s brick and mortar outlet at the end of the year thanks in part to the closing of Honest Ed’s to make way for condos. Ceriz admits that this year is bittersweet for him, and that the closing of the store is the reason that Suspect won’t be one of the featured vendors at Horror-Rama this year. Still, he’s finding a nice balance and the positive experience of putting on the festival to be a refreshing change of pace.

“I thought it would be a lot easier, but I think lots of things are easier than they ultimately are,” he sighs and chuckles at the same time. “I’m really working all the time. I want to close Suspect properly and give it a great send off by spending a lot of time there, but I also have to focus a lot of time and attention on the convention at the moment. My attention will obviously shift after the show back to the store. That’s also part of the reason why Suspect won’t have a table at the convention this year. I thought it would just be too much. I like doing shows and showing off things that other exhibitors might not have, but it just became maddening to think about. It was just a lot easier to devote my time to the show instead of short changing one for the other.”

For more information on Horror-Rama, directions to the Hyatt, tickets, and a full list of guests and vendors, check out their website. Horror-Rama runs on Saturday from 10 to 6 and Sunday from 10 to 5.