Long Beach is in for a weekend of terror as the wildly popular Midsummer Scream Halloween and Horror Convention returns to the Long Beach Convention Center on July 28-30.
The annual scare-a-thon, which is slated to attract about 40,000 bodies, will celebrate all things horror with panel discussions, a horror movie festival, walk-thru mazes, gory makeup tutorials, a horror-themed marketplace, live music and drag performances, activations that showcase video and board games and more.
With the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artist (SAG-AFTRA) joining the already months long striking Writers Guild of America (WGA) last week, several actors have joined the picket lines and will no longer be working on or promoting current projects until a deal is reached. While the strike has vastly affected the popular Hall H panels at the annual Comic-Con Convention in San Diego this weekend — with companies like Marvel and Disney opting out of their usual big studio presentations with its stars due to the on-going strike — it doesn’t have a huge impact on smaller, more niche conventions like Midsummer Scream.
“We were aware that this was happening and could be happening and we were sensitive to it,” David Markland, executive director and co-founder of Midsummer Scream said of the merging strike during a recent phone interview.
“In the past, we haven’t had panels that feature many upcoming films,” he explained. “Though we have some this year, like the ‘Haunted Mansion’ and ‘Saw X’ movies, but we’ve always been more focused on the people behind-the-scenes — like production designers and wardrobe people. We like to hear how the sausage is made here. That’s really what makes our event unique. To be honest, we are really bummed about the strike because even though it’s not impacting anything we have to announce, we would have loved for those actors to join in on those things.”
There will be a “Saw” themed…
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