Episode 124-We’re All Wasted: The Ongoing Saga of Cinema Wasteland

Hi, I'm S. A. Bradley and welcome to Hell Ben For Har, a podcast devoted to all things related to the world. Hi everybody and welcome to a new episode of Hell Ben For Har. Thank you so much for still hanging out with me. I've got to tell you I am so happy and grateful that I still have this platform to be able to do what I love to do, which is talk about the genre of horror and find people that I can have conversations with.

When I first started this podcast, I said something very simple, which is the reason that I do this is to start conversations with you. And that really is still the most important thing. I've been able to travel all over the place to be able to sit with people and talk about our favorite subject. Being people at their passions is such a rewarding thing. It has allowed me to start friendships, have myself involved with many different art projects.

So many different things have happened because of the fine art of shooting the shit. The idea of just sitting down and a sense of playful conversation about something that you love. Now, why am I bringing up all this about conversation and this meeting of minds? Well, a couple of different reasons. Let me see if I can slowly explain. So at the beginning of this month, April of 2024, by the way, two major events happened almost simultaneously while I was traveling to the state of Ohio.

The first was my pilgrimage every year to Strongesville, Ohio to return once again to Sinmo Wasteland, which is the Sinmo Wasteland movie and the Robelia Expo that happens there. So that's one thing. The other was that Cleveland was one of the places in line for a total solar eclipse. So dig the synchronicity here. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we have a convention, the Sinmo Wasteland movie and the Robelia Expo. And on Monday, the very next day, we have a total blackout in the middle of the day.

We have a solar eclipse. Oh, I don't know. Is there some kind of forward boating there? I'm not sure. But anyway, after coming back from Sinmo Wasteland, I really felt it was time to do another show about the event and what it means to me and why I'm still going and what it means to other people as well. And there are a couple reasons for that. One of which happened last year, middle of the year, I believe. And it was where I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to go to Stokercon.

And while I was there, I found out that through one of my friends, John Kittley, that the monster bash was happening that same weekend. Now I'm involved in Stokercon. It's kind of a big event. But I had heard about Monster Bash as being another kind of convention that is in the vein of Sinmo Wasteland. And in fact, the way that Monster Bash was mentioned to me or described to me was that it was the sister show to Sinmo Wasteland. And it is more of a monster kid bend.

So something that is more universal monsters, something that's more hammer than it is in Sinmo Wasteland, which is a little bit more skewed towards the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. Essentially 70s and 80s, probably more than anything else, that whole driving exploitation thing. So a very simple way that Monster Bash was mentioned to me was that Monster Bash covers all the movies until they added color to the blood in the movies.

And once there was red colored blood in the movies, that's where Sinmo Wasteland took over. I had never been there, but I had been told that I really should go there. And so I was always really excited to see what this is going to be like, especially because I really do love universal monsters. I love hammer. I love a lot of the old stuff as well. So I decided to go there. And one of the things that I did find there, first off, it was a lot of fun. Certainly the people there are knowledgeable.

But there was something that I really noticed that started making me think about Sinmo Wasteland as well. And what I really noticed there is that time is marching on, folks. And the Monster Kids are of course the kids from that grew up in the 50s, 60s. And there are the people who started the first zines, started the first conventions, all of that stuff, the Monster Kids that were under for the Akramans power with famous monsters of film land. They're all aging out.

And so as much fun as I had at Monster Bash, I could feel that shall we say aging process happening. It was very hard to get across the entire vendor's room at any given time because there were a lot of people moving very slowly in walkers, canes, in the little carts. And you could just feel when I stopped and looked at it, I was able to take a look at the folks and of course young at heart, tons of laughter, lots of fun. But you could feel that at some point this really is going to wind down.

In fact, if I remember correctly, one of the founding members of Monster Bash, the people who put it on had passed a year or so ago. And so there is a sense that this is all finite, right? We all know that it's finite, but we never really think of it in those terms. And Moaisland has become such an important part of many of our lives that we don't ever want to see it go away. But there are things that are pointing to the idea that it is going to wind down at some point.

We're aware that it's going to end sometime. There are little hints that are happening. Ken Kish, who is the founder and showrunner, has had health problems. He's getting older, it's getting harder to do some of this stuff. Is it really worth the amount of aggravation that can happen to put this show on every six months? Well, that's up to Ken. But there has been talk over the last few years of him flirting with the idea of maybe retiring this.

And Cinema Wasteland, from all intents and purposes, will end when Ken decides that it's going to end. At least that's not any of the scuttle but that's being heard. So there's been that in the air for a little bit. You know, we're not getting any younger health issues are coming up. Of course, there are expenses. Another issue that happens with a show like Cinema Wasteland is that the people who are the draw, they're also aging out, unfortunately.

Many of the people who have been working or did work in the time of the slasher films or time of the drive-ins and the grindhouse movies, they have gotten much older. Some are not willing to get on planes and come and visit. So there is that kind of thing as well. And we've all been kind of holding that in the background while we're enjoying Cinema Wasteland.

But one of the things that really got me and I think many other people thinking about the impermanence of things was something that happened not even at the hotel. It actually was something that happened on the other side of the very big parking lot that there is. And that was at the Super 8 Hotel. So this Super 8, why it's significant, is that it tended to take in the overflow. This is how well attended Cinema Wasteland is.

Most of the time they take over the entire hotel and they sell out the hotel. So one of the things that has always been a great standby for people is the Super 8 right across the parking lot. It's also a little bit cheaper. So people who could not really afford an entire weekend at the best western, they were able to bunk together and make it work with the Super 8 there. So what ended up happening while developers came and they tore down the Super 8.

January 4th, 2024. The shot heard around the world. We saw a news article that showed that developers were going to tear down the Super 8 Hotel and replace it with a sheets gas station. Having that Super 8 go down was kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of like hearing that someone that you went to high school with just dropped dead of a heart attack. And you're like, oh my god, he was my age and all of this, it's coming close. You know, the Grimm Reapers hitting close to home.

While there certainly is that feeling around Cinema Wasteland and that best western. So the best western, which used to be a holiday in, has been the one and sole place that Cinema Wasteland has been for the last nearly 25 years. Since 2000, twice a year they've been showing up and putting on this show in the same place. Now a couple of years ago, the holiday in was bought and turned into a best western.

But in the time that I've been going there, which has only been since 2017, there have been quite a few, shall we say, changes that had been happening. The hotel itself hasn't necessarily been kept up. It's modest in how it works. Everyone makes jokes about how the elevators fail every weekend because of course everybody's using it. But you start realizing that they're not putting a huge amount of money into this hotel.

So you buy a hotel and instead of fixing the elevators properly, you walk into the elevator and you look up at the ceiling and you realize that the ceiling tiles are being held in by bookshelf arches. In other words, the little flange that holds the bookshelf up, they're being held up by those and you're going, oh my goodness, and they've just been screwed in there. Sometimes your door won't open or sometimes it will with the key. You have to get the key done several times.

There's a lot of quick turnover. It doesn't seem like we have the same people, the same personnel that are working at the hotel. Every six months, it seems a little bit different. Whereas there seem to be mainstays that were there all the time and understood what was going on in a weekend of a Sino-Wasteland. There's just this feeling that you know what, if the developers ball smashed down the Super 8, are they really putting in the money to keep this one going?

I will say that in my own personal opinion, I would think that considering the amount of time that's been going on with Sino-Wasteland, the amount of success that has already happened, how everybody's getting older, I don't know if I could see can going out, can kish going out and finding a new place if this one decided to go away. I think that shot over the bow of mortality really soaked in to a lot of us because there was an interesting difference to Sino-Wasteland this time.

Not a bad difference, but a difference. But because of that, I'm going to talk a little bit about Sino-Wasteland, what it's meant to me, the changes that I've seen, and also give you a little bit of an insight from people who have been here for a while and people who are new. A little bit of an idea of what Sino-Wasteland means to different people.

For those of you who have been listening to show for a good amount of time, you know that I did an episode early in the creation of this podcast, which was episode four actually. It was called Blood Oats and Bar Tabs, my initiation into Sino-Wasteland. That was my origin story.

It was where I went from going to a convention and meeting some like-minded people in Chicago to them saying, we have a lot of really cool people that I think you would love to meet and they're all congregating at this place in Cleveland, Ohio. You should come. It was Thursday, March 7, 2016, and that was the first time that I walked into what was then the holiday in in Strongesville, Ohio. It was the night before Sino-Wasteland. My first Sino-Wasteland was going to start.

Because I fly from San Francisco to Cleveland, which is insane in and of itself, I get there a day early. This does sometimes. It allows me to meet people before the chaos of a live show starts to happen. So I get there. There's a promotion behind the open ballroom doors and that's this big ballroom that has all the vendors and they're all setting up and it's really kind of provocative to look at them. I'm like, wow, look at how exciting it is in there. You can't go in there.

I have no idea what the rules are. I don't want to get kicked out, but it's obvious that they have someone at the door so perhaps you're not supposed to go in there. And I'm looking in and it just looks like it's fun like the circus is fun, right? The circus is coming to town. I knew nobody. But that didn't stop people from coming over and saying hi and seeing who I was and where I was coming from. A couple guys came over. One guy named Brian Healy, another one named Tom Nisner.

They came over and they offered me a beer. Now, this is an interesting thing because I don't drink. You know, nine out of 10 times when you're someone who's a non-drinker and you walk into a kind of a party atmosphere and people hand you a drink and you say, no, they go, oh, okay, cool. And then they make their way away from you because literally that thing of handing a drink to somebody is the conversation starter. It's a thing that you have in common.

It's this little exchange of gifts that allows the magic to start to happen where we decide we can talk with each other. Now, I've been in that situation often where I walk up and somebody offers me a beer and you know, they just kind of walk away afterwards. They're very friendly about it, but they're looking for someone that they're going to have a strong conversation with. That didn't happen here because the strength of the conversation, the linchpin wasn't going to be the beer.

It was actually what I liked to talk about, which was hard. Why are you here? What do you like? What are you doing? I immediately had two people who spent a good amount of time with me talking about old movies, talking about new movies, talking about music because I found out that Tom Misner, as I believe the lead guitarist, a cardiac arrest, which freaked me out.

I had to go upstairs and listen to some music and go, oh, my God, okay, I better be on my best behavior because it seems like everybody here is doing something, something really interesting. Ken Kish came and introduced himself to me, of course, because it's a small concern, a small group, the same people working the same doors, the same people are putting out all the different VIP passes. My name stuck out. They knew kind of to look for me. So Ken came over and he came and quickly lay the land.

A few minutes later, guests came in and that was people from the movie Street Trash. So James Lorenz, kind of important because this year James Lorenz was back. Jane, Eric Howe, Roy Frumpkees was there. I got to watch these people over that weekend. So the thing that was important about that was I was immediately made to feel welcome. I was drawn into the mystery rather quickly and it wasn't too chaotic. And so those things were big draws for me for that first wasteland.

But I find as the weekend continues when the people who invited me finally show up on Friday, John Kittley and a few others, they are so happy to see me and they start introducing me to people that are around. And what I notice is that just about everybody I meet is either in a band, there are either artists of graphic artists or their film artists or their writing books or they're making reference books and nonfiction. There's all this stuff that's happening. So I'm meeting so many people.

I'm talking to so many people. I've never had that many genre fans all at once that are truly engaged and fun and area dite and loquacious that by Sunday afternoon, I've lost my voice. And I will tell you that when I booked my flight to go to Cleveland that first time, I was pretty sure. I was pretty damn sure that this is going to be a one off that I was going to do this just to say that I did a tag, you're at fantastic, great to meet you guys and see you guys again and to meet these new folks.

It's been wonderful. But I figured it was just going to be a nice story to tell. But since 2016, I have been to Sydney, wasteland enough that I can walk to Cleveland Airport with my eyes closed and still make it to the baggage and find my way to the bus or to the rental car area. It has become something of a pilgrimage for me and I'm not alone. Obviously, there are many people who have been doing it for much longer that also feel very strongly about it, maybe even stronger than I do.

And we continue to meet. So thanks to the passage of time and the idea that everything is impermanent, I wanted to talk a little bit more about why I went back to Sydney, wasteland because it is a bit of a chore to get out there from where I am, it doesn't make a lot of sense quite honestly, but emotionally and most certainly does. And of course, as I mentioned before, I'm not the only person who feels that way. Now here comes the complicated part of the story.

Why is this so exciting and important and interesting to us? When I first did the show back at episode 4 and I was flush with the new excitement of finding something so unique and interesting and fun and small and somehow precious, there was a hard sell for me to talk to people about it already. And what I mean by that about it being a hard sell, it's not a hard sell for me to talk about it, it was a hard sell for people to understand it or be excited by it themselves.

It takes a certain type of person, I don't mean that in the latest way in any way shape or form, it's that this is a very shaggy dog kind of thing. And I think because of that shaggy dogness, it's actually why it's survived in the fashion that it has for 25 years with very little change and deviation to it and yet having this really strong fandom that keeps it alive and keeps it viable for everyone.

But if I was to describe it, you know, you're going to go to Strongville, Ohio, not Cleveland, you might see the lights of Cleveland, Ohio, but you're really essentially kind of in the woods at an airport hotel. In other words, the people who are there are essentially the airplane pilots and the hostesses all there staying overnight. You're going to be in a holiday in slash best Western that is in need of a little bit of a shampoo.

The food is, you're going to have to travel to get any food there. People who are going to be there are people who haven't worked in the industry for probably at least a decade. Some of them are still working, but most of them are not. The people who are going to be there are vendors who have been doing this for quite a bit of time. They're kind of like dead heads. They go from place to place, selling their wares just to be able to go to the next show.

And the movies that you're going to be talking about are ones that are being showcased, at least that have a guess there, are not mainstream fair. So there's a lot of things in there that are not necessarily super appealing to most people, or at least it doesn't sound like it's going to be stunning, right? That's the thing. I mean, people can get that, oh, it's going to be this kind of thing. Okay, it's more of a memorabilia show. People who are there are ex-actors, not necessarily actors.

Got it. There's not really great food there. Don't take the elevators. Got it. Okay. So you're traveling how many thousands of miles to do that? It does sound a little bit strange. So this is the thing that is kind of the conundrum about cinema wasteland. It's more of an emotional thing than it is something that's going to make a lot of logical sense. And yet that emotional thing can be incredibly intense.

So let me see if I can come up with a comparison that may help people understand why cinema wasteland matters. So when I was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania in the 80s, there were just two major social events that were there for teenagers at that time.

One of the things that were big social events was cruising, you know, blaring loud music out the car windows, even in the winter you just put on extra coats and you kept the windows open so that everybody could hear whatever music you were playing. Sometimes the time it was loud rock. And the other event that was happening was hanging out with a few dozen teenagers. Get this behind the dumpster in the Burger King parking lot.

So there was a Burger King at the corner of two major intersections and all the kids would congregate there, go in, grab some french fries or burger or drink or whatever, and then quickly go to the back area where there was a big old dumpster that hid everybody from plain sight. So you'd walk around, puddles of garbage juice and get to this private party that was behind a dumpster which kind of hid you from the rest of the world. Now in the early 80s, you know, vagrancy was a big worry.

Why are these teenagers congregating? I think that may still be a problem any time a teenager's congregate. Older folks get a little bit nervous. So they started cracking down on us, you know, police would show up at different places. And so one of the answers was, hey, the kids don't have anywhere to go. The only reason they're doing this hiding in a behind a dumpster in the dead of winter to hang out is because they don't have anywhere legitimate to hang out.

So adults in their wisdom decided that they were going to build a brand new community center. So they did a pretty cool, you know, state-of-the-art kind of community center where you could go there after school and play games, you could learn arts and crafts, you could maybe learn and take classes on different languages if you wanted to. Things about local plant life, whatever it was, basketball courts, there's stuff for you to do. So they cut the ribbon to the thing.

And for the first month, everybody's going there. But then all of a sudden, nobody's going there. You know, it is a teen center that is astonishingly unpopulated by teenagers, where all the teenagers go. Well, they went back behind the dumpster burger king. You know, we all went back there. You know, why? I can tell you, it's not for the decor. It certainly wasn't for the warmth that we had and it certainly wasn't for the occasional smell if you got downwind.

Now, sometimes places just have a unique energy. What makes them special, you can't logically quantify. There's nothing remarkable about that dumpster. It was like any other dumpster at any other eatery. It was nothing wrong with a community center, but you know what? That building just wasn't the right place. Whatever the right place means, it just wasn't that.

Something intangible, something unconscious, subconscious, something tied to an event that brought everyone back to that fast food parking lot. Whatever it was, the first kids that showed up at that Burger King parking lot, I mean, it wasn't even, our generation came up with that. We were like second generation dumpster hangers. You know, the older brother would bring the younger brother and then he would bring his friends and then the next generation started growing up.

So who knows what the first incident was? That was two or five people who first hung out at that dumpster and they said, you know, this was a lot of fun. Let's do this again tomorrow. Somehow that happened. There was this genesis moment and it doesn't make any sense. Who knows what it was, but I can almost guarantee you that it had to do with the fine art of shooting the shit. Alright.

The fine art of shooting the shit, hanging around laughing and playing with friends and talking about things that really excite you, you enjoy so much, add something to your life. You know, you can build stuff like the community center with the specific intention of making it a sacred place like that. And I will say that there's just something strange about these places, sacred place, holy place, whatever that we just have to make a pilgrimage to.

You can try and make one, but no amount of money is going to guarantee that that building is going to have any kind of personal allure. You know, there are plenty of big conventions out there. They do really well for themselves. And I go to those as well, but when it comes down to a place that I think is really special, I go back to this weird dingy place in Ohio, occasionally it snows most of the time it rains, most of the time it's cold, whether it be in the spring or in the fall.

Whatever made that place attractive, I can tell you one thing. It happened organically. It wasn't planned from the very beginning, it didn't have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen, it didn't have a corporation behind it. It didn't have a superstar behind it. It just happened. Those things happen. You can't plan sacred places. I think last time I looked at fans.com, there's an online fan convention database.

They showed that there are multiple horror conventions that are happening across the United States every weekend. And most of these conventions are very similar. In fact, the template that there is of cinema wasteland is not wildly different from any other convention they're going to. It's really scale. Every one of them is going to have featured guests. There's going to be Q&A, hopefully, although I will say some of the bigger shows don't have nearly as much Q&A as they used to.

One of the things that is unique to cinema wasteland is that they do show movies, 16 millimeter film every hour that the show is open. And it goes into the wee hours after the vending room closes. Of course, the vending room is one of those things. It's the majority of real estate at any size of convention. So the one that cinema wasteland has is a pretty decent size. It certainly dwarves the rest of the convention. But you have some that are just immense.

I used to go to Wondercon when it was held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. And the vending room and the exhibition halls was a 500,000 square foot area. Yeah, it's huge. It's like it has its own moon. Now that can be a very entertaining thing, but it can also be something that is somewhat overwhelming. And it certainly is something where you might not get that personal conversation that you're looking for.

You think that the fine art of shooting the shit is one of the big draws that there are to cinema wasteland. If I were to make a comparison, big genre conventions like Days of the Dead and Wondercon, they're like mega churches. You know what? Mega churches can be fun, I'm sure. But my style is more like the tent revival down by the river. I don't need a family of ministers that are all wearing matching suits up on a 10 foot high stage. You know, bathed in concert lights.

They're all doing these satellite broadcasts of their hymns. You know, that's good for some folks. But what I want is I want a crazy motherfuckin' Pentecostal revival. I want a preacher who's sweat through his fucking shirt. You can see his wife beat her underneath it, his belly's hanging over his belt. He jumps off of the stage and he has to dance the Holy Spirit out and he's knocking people over while he's doing it. You give me a congregation that fucking interrupts the sermon.

You know, get people who are going to yell out and their hosanas and shout and use it and get up and dance. They're going to laugh. You know, that kind of thing of unruly passion really does excite me. I want soul, right? I want passion. I want a little madness. I did not know that it had a name back in 2015, but I did find out that the name was Cinema Wasteland. There's no special photo ops. There's not VIP rooms.

There's not special dinners that you can pay $100 to sit and watch John Carpenter fiddle with egg-free young. Yeah. There's none of that. What's the draw? What makes it a sacred place? Remind you that I'm the guy who, one of the great social events in my hometown, is hanging out at a dumpster behind Burger King. I almost guarantee that it might not have been a dumpster. There was a sacred place that made absolutely no sense in your life.

In fact, I'd love to hear what that is, so feel free to write me after the show. There was somewhere that you went. You go to places that are just desolate, junk-ridden places. That's where kids went to make out. That's where kids went to hang out. Part of it is that we couldn't be found. Nobody was looking for us. We were free to act foolishly. We were able to listen to our music as loud as we wanted. Talk about whatever we wanted for hours.

One of the things that I think is fun about Cinema Wasteland and talking about this communication is that Cinema Wasteland is kind of a place where folks like me have a shorthand around our weird beliefs. You can say, I love big-foot movies and you're not going to have someone go, why? And then you have to explain. Why you like big-foot movies so much? You don't have to have the conversation stop where you go.

I've been really into category 3 Hong Kong horror movies recently and have people go, what? What is that? Can you explain what the hell that is? You don't have anybody looking at you like you're insane because you've seen every movie Joe Demado did. Maybe they look at you like you're a little bit insane for seeing every movie that Joe Demado did. But it's done in a loving way. There is something cool that people already have a certain understanding.

Your weird, I'm weird, we're all weird, we're weird together. We don't have to spend any wasted time explaining why we're fucking weird. At this silly hotel, I found a place where all the kids like me hang out, hiding in plain sight. Everybody that I meet at Wasteland knows what they're talking about, but they're able to champion their older horror films. But they also talked about recent movies and current trends. They stayed topical. They talk about foreign horror films.

These are people who are excitable. I love excitable boys. And if you look closely, it makes sense that this is where I would find this tribe. You know, large conventions, they're full of collectors as well, sure. And I have to say that I had my misgivings about going to Wasteland because I thought oh man, if it's more like a swap meet, I'm going to be bored senseless because you can't get any good conversations. Usually the banter of an archeological dig, he'll find it those kind of things.

But even though these large conventions have the toys and the autographs and the photographs and so many people there for resale value, what we have at Cinema Wasteland is people are connecting more about the joy than it is the thing that's in front of them. You know, I connect with the fans who love the genre so much. They can't remain spectators. The genre compels them to go out and create something. And who knows what it is that they're going to create. They may have a podcast like I do.

They may write a book. They may just paint, just paint. That's a huge thing to be able to do. They make t-shirts. They have bands that play all-har music. There are so many ways that people contribute back into the wonderful river nile that har is. We add the genre in whatever way we can. We feed the beast because the beast feeds us. And so Cinema Wasteland's where the crazy folks go.

This time around, I think we were really talking about spending time with each other and the joy that it was to be able to have this ability to sit and let our passions fly. There were so many people that were walking around with microphones and cameras trying to capture just as I tried to capture the lightning. So I wanted to do a little bit of an experiment here. There were a lot of people that I could interview but what I wanted to do was to still it down to three separate interviews.

One would be with someone who has been at every one of the Cinema Wastelands to give their opinion of what it's about and what it's like. And then another set of interviews with a couple that met at Cinema Wasteland. And they've been going there for several years. There are people who found the love of it and came back and are now part of the rich tapestry. And then I wanted to find someone who is new to the show. So I found someone who was coming to Cinema Wasteland for the second time.

So they got bit by the bug and this is them coming back. They had to return. I wanted to interview someone who is new to Wasteland. And you know, it didn't take long for me to decide to speak to Nivirania. Now I met Niv six months earlier at her first Wasteland. It was in October of 2023. She was part of Lloyd Kaufman's trauma on Taraj. And if you've ever been to Cinema Wasteland, you know that trauma takes over this corner.

If there's anybody who still understands Bally who in this day and age Lloyd Kaufman does. So he brings all sorts of characters there. Niv being one of them. And so we spent some time talking and we hit it off immediately. Niv has a very good knowledge of horror. And she's a big horror fan. So six months ago she was at this on Taraj with Lloyd Kaufman. Six months later she was back and that was enough for me to want to interview her.

So Niv is an actress, a model, and also an unapologetic jugalow. A first question, because people may not know. Tell us what a jugalow is. Are there fans of the insane clown posse? You dress up and everything when you go? Absolutely, every time. How many times have you seen them? Oh man, at least 30 times now. Have you ever been arrested while going to see them? No, I have. OK, fair enough. It's up surprisingly, no, no, I haven't. So you're a horror fan, lifelong horror fan? OK, great.

So my question's going to be about what your first kiss with horror was. The movie or the book that you saw that when you saw that you said, I'm dedicated to this for the rest of my life. Hmm. There's part of me that really wants to say scream. OK. Because I really love that when I was growing up, really, really got into it, watched it a whole bunch of times over. Still watch it, still love it. I didn't really super fall into horror though.

I don't think until I started secretly watching a monster vision when I was younger, I would put on like cartoon network or something like that and then have like the back channel going to TNT. I watched Joe Bob, so I was like when I first really got my first taste. And I just remember watching all that crazy stuff. I think basket case may have been the first one that I really watched where I was like, what the hell am I watching? But I was so intrigued and I wanted more.

I think that's kind of when I started going back every time. How old were you at that time? Oh, maybe nine. Nine? How did it make you feel when you watched? Ah, sometimes it scared me. I will say like sometimes I got scared over like really silly things I feel like. But yeah, I just kept, I kept only more. I kept, I was always craving to see what was behind like the forbidden door I guess.

Plus I also got excited, you know, watching something that my parents wouldn't let me watch, you know, and can I, can I, you know, change the channel quick enough to throw around. So it was almost more that I was more afraid of my parents than I was with what I was actually watching. The only thing that really I think truly scared me when I was younger was when I saw signs and the moment, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I, you know, you know, you don't expect it when it happens. Man, that, that, that kept me from sleeping for like two weeks. I had to sleep with my lights on. Did you have a corruptor? Was there a person who was a corruptor or? Oh, absolutely. Both of my brothers. Yeah. My older brother is only four years older than me and, you know, he was the one that would kind of like explore and like, I would watch a lot of the stuff that he watched.

And then my eldest brother, you know, had not lived with our family for a long time. Because, you know, he had moved out, had a family of his own. He was like an old punk dude. So he would come over and just be like, oh, if you ever seen this shit, this is fucking flying. Like, mom would hate this, but here have it, you know, he was, he was definitely like the corruptor, you know? I wanted a skateboard and my mom told me no, and he got me a skateboard and my mom was so mad.

I was curious about certain music. I wanted a Dynastoneal CD, you know, and maybe like here have the CDs and, you know, don't tell mom. So I would say that he was definitely the corruptor in that regard. So, do you have it like a specific time when you decided, you know what? I don't care what these other people want. I'm going to do what I want and I'm going to follow my own lead until I find my tribe. Honestly, I was going to sound so silly.

I think when I finally like decided to like become my own true self, I'm like really like go kind of had to be really when I went to an ICP show because I kind of went as an outsider and I was watching. I was spectating. I was totally watching people and I was like, look at these people, you know, I was completely judgmental and not only did they put on a great show, the fans were the nicest people. They're super respectful. They weren't mean, you know, nobody was being rude.

Everybody was talking to me. They were just so friendly. I've never felt so included. And you know, I felt so terrible about the way that I'd perceive these people. I was like, okay, I get it. I understand why people are part of this. It is one of those things where like they embrace the darker side of things, you know, they call it horror core for a reason. I really enjoyed that aspect of it and just being able to be into whatever the fuck. It was like, yeah, that's fucking awesome.

Like, you know, fucking embrace it. So like, no matter what you do, you're always going to be met with like somebody cheering you on basically. So like, you can't really do, you can't really do wrong. So I don't know. Did you find a kind of clan through horror as well? I did. Somewhat through trauma. I actually found a handful of people through a bar that I used to work at that was kind of focused on a horror called the Crack Fox and St. Louis.

And I met a lot of really cool people that, you know, would do indie horror movie screens there. You know, just cool people that would talk to me about like, you know, stuff like night of the living dead or whatever. You know, sometimes they'd bring me like DVDs. I would go out and actually like one of my friends that I made there actually got me to go out to theaters. And that's, I still go out to theaters regularly. I try to do that like once a week.

We would actually go out and see a horror movie. And you know, they would pretty much always be my favorite thing. What do you think horror does for you? What is it that makes you want to come back to it? Is it weird to say there's almost like a, I have a weird desire to find something that can truly terrify me at the point where I can't sleep. It's only happened like once, but as an adult, I should say, and I can watch that movie now. So it doesn't bother me.

So now I'm looking for the next thing. What is it? Sinister. Ah, yeah. The lawnmower or the whole thing. The whole thing. I was terrified by the ghoul. I was very terrified by the ghoul. And I think that my fear that's associated with Sinister, I've actually talked to a lot of people about this. I think a lot of people that were raised in very Christian homes and like my parents would tell me, this is so terrible to tell a child.

I'm going to say, if you don't believe in Jesus, you're going to burn in the blazes when I was like five. And I still think about that line. You're going to burn in the blazes. So when they're talking about this curse, where if you look at it, you would just see it, you're basically cursed to go to this hell dimension. It kind of threw me back to that. And I was having nightmares. I was like, oh, God, I'm going to hell. It freaked me out real bad. So this is not films, part.

That was really intense, I will say. But just the whole being a big rule reminded me so much of the weird inner fear of going to hell, but I still have even though I don't necessarily believe that it is. It's like a scar you can't get rid of it completely. I will say that's probably another thing that really got me into horror is honestly just truly like my super religious upbringing. I got to go see the passion of the Christ when it came out, even though I was like 12, which is hilarious.

Field Trip 2 is not a film. That's whatever. I think one of the things that has really brought me into it was reading Dante's Inferno. It's incredible. I feel like Dante's Inferno probably is like the scariest thing that I can think of. And if somebody was able to make a film of that and make it realistic enough, that would probably scare me shitless. That would be too much. So we're talking about, we're here at Cinema Wasteland. It has a reputation.

So I actually was brought here by Jessa Flux, who has a booth here. We were in a film together called Triple X-Mess, which was a really fun time. And the movie was really great, so you should definitely check it out. She had been doing some work with Troma and the director of the film that we were in had movie that was streaming on Troma now. So she came up and she was being a Troma and she was kind of like, oh, I think they need a Troma and I was like, oh, I loved it. Volunteer.

Volunteer. Volunteer. And I really connected a lot of the people up here. I really liked the, this is a very nice community here. I feel like where everybody is just very open and sweet to each other. It's not like a huge convention. Not like I would say, like, poor hug. You're not going to go around the halls and just talk to everybody. Here I feel like it's more of a constant stopping, talking to people and everybody's polite and happy like interacts with us.

Other places, you know, it's not going to be as much. It's going to be more so like poking around at vendors and like creeping around and you know, getting your things signed or whatever, but this one is actually more like fans becoming friends, I guess. And I like that. I like the community aspect of it. I've met so many people that I've since those last weeks and I still talk to almost all daily cases. Nearly everybody that works with Troma booth is just super laid back and really cool.

Like because they're really fun to be around. It's almost like a second family. I feel very comfortable around them. I genuinely think they have the best interests for me. It's cool. We can just talk about movies and be cakes and other weird stuff that we're into and everybody's like, oh, that's cool. Or even better than I feel like that's disgusting. But yeah, no bad vibes here at all. It's been wonderful.

I mentioned before that the key thing that I look for when I go to cinema wasteland or really any convention for that matter is that I want to have conversations. I want to start conversations with people. Now when you're dealing with cinema wasteland, your wish will be fulfilled if you have that wish like I do and maybe a little bit too much, it's like drinking out of a fire hose.

Our late night Algonquin round table of horror, which is just anybody who wants to come in to jump in and start having discussions about movies, can get pretty big. I mean, we can get 20 plus people to table and have a dozen conversations that are zipping in and out of each other. It's a lot like jazz musicians back in the day where they sit around cutting heads. They just start to improvise.

That means that there are people that I get to talk with and I have a great time with and we can laugh and everything, but we don't necessarily talk outside of that milieu. And such is the case with Dave and Amy Ronic. Now Dave and Amy, I met them I think in year two of my time and we've had many fun conversations over the years because both of them are formidable hargiques. They can go into some seriously deep dives.

Now I can tell you about that side of them, but I've never sat down and really talked with Dave and Amy about, say, themselves or their love for the genre or what they think of cinema wasteland. Both of them have been attending wasteland for about half of its 25 years. So they seem like a pretty good representation of wastelanders that are somewhat veterans. Plus, I'm fascinated by them because on the surface, they look like the straightest folks you'd ever meet.

This could easily fit in at a sporting event instead of something like cinema wasteland. Now one of my friends jokingly said that they are too good looking for wasteland, but all you need to do is spend a few minutes or even one minute speaking to David and Amy and you'll know that they are in the right place. Hello, this is David Ronic. I work for a software company. I've been into going to a convention since 2005.

My first convention was cinema wasteland and I've gone here twice a year ever since. Amy Ronic and I've been coming to cinema wasteland since 2008 and I'm just as a big fan of horror and I've been that way since I was a kid. My first experience with horror was when I was around 8 years old. I remember I was coming in. It was a summertime and both of my parents were just sitting down and on TV. It was the start of a black and white movie.

I remember when I walked into the family room I was basically making comments about the fact that I didn't feel like watching a black and white movie because it was ready around probably like 8 o'clock at night or something like that and I was just ready to chill out and go to bed.

But I do remember that shortly a little bit later the credits started rolling and night of the living dead showed up on the screen so that immediately peaked my interest and from that point forward I was completely engulfed in the movie and I wanted to then see everything that was related to zombies.

I was obsessed with that and my parents realized how interested I was so they basically would go to the video store find movies that were either made for kids kind of like a monster squad and things like that and then they would rent them for me and bring them home so you know they could you know give me more of a feel. Then obviously I was diving into things like universal monsters and stuff like that and it just went from there.

So when I was a little kid my family all watched Psycho together as a family and it was like it was just so much fun like we were all like joking about it at the end and like we my I remember my brother tried to go to the bathroom and my parents went in and turned off the light and started making the cycle noise and so it was just kind of like a big fun community type thing you know.

So then after that I became obsessed with like fun like scary movies but they were like so I watched Jaws and I actually loved Jaws and then from there like we just watched like all these different black and white movies and on Saturday I didn't have cable so on

Saturday afternoon they would have like a horror movie and it was fun to watch that with my family because like it kind of gave me even if it was really scary it gave me time to kind of like recover before bedtime so I can handle it and so then I kind of got into it more and more and then as I got older my friends got into it so it was almost like a big community type feel like we can watch a scary movie together and it's just like fun to just kind of experience that as a group so.

That's pretty interesting. Most people don't have their whole family sit down and watch Psycho with them. Yeah. So you had a horror show that you watched on Saturday. Do you have a horror host?

No well actually so there was big chuck and little John in Cleveland so they would show like some fun movies not always horror but they'd always show fun movies but no it would just be I think it was like CBS would have like a just like a Saturday afternoon movie so it would always just be something like cats eye I always remember watching cats eye with my family and like that little troll always freaked me out but yeah so it was fun.

Did you find that you had a conspirator who was your culprit of the spirit of it? Somebody get you into it was the whole family. Well I was like the whole family because my parents actually liked it like when we were younger my parents liked horror but as I got older my brother I have an older brother and he was like really in a horror so then like when I got to high school like he was watching like

Don of the dead and like last house in the left and all that so then I ended watching all those movies and started getting deeper into horror from that and then actually then when I met Dave he got me into even more underground and introduced me to Sima Laceland and so then like and just opened my whole world up with more horror movies so.

Well for me I mean my big deep dive was actually by myself being an only child we had the movie channel and on the movie channel in the late 80s early 90s Jobab breaks that is so I met him. Yeah so I would actually like either my parents would be out and I would have a babysitter over my babysitter would let me watch Jobab and that's where I started to experience basketball and all that seriously deep dive stuff and basketball case terrified me as

a kid but that feeling I absolutely loved so then I kept chasing that feeling and you know I would go to the video store whether it be a mom and pop which is usually what I tried to go to or blockbuster I would go into the horror section and basically you know find

the craziest covers, Brent that movie completely blind or look for the movies that had like little stickers on the side that said not suitable for people under 17 or whatever and then I would rent those so from there you know I accidentally rented house by the edge of

the park I was very young when I saw that and again you know experiencing that stuff for the first time was shocking but it just made me keep wanting more and more and then as I got older more my friends started to get in the horror so we would end up just like

running movies on Fridays or Saturday nights getting pizza hanging out and watching them is so you talked about chasing the feeling you know what the feeling is it's tough I mean I guess like the first true feeling that I can remember being completely terrified was

when I saw pet cemetery for the first time which I mean it's an older movie I'm not older I'm newer movie I guess and I was a little older when I saw it but but that movie horrified me so bad that like just the feeling of that complete fear and dread for whatever

reason was like so interesting to me because like I was having trouble sleeping and everything else and I'm like how could a movie that I know is fake impact me that way you know and then again I was just trying to like constantly live for that fear and yeah I've been always

chasing it ever since but you know nowadays we're pretty desensitized so well that's something that I wanted to talk about as well because I've watched you know over a thousand movies being very conservative about the content of the amount that is it's way over that I'm sure but you know I've no longer go expecting to get scared so that's not the key to the movies for me it's surprise what do you think it is for you that you're looking for?

this point there are some movies that still impact me a little bit here and they're surprised and I guess it is a surprise because like I'll go into a thinking I'm not going to be afraid or creeped out like paranormal activity when I saw that I actually yeah it frightened

me and I wasn't expecting it so I think it caught me off guard where I was more open to being frightened and like we you know it also depends where you watch it and things like that too like we watch Lake Mungo outside in the dark on our deck at our house and

we were completely terrified watching it we watched it a few years later inside the house with the lights on and whatnot not you know because we were afraid or anything but it was a totally different experience and it didn't impact us the way it had done the first time

you watched it so like you never know but yeah things like that surprise you and that is still kind of what I'm hunting down but yeah and you you mentioned that it was more familial in your your house all the it you laughed you laughed through psycho with mom and dad right

so what is it that you look for is it something that is like trying to go to a darkness or you trying to find something that is exciting I just like the excitement of it like in just like Dave said like that just a surprise element like you know what are we going to

expect and sometimes like the story lines are just so unique and in different it's just it's kind of like it's fun it's a fun experience to see like what you're going to get into but I mean there are still movies that will scare me a little bit like like the vanishing

and that like the original like the Dutch I mean like that really terrifies me I think I think about that yeah I think about that one all the time that one stuck with me and it's just like something I never thought of and it's just like it's still like groups

me out that's one that I talk about when people go oh the a 24 stuff and I do these movies have existed forever the idea of dread or you don't have to have anything jump at you just the idea of something so realistic yeah that it just gets you in the stomach and

the fact that we're following the killer as much as we're following the obsessed guy yeah and I was just like wow that's freaking cool yeah so I see a unit as a medical supply company hat on you and I believe when I was walking by I heard some impassioned conversations

about return to living dead so you want to talk a little bit about that movie and what it means you guys yeah sure so you know return to living dead was probably like the introduction of myself to horror punk death rock and that whole genre of music that I had no clue existed

but always probably wanted to have exists until I saw that movie so when we watched it for the for when I watch it for the first time and I heard the songs in that movie I immediately had to go and look up all the bands and hunt down the soundtrack and then from there deep

dive into bands like the cramps the damned the flesh eaters and then what actually is one of my favorite bands of all time 45 great so I was actually just talking with my wife few days ago because I told her that without return of living dead introducing me to that

music I actually probably would have never met her because I met her at a punk rock bar and the reason why I was at that bar is because I was friends with quite a few people in the Cleveland area that are in the punk rock scene and I met quite a few of those individuals

actually at a concert in 2005 for 45 great because my friends been open for them so it's just kind of funny how it all plays in where like I could tell her that I met you because of return of living dead and again you know that movie changed my life not only because

I met my wife through that but you know it got me really more deep in the horror and the music in general and yeah it was just all senses how about you how do you feel about that movie what is it that you keep coming back to it oh it's just like I don't know just

like a great storyline it's like a great soundtrack it's just a fun movie it's a movie that you can watch with friends you can watch you know like just together like it's just I just love that movie but I never saw it until I met him and then he introduced me to that

movie and you were I was like this is a really awesome movie we watched it with all of our friends and yeah it was just it was just a fun time I just like that movie yeah got a funny story about that too as well so back in the 90s I was renting that movie so often from

Blackbuster like literally almost every week that I went into Blackbuster around 1998 and was like okay look up like the last three years in the computer system and see how many times other people besides me run it this and if you can sell it to me I would be appreciative

and whatever so they actually looked it up and only like four other people had to run it in between that time so they sold it to me for $10 and it's like the hard shell VHS case you know that was on display on the shelf so like I still own that return of living

that that I was always renting for many many years so just having that experience and you know being able to own it now being like the original one I watch it's it's pretty shocking and that's pretty amazing so we get to cinema wasteland yeah and both of you had you done

conventions before it was your first convention yeah so this is my first one yeah so with that what were you expecting when you walked in the door what made you come really what it was was the guess now I don't remember who were the guests at the first one but you know just graduating

college and getting my first job we were able to have like a little bit of extra spending money so we heard about this convention and obviously like the same group of people that were into like the punk rock death rock stuff we were all like let's go to cinema wasteland and check it out so we

came here and we're just completely floored at like the vendors because we had no idea that there is like this you know underground scene where people are doing art and making t-shirts and you know you can buy movie posters and then meet actors and actresses from some of these movies so that

really like threw me for a loop and from that point forward I was like I can never miss a cinema wasteland and after going here so many years like you become friends with everybody which you know it doesn't happen in a lot of other like niche you know groups I feel but everybody's like so

open and easy to talk to like and inviting that you know you come out here you start talking to some vendors and then they introduce you to their friends and then you become friends with their friends and it's really nice yeah so that's one of the things getting to talk with people

yeah just having that openness what was it that surprised you about coming here where you came here obviously you knew that we're gonna be people from the movies and stuff like that but what was it that made you say I need to start talking to people around here I just felt like you know

everybody was just so friendly and open and it like they're so passionate about like the movies that they watch and why they like it and it's you know when I first started coming here I felt like I was a rookie like I didn't know a lot of the movies and it really opened me up to all that like

this whole genre of like more movies I've never seen so and it's just it's really just a great environment to get to know people and find out what they like and why they like it and then they recommend movies and it's just it's just fun that you have this whole community of people and

everybody's so friendly and so like open and willing to talk to people and even if you're shy I feel like people are still willing to like be open and talk to you you know did you find yourself shy at first yeah I was like really shy but because I just felt like I didn't know like I didn't know

all these movies and everybody else seemed to be in the know and I just kind of felt like out of place at first and then but one as soon as I came here like everybody was just so open and willing to like introduce me to things like well if you've never seen this then you've got to see this

movie or you've got to check this out or check you know you've got to meet this person so it was it really opened me up I felt like it was a really good communal like experience here you mentioned people telling you hey you should see this movie was that a big draw did it really

enrich where you went and it changed the avenues you were looking for movies oh for sure I mean for me like I was going to like you know like blackbuster or a family video or something like that and you know they have some you know or selections but they didn't have the level like underground

where like this convention has and I felt like this this just has like a wealth of movies that you would never find anywhere else and it just really opened me up to horror in that whole different way how about yourself yeah for me it was like it was especially like after talking with more and more

people I mean this was almost before like vinegar syndrome and sever and and stuff like that so like I would hear things about movies and I would have to go on touring sites I'm I'm gonna download them and then burn them to like a DVD that I so I can actually watch it because

you know there was no easy way of accessing some of these movies and you know even takes me back like when I was in college there's a mom and pop video store by me and I was like the only person in my group of friends in college at like tour movies pretty much so I would pretty much just go

to this family place and rent different movies go on bloody disgusting or you know some websites to try to find out like what movies are out there to hunt for and like for me flesh eater was like always one of those like pinnacle movies that I had to find because Bill Hansman was in it and it

was you know obviously tied to night living dead and always talked about as being such like a insane horrible traumatizing movie and I I found a rental place by me in college and I was able to actually watch it and then like having that experience where I hunted it down found it put it

in my VHS player and watched it was like just such a I don't know like religious experience I guess yeah it has a heft I like the first time that I saw snuff and found snuff on a VHS and I swear that the tape was heavier than other tapes and I picked it up it's like oh my god it's snuff my

holy grail at the moment when I first started finally getting into trying to find the more unknown films was last house on dead end street that was like one of those that you heard about and then when you finally saw it was like almost too muddy to even watch but it meant something it was like

I found this thing so you get that here at cinema wasteland where did you get it before you started coming here again I mean the internet was kind of in its infancy stages so I subscribed to the fangoria and gore zone and some of those magazines and really like it was just going to

different video stores walking through the aisles finding what looked interesting and sometimes it was a win sometimes it was a loss but again it was still an experience you know like and you would take it rent it go home with yourself for some friends and you could even get a good laugh

out of it if it wasn't as terrifying or crazy as you thought it was going to be I mean I know Amy's got a fun experience with a shot on video movie where she rented it blindly and now it's one of her favorites what one truth or dare yes yes so when I was in good cover yes it is so I actually

grew up like two blocks away from a little mom and pop video store so my best friend she lived two streets away from me so her and I every weekend would go down to that little video store when we would run something we'd always look at whatever had the craziest cover and like that's what we

would run but we ended up renting truth or dare and that became like one of our favorites because it was just so like cheesy and it was just a good one to laugh at and but I like watch that so much I rented it constantly kind of like the day with this return living dead I would rent it all the time

and then the video started closing and I ended up being like I ended up buying that movie I was so worried that that was going to be gone I like rode my bike up there and there were like nobody nobody wants to see but you can have it so I still have that me just today yeah that's fantastic what's

your favorite moment that you've had so far oh wow there's been so many I mean I've got to really say though it's just walking around and talking to everybody because like we've joked like over the years since we've got gotten to know more and more people it's actually tough to just make it

through the one big loop of the room because you run into so many people that you can just talk for hours with and that experience is not something that we have in everyday life and you know we get it twice a year so we want to make sure that we can absorb every moment every second

you know that we have here and you know the guests are awesome especially because they always like can't always pull them like a lot of guests that are for some lesser known movies that we grew up with at love but yeah it's it's really the camaraderie and being friends with everybody just

you know we've made so many friends through like well cinema wasteland and just all of our conventions that like you know they've become like really dear friends of ours and so we see these we see the wasteland family more often than some of our other friends and we have just you

know that similar interests it's just something that we can talk to that we can't always talk to with everybody else like not everybody else has that same interest or knowledge but we're you know our friends but you know it's just it's just so unique here I mean we just we just

it's like our family a little convainty so the last interview that I want to share with you is the guy who got me in this mess in the first place John Kelly that seems hard to believe that it's already been seven years since I first met

John you know it kind of feels like yesterday and at other times it feels like we've known each other forever John is one of the people who has been with cinema wasteland since day one he was here on the first show and cinema wasteland is just part of a much longer journey that he's been doing

in the world of the harajana he's been deeply entrenched in fandom since he was a kid and he was at some of the earliest conventions like the first fangoria convention in New York City so he has been entrenched in this and lives and breeds it and he has fun with it so John's been writing for

horror hound magazine for many years he's written a book called Discover the Horror and he's one of the contributors to the Discover the Horror podcast but most importantly John is one of the great champions of horror fandom he's a historian of horror who welcomes everyone into the tribe if

they're willing to learn if they're willing to talk if they're willing to listen if they're willing to share he'll have them in and he's wise enough to know that there's still more for him to learn as much as there is for anybody else obviously you've been a fan of cinema wasteland for a while

how many shows have you been to now all of them I've been here since the beginning of September 2000 and I have not missed one in almost 24 years 25 years almost so there was a time before cinema wasteland and what precisely were you doing at that point we were doing a few conventions namely

fangoria weekend of horrors in New York I've known Ken for a while and we'd see him at shows and he would always bitch about the current show and say he's gonna start his own show one of these days and we'd laugh and see him at the next show and go through the same routine and then it was a world

in August of 1999 we went up to see him after we got set up and he gave us a flyer for the first cinema wasteland and we were like holy shit he's actually going to do it and yeah that was September of 2000 and it's like no other show you're gonna find what were your expectations of

cinema wasteland when you first heard about it um I because it was Ken Ken had been a dealer since they invented them I think he we had confidence that he was gonna run it from a dealer aspect he knew what dealers go through so some shows dealers are they pay for the room and then that's all they

they're in and knowing it's almost but Ken's a dealer so he knew and he treated the dealers really well it was well organized there was plenty of stuff to do for fans coming in and the funny thing is is it hasn't changed at all in all those years so you're you're at the the first wasteland

and what was would you say was the first thing that you went oh wow this might actually work it felt like a different convention it felt more um everybody come with you the door or really die hard fans it was a dawn of the dead reunion and Ken had I cannot even remember how many

guests from the show um everybody was super friendly a lot they were more approachable than the shows we had been to where the guests would be carted out after q a day and you get a few minutes to get it hopefully get a signature this these guys were sitting in the dealer room basically

um we had a chance to walk up and talk to them it was more personable um so that right from the beginning seemed different which was a nice change you talked about how you were going to some conventions before you actually ever got to send a wasteland so what was it like before you were

starting to go to conventions uh what was it like to be a fan what were you doing as a fan well my first convention my first horror convention was in April of 88 fangosho in in california which first time i ever met anybody famous so it just mind boggling walking through the lobby and

there's george maro standing there talking to fans and uh riding mcdowell and just unbelievable um so i was a fan obviously a fan first and we tried to go to at least one or two conventions a year and this was back when there was only one or two conventions a year not like now and then at some

point it's the term dealer obviously references to like being a drug dealer and the whole thing is that a drug dealer becomes a dealer to support his own habit that is exactly for vendors or dealers at a movie convention because i always said well if i make a hundred bucks if i spend a hundred bucks

i really didn't spend any money that's the kind of mind thinking that you do so it just started with that if i could make money then i could spend more money and buy and increase my own collection and buy stuff um plus you get to meet so many different people because you're at the table people

are coming up to you you make a lot of new friends and you see the same vendors over and over again over time um and there's people that i've met at wasteland 30 or 20 something years ago that i'm still friends with today so it continues so when did you start writing so you started as a

fan and then you started going to conventions you became a vendor or or to do a writing before that um i probably i might have done a little bit of writing prior to but in 1998 i started my website kitley's crypt um and that was mainly just to have an outlet for my thoughts i didn't really have a

plan i just wanted to be able to get on my soapbox and talk about what i like what i didn't like and the in the early days it was a lot of DVD announcements or laser disk announcements what was coming out the longer i went than the more technically the more writing i would actual writing

i would be doing instead of little news bits um and i honestly i don't remember the exact year when i started writing for horror hound they used to come here to this show Nathan and Aaron we started horror hound and i remember the show that they brought the premier issue

and he had Aaron asked me to to write for him or to write something for him and i'm like no i'm i'm working on my site i'd rather do that and then i don't know how many years later four couple of years later they asked me again if i wanted to do a column and by that time i'm like

i would be dumb not to so again at the whole point is to get people to watch different movies to expand their knowledge of the genre and i figured a column in a big magazine like horror hound would be the perfect opportunity so i've been doing that now ever since horror hound just had their

one hundredth issue which is mind boggling but it's still fun and i still get to reach fans to hope to get them to watch some different movies that they might not have heard before so there's a whole thing about uh cinema wasteland that i talk about which is uh if you're trying to

explain this to somebody they're gonna look at you really strange like why are you here to talk is like one of the weirdest things to say to somebody and where are you gonna go i'm gonna be at this old holiday in type building we're not even in Cleveland when strong's built we're on the side of

Cleveland so what is it that you can say makes it so unique the the difference the difference that i found at wasteland and this is gonna kind of be hard to say without sounding either an elitist or condescending and that's not my intention but when we do a horror hound that is a specific

type of crowd that they're bringing usually more modern day a lot of Freddy Jason Michael Myers but wasteland goes beyond that and it goes beyond a certain era it specializes in the driving the exploitation area time horror sci-fi but all in that kind of outside of mainstream Hollywood

when you come to wasteland and you bring up some Euro Horror star from the 60s most people are gonna know what you're talking about you bring that out of but all the shows maybe not as much um so i i don't want to say that the wasteland fans are more educated but they like that certain kind of outside of the mainstream collectic and that was a nice very refreshing thing to come to this show and someone here someone say something about a Erica Blot movie and you're like holy shit you know

who Erica Blot is and it just stems from there so it's a different crowd um they're all diehard fans they know who you're talking about you know who they're talking about so you have a difference connection at this show then you do it a lot of other shows did you have an outlet before you started

going to conventions were uh were you uh pen pal with people what was it he did yeah that's that's that was saying i used to tape trade movies with a bunch of people so i i did that with about six or seven different people from england canada from australia because that's how you

you and and corresponded with people just pen pals because i didn't have anybody that was obsessed about horror movies as much as i was so you have to find your tribe and you did that in the old days through pen pals or reaching them through ads and fangos and you would build up that that connection

with these people and they you had that you had the way to you can express about your films before the internet before all that stuff this convention or any convention these people got to get together and then you have that same conversation except now it's in person at a hotel somewhere in the

middle of nowhere and again wasteland was always different in that aspect but technically for me i've made sure that i've done that at every show you have to have that connection of that gathering of people where you can literally even though there's a lot of joking and and ribbing and stuff

like that we have serious conversations about film filmmakers even if it's as a silly as what's better american were well for the howling it's talking about film and it's talking about film with a passion a serious passion that you can't get anywhere else but i think it's intriguing at is that

most of the people that i know here are obsessive sure but they're also creators it's like yes they can't they can't be content just watching even though the thing that gets us all together is watching everybody here seems to be obsessed in a positive way in other words you have specialists

in every place so who are the people that you go to that kind of even out your understanding of horror so there's maybe someone that you go this is a specialist in Asian films this is the specialist if i want to know something about geolo i go to this guy that's a tough question

there's a lot of there's certain people that i know like ryan smith who works for dream haven is just completely nuts over the hong kong cinema i used to be in the hong kong stuff back in the 90s and got kind of out of it garing more towards horror talking to him at any given time brings back

memories of when i was back in there and i remember in these names now um but i think that's i don't know if there's certain people that have specific specialties so to speak um because of this one it's kind of like all one melting pot we're all and and that's the again that's another great

thing about conversations as we're talking and someone says oh well you know those mexican horror films and you may have someone off to the side but wait a minute what what are you talking about and now you've just sucked him into the conversation and i'll heal me out seeking new movies and

the other thing in the conversations is no matter how long you've been watching movies there are a ton of stuff you have not seen so there are multiple times during the conversation someone whips out their phone or a notebook and go okay what was the name of that movie and you go from there so i

don't know if i have a like specific people for specific for specific things but it's it's kind of like altogether we're all in that same discussion i do i don't know half a dozen shows a year and they're all some of them are held a lot more crowded than this one there's more people attending

but it's something like at wasteland that is different the clientele that come here the fans that come here you're on the same plane field um it's like gotta hate using a baseball metaphor but you go to a sports thing and eighty percent of the people are wearing cub shirts and you're a

cub fan you're like these are my people instead of yeah i growl baseball fans but these are my fans these are the same on playing on wasteland is kind of the same thing where you come in here and if you're wearing a giant claw t-shirt people are gonna go i i like that show that's a great movie

whereas if i was at a different show people would have no idea what that is which is what i used to do with uh ban shirts yes exactly it's the same thing where you're you're wearing something in pride that you admire you like and you get that recognition and that tells it's not only great that

someone else knows what you you're wearing but it tells you that what i am wearing is important someone else feels the same way so you have that connection even if it's literally just walking by hey dude nice shirt it's that immediate going that guy gets it too is this energized you creatively

or is it just uh emotionally socially i think it's both because you come out of these shows realizing that hey you're not alone you're not the crazy guy that is so obsessive about films that that's all you're thinking about you come out of these shows going i'm one of many i am part of the

collective and we are bigger than you've ever thought and if if you're one of those that is sits at home and and doesn't have that outlet or that tribe you are not alone you just need to find them because they are there and even if it's done online which if that's your only option

that's great i would highly recommend that but it does not replace the interaction amongst people uh the one on one or not one on one but face to face uh you cannot replace that if you had to say what uh sinimal wasteland meant to you you're talking to someone and god forbid this was no longer

happening how would you explain it oh man you missed it yeah that it's it's one of those again it's gonna make me sound old but it's one of those old glory day stores or you're like oh my god you wouldn't pack in that day that those were shows were were amazing any of my friends that

I knew from other shows or I knew and had not been to wasteland it was you have to go to wasteland and uh friend of mine Dave Kosanki who uh from liquid cheese used to go to chiller all the time Dave you got to come to wasteland yeah i heard i heard no you have to come to wasteland

he started he came that first time and i from then on he was here almost every show so it's it's it's whether that infection happens and i know you did the same thing when you came to flashback i'm like you think this is good this is fun you got to come to wasteland and it's kind of like

walking into woolly wonka's candy thing where you're going oh there's a lot of candy yeah okay i get it i like candy and then you walk in there and you're like holy shit there's a lot of candy here it's kind of the same thing so to try to explain someone that when that's gone it's like well

it's really cool and they're like hey okay no it's not that it's really cool so it it's it's kind of hard because if you don't experience it it's hard to explain just how good it is because no matter how you explain it it's not it's going to be better than that what do you take away from

wasteland where you go back a lot of DVDs a lot of books all right posters not a lot of money it's got one of the best dealer rooms it's a family reunion you get to see your your convention family you get to sit and hang out and talk and it's it's literally like if the show wasn't even

here is that collection of people and to me that means that's more important than the events not that those aren't great but it's the connection with people because as a horror fan growing up when you don't have a lot of people that you can connect with that don't understand why you're so passionate

about this film from the 40s it can drive you mad and i think this is like almost letting steam off where you're that pressure is building up or out there in the outside world where it's just beating you down you get to come here and here's some guy go what's this what's this movie the

body snatcher is i heard that's good and now you can sit there and have this conversation about a movie that came out 80 years ago so it's it's re re energizes you that you are definitely not the one that there's more people out there that are just as passionate if not more than you are and it

just it makes you realize that what you're doing is not for waste one of the things that i think is really great about the the fans that come is how they treat the guests that show up so talking about the guests themselves as you may have already heard from me they're not necessarily

marquee people now but they're considered marquee people to the folks who come to cinema wasteland you know for many of the actors and directors who made horror films especially low budget independent horror films from say the 50s 60s and 70s you know they had no idea that there was any love for

their movies but there are so many movies that they make a slight ripple when they first come out for these folks and then they disappear some of them didn't get paid at all because those movies didn't make enough if they're lucky some of these actors work on a few more horror movies they're

really fortunate they did see a royalty checker too the filmmakers and the artists who made these low budget indie horror films were kind of journeyman folk they went from one job to the next to producing work for themselves year after year sometimes you know working on other people stuff

going into commercials going into radio going into being at car dealerships and things like that many of the people that come to cinema wasteland come there not in the business anymore but when they leave they have a little glimmer of business again there are several people that i've made

friends with on facebook that i watch their career start to grow again now the career may be nothing more than going from convention to convention working in plays whatever it might be but they get rekindled by what happens at cinema wasteland and that is just this wonderful adoration that's sincere

that comes from fans who are true collectors who are true cinnists people who absolutely love these movies and love what these people had given them i like to think that we are paying back what we were given from these actors by having them come here and remind them why what they did was so

important it may have seemed somewhat trivial because the business itself likes to say that the stuff that they were doing was trivial but to us these fans none of it was ever trivial we always enjoying it we always found it very important some of these movies got us through a lot of crazy

shit and so getting to meet people and tell them that is so important to us and because many of these folks they made their appearances in these movies back in the 60s and 70s they're older now and so when they're here at times it can be somewhat bittersweet i will say that many of the people

that i have met are no longer with us and i'm somewhat a newbie so people who have been there from the very beginning they have a long list of people they were able to say hello to and tell them thank you but many of these folks they're no longer around i have my own great secret of my

visits that i would come in on Thursday and i would take a van from the airport to the hotel of course the hotel van and many times i'm getting in at the same time that the celebrities are showing up and that essentially gave me about 20 minutes of undivided attention with them as they're

coming into Cleveland maybe for the first time many of the times that i sat in that van i was with people who had never been to cinema wasteland before hadn't been to a convention in years if ever and they're somewhat nervous and so i hoped to be the best welcoming committee that i could be

without being an official cinema wasteland personnel when the convention finally starts and they're behind a table they're on and at this point we're just talking like human beings and then slowly letting me tell them that i know who they are and most of the time they want to release a little

bit of stress from all of that travel so i had great conversations with jack catchum we didn't know it at the time because he didn't tell anybody of course but he was dying of cancer and it was one of the last shows that he was going to do but he ended up having a great time and because we spent

all this time in the van just kind of shooting the shit the rest of the weekend when he saw me he came over and say hi we joke with each other and that happens over these weekends one of my favorites as well was dianne thorn now dianne thorn is a notorious name in exploitation films one of the

movies that a lot of people think is unforgivable is ilsa she wolf of the ss and ilsa is of course dianne it's nazi exploitation done at the highest levels and and her performance is legendary and notorious and she was there with her husband howard mar and howard was a conductor and a actor

as well he was in five different movies with dianne at the time when i saw her she was quite frail she was in a wheelchair i gave them some help getting her into the van and also tried to stay out of their way and of course dianne decided to make a conversation with me and thank me and she

let me know that she had fallen off of her horse and that's why she had a hip just wasn't repairing itself that easily so i spent a little bit of time talking about how much i admired her work and we laughed she's like oh god i'm an ordained minister now and i marry people not too many people know that i'm ilsa and yet she came with full regalia right she came with writing boots the black boots that she wore as ilsa and howard started talking me and howard is full of a million stories of being

a conductor in las vegas for a bunch of big names and some mobsters so it was it was a day of getting a lot of great conversations but what i bring dianne up for is because when i first see her she's coming into the world of cinema wasteland from the real world and in the real world she's in a wheelchair and she's you know she's very tiny and she's traveling and she's irritable about all that but

she's about to fall into the wonderful fantasy world that is wasteland but what was great was the first day that dianne hit the floor where her table was where she was going to be doing autographs and as soon as she got there she had the boots on she stood straight up she walked around on her own

and she seemed like she was six feet tall and she commanded the place and there was a line to see dianne and you can just see this wash over her and by the end of the weekend she's a great voice and boisterous and flirting with everybody and just having a great time and dianne's no longer

with us but i'm really glad that i got to spend some time with her i'm glad more though that she got to meet hundreds of fans in that weekend that just let her know yes some people might think it's a silly little movie but it mattered to them because they were entertained by her and

sometimes there's nothing more wonderful than giving someone a little bit of entertainment so like every cinema wasteland that i have attended sunday is you know a mixed bag we're saying goodbye to people slowly it's a slow

procession out of the place for people who have driven four to eight hours to get to cinema wasteland they're on their way home to be able to get up in the morning and go to work one more time and i always spend time there because i don't leave until the next day watching everything come down

get broken down and put in boxes over the years i've been able to make friendships with a lot of the vendors so i'm not just sitting there alone watching i spend time talking with people and so this time it was a little bit different so i had mentioned before that there was a convention

happening friday to sunday but on monday there was going to be a total solar eclipse in the area so one of the things that was really interesting this time was that there was a level of tension in the hotel the normally isn't and that's because every hotel in the area

was already pre-sold and sold out for the eclipsers so the wastelanders were going to be supplanted by the eclipsers and there was this whole thing of like you can't keep your bags here you can't stay any longer luckily i had the room until monday so i didn't have to worry but for

some people they had to get out of the hotel quickly because they had people showing up to clean all of these rooms they had 350 or 400 rooms that they had to clean in a few hours just to be able to be ready for the eclipsers who are going to start coming in around four o'clock now

sinmo wasteland ends officially at four o'clock and check in starts at four so where we normally have emptiness and quiet they're suddenly chaos if you want to know a little bit about the the melon collie of the sunday evening you can listen to episode four where i talk about how it's dead quiet

it slowly turns into a normal holiday in they're throwing away all of the old poster work that was from sinmo wasteland and it's almost as if like a magical fog is dissipating in this place and you're just returned back to the regular life while this time maybe not so much there is absolute

chaos going on there is a line of people out the door people are screaming at each other because they've been on the road god knows how long to come and watch this eclipse and what i can say is that they don't trash the place as bad as we do but they trash each other a lot worse so yeah we do

a little bit of damage to the place you know bathrooms don't look fantastic the elevators get overused now for the first time ever probably sunday evening the elevators are broken down because there are so many people trying to get in it there is just madness everywhere and people are angry

they're traveled all this way to go see the sun get blocked out by the moon and they are losing their shit in the foyer of this best western could not wait to get the bed and packed and get the hell out of there normally a little bit sad this time nothing but absolute chaos you know i would

have loved to have seen the eclipse i would have loved to have stayed another day but i didn't think of it at the time and there was no way to get an extra room and there were no rooms anywhere in the greater cleveland area that weren't taken up because this is a huge

momentous event i leave cleveland but i get to st. Louis and i'm stuck in the airport there and i'm in the airport as the eclipse is starting to happen so i'm watching on my phone the live event as it's going across the globe starting in mexico and moving its way across the country

and i start to get a little bit emotional because i'm seeing how people are kind of coming together on this yes it was the chaos and madness at the hotel but now that the event is actually happening this special event all of a sudden people who normally would not mix who might not know each other

at all who might just be showing up in these weird places like cleveland for the first time for something that seems momentous to them that matters to them and they drop all pretenses and just look in awe and people cheer as everything goes dark and some people cry and i'm starting to get emotional myself because i'm watching over and over again as the hours go by and it's coming to me

right in st. Louis they're not going to get a hundred percent but we're still going to get dark there i'm not able to see it the sun is going to be directly above the airport at the time so all i can do is look out at the flight line and see all of the people who are the baggage

handlers and stuff standing there with sunglasses on looking up as everything goes dark and why this made me really feel like i had to write about cinema wasteland was that there's not going to be another one of these eclipses totally clipses hitting the United States i think for another 25 years

and it won't hit that area again for hundreds of years and so it is a rare event to come together and spend time and enjoy something that is just strange and unusual and so i felt this idea that you know everything is impermanent right the people who are watching that

people who are chasing the eclips across the globe across the world following eclipses as they happen every year going to different areas you know they've done that for decades there are people there who are in their 80s that remember the one from the 70s that remember the one that came before

that and they realize that this is probably the last eclips that are going to see and they're seeing it with their loved ones or seeing with people that they care about and so i have no idea how many cinema wastelands are left but you know what i think i'm going to cherish every one

that i go to because i don't necessarily know what's going to happen once this thing ends i'm sure we'll find something else the world is not going to end but a certain wonderful weirdness is going to end and so let's hope i don't think that the next this has been the last wasteland in fact if

Ken kish heard me say this he probably would go one more year just to spite me for saying this kind of thing but at some point it is going to end the place itself is a place holder it's a spot a sacred place that we come to but what makes that so sacred is the people who show the people who

feel it this is something special you cannot make a sacred place you can't do that on purpose it happens on its own i'm just glad that i've had my moment with all these people you know everything changes everything ends and someday i will too but not yet and until i'm gone i'm going to have

a little bit of fun and thanks so much for listening to the show now one of the things that i mentioned in this episode was that i have this place this sacred place as a kid and it was the dumpster behind burger king that might resonate with you and if it does i mention that i like to get into

conversations so reach out to me you can get in touch with me at scott at helbinforhar.com you can find me on facebook you can go to my website helbinforhar.com i would love to hear from you about that this episode of helbinforhar is brought to you by patrion supporters and listeners just like you

if you enjoy helbinforhar please consider supporting the show by contributing either on our patrion site or maybe paypal we have other things you can take a look at if you want to go to the website you can find links for that at helbinforhar.com and i thank you for helping sustain the show

thanks for listening though the most important thing tell other people about it that's also super important that's what i consider contributions helbinforhar was written in broadcast by me as a Bradley and produced by me and leesa gorsky you can find more about us on our website helbinforhar.com

i'm also on facebook at facebook.com forward slash helbinforhar pretty easy to find you can find helbinforhar the podcast on itunes google play and spotify and other podcast platforms h4h has its own app as well so you can download that from google ramazon store for android and the iphone version is available on itunes as one would expect and i want to thank you again for listening and until next time stay helbent