Rex B. Hamilton reports on the 2006 TransWorld convention

[RexBHamilton]

Rex B. Hamilton reports on the 2006 TransWorld convention

March 27, 2006

Greetings, Fellow Haunters:

My visit to this month’s TransWorld show was a lot of fun. I was there from Wednesday through Sunday.

In the ten years I’ve attended TransWorld, this year’s weather was probably the best yet. Temperatures were well into the 60s and the sun shone brightly most mornings. We who hail from the Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland latitudes don’t usually see this kind of warmth until late April or early May.

As you might imagine, the drive to Chicago on Wednesday morning was smooth and easy. Jeff Glatzer and I arrived at the Crowne Plaza around 1:30 that afternoon and immediately looked around for people to party with. We found a few, fellow early-arrivers from the Carolinas and jawed with them for about an hour. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing in our room.

The attendance at the 2006 Crazy Bob Social on Wednesday evening was about the same as last year, perhaps a tad better. I don’t know why the attendance did not take a dip, given that the Thursday seminar day had already been canceled. Perhaps the haunt community is beginning to realize that we need to wrap our arms around every opportunity we can to speak frankly to our fellow frighteners.

The venue for this year’s Social was a first: the sunken lounge in the Crowne Plaza, right outside the swimming pool.

Assisted by Crazy Beth, Laura, Jim and Jason, Bob introduced his audience to some of the movers and shakers in the haunt industry. And for the eighth year in a row, he led attendees in a far-ranging discussion of where the haunt business is now and where it might go in years to come.


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For those of us already ensconsed in Chicago, Thursday in 2006 was the strangest of days. Under normal circumstances, we would all be neck-deep in the day-long seminar program.

But if you’re a haunted actor and if you have the ability to sleep in, you do so. And we did. The only intelligent thing I did that morning was to blaze downtown on the Kennedy and have lunch with my nephew Jac, a third-year architecture student at Illinois Institute of Technology. We went to Chinatown and tanked up on some spicy stuff.


But what to do on a Thursday afternoon? The best solution I could think of was to sneak inside the convention center and help vendors set up their booths. I had never seen the convention floor on a Thursday before. The place was a big, ugly mess. There were random stacks of large cardboard boxes such that you could barely walk down an aisle. I looked at many vendor booths during the late afternoon and said to myself, “These guys will have to stay way late tonight in order to finish assembling their booths.”

The “after seminar cocktail hour” from 5:30 to 6:30 PM. was the first “scheduled” activity of the day. The location was the same as the previous night’s Social - the sunken area next to the swimming pool.

TransWorld, I think, kept this party on the schedule to show that they were sympathetic to those haunters who were fans of the Thursday seminars. Because the seminars had been canceled only a couple of weeks earlier, some attendees found it too expensive to change their airline flights and chose to cool their heels in Chicago on Thursday.

At the cocktail hour, I met a group of haunters from Maryland who have turned the family dairy farm into a haunted attraction. I reunited with my sponsors from Hong Kong. I yakked it up many enthusiastic haunters, each of them nutcases in their own way.

A number of spookers remembered that I had been a seminar instructor last year and told me how disappointed they were that this year’s seminars had been canceled. Those who spoke to me had another unanimous opinion: they were opposed to the idea of large-scale, panel discussions and favored small, targeted classes.

After a quick dinner of “Fluffy food,” Jeff Glatzer and I drove to Dream Reapers Haunted House in nearby Melrose Park. Earlier in the day, Jeff and I had spoken to the owners (Ken, Mike, J.T. and Ricky) about helping them get their show ready for the Friday and Saturday evening performances. But when we arrived, the guys would not hear of us doing any work. They very nicely gave us a complete, lights-on tour and then insisted that we relax and chat with their staff people.

So, while Ken emptied wastebaskets and picked up the trash, Ricky cleaned out dozens of airbrush bottles and J.T. tuned up his animatronics and other effects, Jeff and I lazed around and chatted up some of Dream Reapers’ key staff personnel: James, Steve and Rick. We swapped stories and traded ideas with them until past 11 PM. Everyone at Dream Reapers has my gratitude for their warm hospitality.


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Friday for me was a hot time in old Chicago. First up: a few minutes before 9 AM, I arrived at Stylemakers hair salon on West Higgins Road. Jennifer, my pretty stylist, was waiting and eager to electrocute my hair and spray it a blinding purple. (This is the 6th in a row that she’s helped me look my weirdest.) It was the first step in creating a new character: Dr. Giggles, M.D., Ph.D., BVD. He’s the Director of Lobotomy Research at the Psycho-Traumatic Institute for the Hopelessly Deranged.

Back at the hotel room, I spent about 30 minutes applying the Doctor’s make-up. Right around 11 A.M., I bounced across the street and into the noisy, glittery maelstrom which is TransWorld. The vendors must have worked hard during the night because all the booths appeared to be in tip-top shape. For the next two hours, I wandered about the convention floor, gawking at new gizmos and greeting other ghouls.

From 1 until 3 PM. I pulled a shift at the IAHA booth. (I have a perfect record - I’ve worked every IAHA booth at TransWorld.) Secretary Deanna Rogers-Morton gave my booth-mate Barry Schieferstein (co-producer of Midwest Haunters Convention) and I a quick rundown on how to sign up/renew members and what gifts they were to receive. Then she raced off to who knows where.

However Deanna did not leave us two by ourselves. Marty Smith, wife of Treasurer Jim Smith, and their daughters Emma Leigh and Cary did the heavy lifting during my shift by filling out the paperwork, dispensing gifts, tracking inventory and so forth. This gave me the freedom to stand out in the aisle, pose for photographs and do my “carnival barker” routine to harangue potential new members.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of booth traffic. What you need to understand is that the IAHA changed its fiscal year in 2006. Instead of members renewing their memberships at TransWorld (March), all this was done by mail in late December and early January. In years past, the booth has been a madhouse of people going through the renewal process. We didn’t have that sort of craziness this year.

The bottom line: nearly all the people who stopped by the booth were _not_ members. The few members who did stop by were there for only a moment to pick up their copy of the membership directory and assorted other goodies. This gave us a significantly enhanced opportunity to concentrate on signing up new blood - a much more productive use of our time.

Here’s another good thing: the booth was the most organized it’s ever been and I’m told that Treasurer Jim Smith deserves the credit. Each Association member had a large envelope with his/her name on it, filled with a membership directory and whatever goodies s/he was entitled to. All we had to do was hand the member the appropriate envelope, an IAHA t-shirt and thank them for their support. Case closed! I could tell from the reactions of members that they, too, were impressed by this year’s level of organization.

By the way, those IAHA t-shirts looked pretty good. The Association has a new logo, created by Brainstorm Studios, that looks much better than our previous “comedy and tragedy mask” effort. The new logo centers around a drawing of a haunted house which should resonate better with the public-at-large.

I spent the balance of the afternoon enjoying the sights and sounds of the convention floor. Then it was back to the hotel room for dinner with Jeff and two of our other Scab 5 compatriots, Roger “Ichabod” and Tawny “Adolphia” Miller.

From 7 until 9 P.M. you would have found me at the IAHA Annual Meeting in the convention center. The election of board members had taken place earlier via mail and proxy, so there was not as much official business to take care of that evening versus previous years.

This year the IAHA casket basket raffle and auction was hosted by horror movie producer Chuck Williams and Rich “Horrormeister” Hanf. Once again, I put myself up as an auction item to benefit the Association. The winning bidder, at $400, was Derek Vitas from a family fun park called the Rockin’-R-Ranch in Columbia Station, Ohio. That’s less than 20 miles from my house - how convenient! Derek will have my haunted services for the weekend of September 29 and 30.

Secretary Deanna Rogers-Morton should be recognized for pushing the meeting along without the aid of a public address system. Why didn’t the large meeting room have a PA system? I haven’t learned the answer to that question. But it did make listening difficult for those near the back and sides of the room. The auctioneers had to shout in order to be heard. But what’s important was that Deanna got the meeting wrapped up right at the stroke of 9.

Grateful to still have a few hours to make merry, most of the attendees and I streamed across the street and resumed drinking and hollering at the Crowne Center bar.

Around 10 P.M. haunted painter and make-up artist Shane Rapkin strolled over to me with something clutched behind his back. He gave me his patented, wise-guy grin and presented me with a black “hoodie” sweatshirt. It wasn’t just any hoodie - it had an airbrush painting of my Lord Zargon character across the entire back. It was, and is, beautiful.

Why did you do that, I asked him. Just because we’ve been friends for so many years, he replied. I didn’t know what to say except to thank him. Shane is the best painter of leather jackets I’ve ever seen. Period. He also creates UV wall panels for haunted attraction scenes, illustrations for posters and more. His Web site is http://www.ravens-wolf.com.

When I left the bar at around 1 AM to scrape the gunk off my face and hair, many haunters were still in a partying mood.


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On Saturday morning, Jeff, Tawny, Roger and I had planned to stroll around the upstairs convention floor as a group. (The fifth member of the Scab 5, Geoff “Arachnid” Beck, was selling copies of his “Playing With Fear” DVD at the Screamline Studios booth downstairs.) I was curious to see if we could scare up some October consulting jobs as the Scab 5, rather than as individuals.

We arrived on the show floor near 10 AM and managed to stay together for about 20 minutes. The situation made me chuckle. As we would slowly make our way down an aisle, all of us were constantly in conversation with vendors, producers, enthusiasts, TransWorld staff and more. Some we knew from past conventions, others were newly met.

We were pulled in so many directions that the four of us gave up trying to stay together. “Go with flow” is what I think we all said silently to ourselves. If you’ve never been to TransWorld, the convention floor is at its loudest and busiest on Saturday.

Around 1 PM I witnessed the beginning of the make-up competition. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any video coverage so that the audience could see up close what the artists were doing.

I was given a complimentary ticket to the 1:30 PM acting workshop called “The Art of the Scare.” The instructor was Wade Gordon from Knott’s Scary Farm. The session used a number of video clips to good advantage to demonstrate their style of outdoor acting.

The class ended just an hour later. I had thought all along that afternoon workshops at TransWorld were scheduled from 1:30 until 4 PM. However, no one else in the room seemed surprised at the 1-hour length (and they probably paid for the class), so I must have missed something.

What I did indeed miss was the end of the make-up competition Yet, I managed to catch up with the top three finishers and take a few photographs as I spent the rest of the afternoon on the show floor.

After dinner in our hotel room, Roger and Tawny went downstairs to the bar to whoop it up all night. Since they have small children, they don’t often get that chance on a Saturday night. Jeff and I watched some ESPN and then drove to Dream Reapers to see the show.

We pulled in to the parking lot just a few minutes before they closed. There were still a fair number of people waiting in line. They actors didn’t disappoint - they tried hard to scare us professionals.

The producers at Dream Reapers distributed a playbill to all the customers. Inside you could read a brief biography and view a small photo of each performer. Playbills are Standard Operating Procedure in the theater world, but quite rare in the haunted attraction business. I’m often asked how to recruit and retain haunted house actors. One of my standard replies is to give them recognition, and I’ve insisted for years that a playbill is a great idea.

Back at the bar and patio at the Crowne Center, the partying was in high gear. Near 11 PM ghastly-looking participants from the costume ball at the Sofitel hotel began drifting back to the Crowne to join in the fun. When I made my way back to my hotel room at 2:30 AM, many haunters were still in festive spirits.

One other item about Saturday: I met with producers from three regional haunt conventions near me - Kkrazy Kkaren from Great Lakes Fright Fest (http://www.greatlakesfrightfest.com), Michael Bruner from the Pennsylvania Gathering of Haunters (http://www.hauntersgathering.com) and Tamara Hedstrom from Ironstock (http://www.theironkingdom.com). All three were kind enough to say “yes” to my request to teach a class at their respective gatherings.

Sure, I’ll be teaching again at this year’s Midwest Haunters Convention (http://www.midwesthauntersconvention) in mid-July. But I was looking forward to teaching classes at TransWorld in 2006 and the fates conspired against me. My teaching “jones” needs a fix, and I’m grateful to these three producers for giving me new opportunities to provide haunted education.


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Early Sunday morning, my three roommates packed up and drove back to Cleveland. After checking out of the Crowne, I spent the day on the convention floor meeting, greeting, gawking, asking questions and taking photographs.

The 5 PM closing time on Sunday comes all too quickly. Before it seemed possible, my five-day visit to Chicago was over, and there was nothing left to do except drive the seven hours home and start planning in earnest for the haunted season to come.


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So, what did I think of this year’s show? The attendance seemed noticeably bigger than last year. On Friday and Saturday many of the aisles were packed with people. Even Sunday’s attendance was an improvement, I think, versus last year.

The lack of the Thursday seminar day was a sore spot for some. The overall number of vendors seemed unchanged from 2005. Moving the free seminars from just inside the first-floor entrance to the conference center portion of the building didn’t seem like a wise move. When you have activities that are free to all then they should be easily seen by all - that’s my opinion.

I did not hear any complaints about the fact that the heavyweight haunted vendors were upstairs by themselves. It appears that the haunt community has cheerfully accepted the idea of their own display area. The noise level upstairs is still a factor to consider. I spoke to several vendors who told me that they could only take a couple of hours of that racket at a time.

TransWorld still needs to do a better job of grouping vendors on the first floor by market niche - costume, party, retail, haunt and so forth. I saw a number of vendors whose booths were like small desert islands in a vast ocean of another market.


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TransWorld 2006 was a very satisfying experience. I ate, drank, looked weird, met many new people, got hired by haunts for this coming season and saw a wide collection of haunted merchandise. But what really keeps me going are my wonderful haunted friends. May you and everyone else have a terrific 2006 season!


Very truly yours,

Rex B. Hamilton

13939 Clifton Boulevard
Lakewood, Ohio 44107-1462
216.226.7764 (home)
216.973.0050 (cell)
EvilLordZargon@msn.com