CHILLERCON IN SCARE-BOROUGH! BY PAUL KANE

17/3/2022

Since we announced ChillerCon, the first big horror event in the UK supported by the Horror Writers Association, people have been asking why Scarborough? Apart from the fact one of our committee, Alex Davis, ran a hugely successful FantasyCon there a few years ago, and the town is only a hop, skip and a bite away from Dracula country in Whitby where they hold the Goth Festival every year, there’s a very rich history of all things scary and spooky about the place.

   For starters, there are a number of haunted venues in the area, from the Black Lion pub –two former 17th century buildings merged together to form an inn – which is rumoured to be the town’s first mortuary, to Scarborough Castle which sits on a clifftop overlooking the entire city (it is said to be haunted by the headless phantom of Piers Gaveston, the son of a Gascon knight and ‘favourite’ of the ill-fated King Edward II). Indeed, one of the con venues, The Grand, is itself rumoured to be haunted. Built in 1867, to accommodate the most noble of guests, it was one of the largest hotels of its kind at the time. More recently, guests have reported witnessing items flying across their rooms, objects falling from walls, doors shaking and banging with no one on the other side, plus the sound of singing and laughter accompanied by old fashioned music. Various apparitions have been seen over the years (and Kindred Spirit Investigations do regular Ghost Hunts there), but the most common remains a mysterious lady wearing a long red dress…

   The author of The Woman in Black, Susan Hill, has talked before at length about the influence of Scarborough on her work – she was born and raised in the town. In fact, the adaptation of that most famous of ghost stories started life there, at the Stephen Joseph theatre… and it’s not hard to see why. She’s described how Penny-in-the-slot machines used to show executions, and a Chamber of Horrors in a long-gone museum displayed waxwork murderers! Nowadays, of course, we have the wonderfully fun Terror Towers on the sea front, which is well worth a visit if you have time during the convention.

   The town has also played host to film and TV crews over the years, making supernatural and horror productions. One of the most recent is the BBC’s mini-series Remember Me from 2014, starring Michael Palin as a pensioner who appears cursed when strange things keep happening to those around him. It all leads back to the atmospheric location of Scarborough, and if you take a walk down the sea front you’ll find one striking location in particular in the form of the Scarborough Spa – with its instantly recognisable chequered floor.

And of course 2020’s superb Saint Maud, contender for best horror film of the year, was filmed in Scarborough. Starring Morfydd Clark, who gave a mesmerising performance, this told the tale of one devoutly religious and reclusive young nurse’s descent into madness. A masterclass in paranoia and psychological terror, the shocking ending was filmed right there on the beach at Scarborough.

So, given all this, I suppose the better question to ask might be why wouldn’t we choose this place to gather together the horror community! It might have been a while coming, but finally this summer we can all come together in person, and boy do we have a convention lined up for you. Spread across The Grand and The Royal, there will be panels examining every aspect of horror, masterclasses from the people who know horror inside out, pitch sessions, book launches and publisher parties, readings, a dealers room, and not forgetting our Guest of Honour and Special Guest interviews – plus performances from guest Robert Lloyd Parry of Nunkie Theatre (you can read all of our Guests bios at the end of this piece). Come and join in the spooky fun!

ChillerCon is running in Scarborough between 26-29th May (https://chillercon-uk.com/)

Our Guests of Honour are:

Mick Garris began writing fiction at the age of twelve. By the time he was in high school, he was writing music and film journalism for various local and national publications, and during college, edited and published his own pop culture magazine. Steven Spielberg hired Mick as story editor on the Amazing Stories TV series for NBC, where he wrote or co-wrote ten of the forty-four episodes. Since then, he has written or co-scripted a number of feature films and teleplays (*Batteries Not Included, The Fly II, Hocus Pocus, Critters 2 and Nightmares & Dreamscapes, amongst many others). As a director and producer, he has worked in a wide range of media, including feature films (Critters 2, Sleepwalkers, Riding the Bullet, Nightmare Cinema); made-for-TV movies (Quicksilver Highway, Virtual Obsession, Desperation); cable movies and series (Psycho IV: The Beginning, Tales from the Crypt, Pretty Little Liars and its spin-off Ravenswood, Witches of East End, Shadowhunters, Dead of Summer, Once Upon a Time); network mini-series (The Stand, The Shining, Bag of Bones); series pilots (The Others, Lost in Oz) and series (She-Wolf of London). He is also the creator and executive producer of Showtime’s Masters of Horror anthology series, as well as creator of the NBC series, Fear Itself. Mick is known for his highly-rated podcast, Post Mortem with Mick Garris, where he sits down with some of the most revered film-makers in the horror and fantasy genre for one-on-one discussions, including the likes of Stephen King, John Carpenter, Roger Corman, Walter Hill, Neil Gaiman, and many others. A Life in the Cinema, his first book, was a collection of short stories and a screenplay based on one of the included stories, published by Gauntlet Press. Mick’s first novel, Development Hell, was published by Cemetery Dance, who is also the publisher of his novellas, Snow Shadows, Tyler’s Third Act and Ugly. His new book, These Evil Things We Do: The Mick Garris Collection, features four novellas, and his second novel is titled Salome. He has also had many works of short fiction published in numerous books and magazines. A biography, Master of Horror by Abbie Bernstein, was published last year.

Kim Newman is a movie critic, author and broadcaster. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Millennium Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, Life’s Lottery, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, An English Ghost Story, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and Angels of Music. His comics include Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland and Anno Dracula Seven Days in Mayhem. As ‘Jack Yeovil’, he wrote the Vampire Genevieve and Dark Future novels for Games Workshop. His most recent novel is Anno Dracula 999 1Daikaiju. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Millennium Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. He has also written for television (Dr. Terror’s Vault of Horror; Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema), radio (Afternoon Theatre: Cry-Babies) and the theatre (The Hallowe’en Sessions), and directed a tiny film (Missing Girl). His official web-site is at www.johnnyalucard.com. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.

New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix has written about the confederate flag for Playboy magazine, reported on machine gun collector conventions, and scripted award shows for Chinese television. His novels include Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, which has been translated into 14 languages, My Best Friend's Exorcism, which recently became a feature film starring Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade), We Sold Our Souls, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being turned into a television series for Amazon), and The Final Girl Support Group. He's also the author of Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties, which won the Stoker Award for “Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction”. He wrote Mohawk (2017), probably the only horror movie anyone will ever make about the War of 1812, and Satanic Panic (2019), about a pizza delivery woman battling rich Satanists. You can discover more ridiculous facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

Gillian Redfearn is the Hugo Award-nominated Deputy Publisher of Gollancz, the world’s oldest Science Fiction and Fantasy imprint. Within five months of joining the Gollancz team as editorial assistant she had commissioned the bestselling First Law trilogy from Joe Abercrombie, swiftly followed by acquiring the UK rights to Patrick Rothfuss’ novels. When she became Editorial Director for the imprint in 2014 she was selected as a Bookseller Rising Star, and two years later Gollancz was shortlisted for best imprint in the Bookseller Awards. Throughout her career Redfearn has worked across the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres, with bestselling and award winning authors including Ben Aaronovitch, Joe Abercrombie, Aliette de Bodard, Joe Hill, Charlaine Harris, Joanne Harris, Sarah Pinborough, Brandon Sanderson, Alastair Reynolds and Chris Wooding, among many others. As Gillian finds herself unable to travel to Scarborough on the new convention dates, her Guest of Honour interview will be via video with Joe Hill and made available to Supporting Members of the convention after the event via a private area of the website. Other ways in which Gillian will be participating will be advised in due course.

Our Special Guests are:

Mike Carey was born in Liverpool, but moved to London in the eighties after completing an English degree at Oxford. He was an English teacher for fifteen years before resigning to become a freelance writer in 2000. Initially he worked mainly in the medium of comic books. After writing for several UK and American indie publishers, he got his big break when he was commissioned by DC Comics’ Vertigo division to write Lucifer. Spinning off from Neil Gaiman’s ground-breaking Sandman series, Lucifer told the story of the devil’s exploits after resigning from Hell to run a piano bar in Los Angeles: Mike wrote the book for the whole of its initial seven-year run, during which he was nominated for four Eisner awards and won the Ninth Art and UK National Comics awards. More recently he has written Barbarella, Highest House and The Dollhouse Family, which will be released in September of this year as a hardcover collection. Mike’s first foray into prose fiction came with the Felix Castor novels, supernatural crime thrillers whose exorcist protagonist consorts with demons, zombies and ghosts in an alternate London. These were followed by two collaborations with his wife Linda and their daughter Louise, The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness. Subsequently, under the transparent pseudonym of M.R.Carey, he wrote The Girl With All the Gifts and its prequel The Boy On the Bridge. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of The Girl With All the Gifts, for which – at the age of 59! – he received a British Screenwriting award for best newcomer. The Book of Koli (2020) was the start of a new post-apocalyptic trilogy, followed up by The Trials of Koli (2020) and The Fall of Koli (2021).

Robert Lloyd-Parry has worked variously as an art historian, theatre reviewer, actor and guesthouse keeper in a Greek monastery. He co-founded Nunkie Theatre Company in 1996 to produce shows on the London Fringe—amongst them Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, Patrick Suskind’s The Double Bass, and David Mamet’s Squirrels. It was while working at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that he rediscovered a fascination with the works of Montague Rhodes James, the master of the English ghost story. In 2005 he dusted off the Nunkie brand and performed A Pleasing Terror, the first of six one-man shows based on James’ tales. He has since toured these extensively around the UK, USA, and Ireland, and on Christmas Day 2013 he appeared as M.R. James in Ghost Writer, Mark Gatiss’ BBC-TV documentary about the life of the author. Robert Lloyd-Parry has also toured a one-man adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and, most recently, Gallery of Screams—a one-man show based on two weird tales by H.P. Lovecraft. He has written, presented and produced two documentary films looking in detail at two of M.R. James’ greatest tales, and released audio books: Curious Creatures—The Shorter Horror of M.R. James and Two Strange Tales Lucy Boston. For more on Nunkie, see here.

And our Mistress of Ceremonies is:

A. K. Benedict was educated at Cambridge, University of Sussex and Clown School. She was the lead singer and co-songwriter of cabaret-punk band, The Black Tulips, and now performs with The Slice Girls, a troupe of female crime writers who sing songs of murder and betrayal, in corsets. She has composed for film and TV, with music played on BBC1, Channel Four, Sky, Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and XFM, in cinemas across the Middle East, and on a cross channel ferry. As an actor, she has appeared in film and radio drama as well as performing in touring productions of Shakespeare, Wilde, Coward and contemporary theatre. Described by the Sunday Express as ‘one of the new stars of crime fiction with a supernatural twist’, AK Benedict’s debut novel, The Beauty of Murder, was shortlisted for an eDunnit award and is in development for TV by Company Pictures. Her second novel from Orion, The Evidence of Ghosts, is a love song to London and shows her obsession with all things haunted. And The Christmas Murder Game came out from Zaffre last year. Her radio drama includes Doctor Who and Torchwood plays for Big Finish and a modern adaptation of Lost Hearts for Bafflegab/Audible. Her short stories and poetry have featured in journals and anthologies including New Fairy Tales, Best British Short Stories 2012, Magma, Orbis, Scaremongrel, New Fears, Phantoms, Great British Horror, Best British Horror 2018, Exit Wounds, Invisible Blood and Best British Horror 2019. Alexandra is RLF Fellow at University of Kent and Visiting Lecturer on the Crime Thriller MA at City, University of London. She is currently writing a thriller set in the arctic and a collection of ghost stories. She lives in Rochester with writer Guy Adams and their dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

All Guest appearances are subject to availability at the time of the convention.

ChillerCon is running in Scarborough between 26-29th May (https://chillercon-uk.com/)