It was a monumental effort by everyone involved with the show, but 2 1/2 years after the last one, the 2021 Texas Frightmare Weekend happened. After repeated cancellations and reschedulings, after understandable concerns about further lockdowns and insufficient social distancing space, Loyd Cryer and crew pulled off the biggest convention in the Dallas area since the beginning of lockdown in 2020. As such, everyone involved deserves sustained applause, because I don’t think anybody else could have made it work and made it work as well as it did.
For those unfamiliar with this greatest of horror conventions, Texas Frightmare Weekend celebrated its fifteenth anniversary this year. Normally, it runs on the first weekend in May (most of its crew are haunted house organizers and workers, and the idea was to hold a show that didn’t conflict with their getting ready for the Halloween season), but the decision last spring was that vaccination rates were high enough to give it a chance of running in September. Hence, we all piled into the Hyatt Regency DFW at DFW Airport, suitably masked and slathered with hand sanitizer, and conducted what had to be the most mellow convention I’ve seen in nearly 40 years. Naturally, carnivorous plants contributed: the Triffid Ranch location in the back of the Lone Star Hall meant that everyone got a good dose of green, whether or not they were expecting it as they came around the corner.
To be continued…