To paraphrase a quote from The book of Passover, “Why is this year different than any other?” Well, Covid. So many events have transitioned to online. That is the case with The Horrorgasm 2020 convention. This was the third annual con for the website Horrorgasmsd.com. They strive to highlight local artists and vendors in San Diego, CA. This was the first year that the event took place online.
There were 3 tiers of registration. Deranged (Free), which gave you access to a lot of online content, Psychotic ($10), which gave you access to all the free content plus exclusive performances, interviews, and seminars, and the Inhuman ticket ($25) which gave you access to everything plus a Scare Package of exclusive Horrorgasm 2020 collectibles. I went with Inhuman.
This was a fun concept that had some great parts but some portions of the festival felt like they needed a little more time to be developed. I give them all the slack and credit in the world for moving from an in-person to an online festival in such a short amount of time. Here are some aspects I wanted to highlight.
A SPECIAL PERFORMANCE BY AIDA MARREFEMME
This was fantastic. Aida is a performance artist that executed a brilliant Tribal Belly Dance. (Make hyperlink)
ART GALLERY
This was a great collection of horror-themed pieces by local artists. One of my favorites was a 3D head titled, “Tell Them Large Marge Sent You – by Jennifer Cooksey.
HORROR LIBRARY
A collection of books by local authors. The problem I had was that there were just pictures of books that when clicked on them would take you to the author’s website or Amazon. There were no descriptions or reviews on the Horrorgasm page.
VENDORS
This was very similar to the Horror Library in the way that it was just logos that took you to websites with no descriptions. I was able to find some cool shops that I had never heard of before but that was after spending a lot of time randomly clicking around.
THE SPOOKY MIXTAPE
This was a lot of enjoyable. I was expecting a streaming playlist of classic Halloween music. What I got was individual tracks by different artists in the horror genre. One of the standouts was Ghosts of L.A. – by Sammy Ruiz.
ROAST OF HORROR 2020
Oh boy. I have gone back and forth with what to say about this video sketch of “movie monsters” roasting each other. Here’s something you may need to know about me. I have been performing improv and sketch in L.A. for over 15 years. This is my realm. This roast was a pre-recorded and edited video in which actors dressed up as monsters making fun of each other. It started off a little rough when Mildred, the Mad Scientist took a break from talking about her period to drop character and go into a non sequitur feminist lecture about words that have man and men in them. Enlightening but where are the jokes? Then the Roast of Horror just moved into being offensive in an unclever way. Maybe in a live environment where this show was for the live audience and to be performed only once maybe it could have worked…maybe. Most of the jokes were calling someone gay or were about menstruation. There were a few jokes about Jeffrey Epstein and Samara Morgan (from The Ring), so… There is that. At one point Dracula says, “Cthulhu was created by H.P. Lovecraft. That sounds pretty gay.” Come on guys, we are better than this. Mr. Hyde told Mildred, “Cthulhu has wings in case you have that not so fresh feeling.” If you are going to make a bad yeast infection joke at least get your feminine hygiene products straight or just don’t make the joke.
Overall, I had a good time at the online convention and will definitely attend another Horrorgasm event in the future. Hopefully, live when we can be around people again. I would like to give them special thanks for doing something to try to keep us all sane during this truly insane time.
