Whew. Another busy, fun, crazy, awesome GeekOut weekend in Asheville!
Stuff Monsters Like takes credit for kicking off the con on Saturday with our 11am panel: “No Sparkle and All Bite: Vampires that Don’t Suck.” The panel presentation began with a special surprise guest appearance from the Inconceivable Gypsy Jim, named Asheville’s Best Psychic in the 2013 Mountain Xpress poll. Gypsy Jim was drawn to several members of the audience to read their palms, all of whom seemed to have something great and exciting in their near future.
Then Jimmy and Sarah, SML’s head monsters, gave a little overview of our recent mischief and mayhem, as well as mentioning a few upcoming events and projects. First, we’ve been featured in the Collinsport Historical Society’s upcoming compilation of movie reviews, “Bride of Monster Serial.” Look for more information about the release date for that book very soon!
SML will be participating again this year in Intergalactic Hug a Monster Day, held every year on July 27. We encourage you to pull your monsters out of your attic and basement, and give them a great big hug.
This fall, SML will also be helping resurrect the Asheville Zombiewalk from the dead. It seemed fitting that if anyone could offer support on bringing that monster back to life, we should be able to help out. The Asheville Zombiewalk should be releasing more information about the event as they get closer to the October 12 event date, so keep up with them on Facebook to learn more.
The bulk of our presentation was about our experiment with the Great Vampire Challenge! We spent the better part of the last few months watching and reviewing some of the top vampire films ever made. Our goal was to compare the number of tropes present in the films in order to definitively determine *the* “most vampirey” film of all time. You can review the results on our website, and be sure to leave us some suggestions if you think we might have missed a contender.
As an extension of the Great Vampire Challenge, we used this year’s audience participation portion of the panel to definitively determine the best incarnation of Dracula. Surprisingly, the four audience members flagged by Gypsy Jim were the ones we randomly chose to play along. Those four Dracula lovers each literally drove a stake into the hearts of one of the top eight most popular Draculas with the SML patented Van Helsing mobile.
In the end, Nosferatu was declared king of the Draculas, and Van Helsing mobile driver Matthew Ensley was declared our winner for the day. Matthew was last year’s runner up in the “Cats vs. Monsters” video challenge, and navigated valiantly this year for the win!
So, have you read this far and now wish that you’d been there for our excellent presentation? We get that. You totally missed out. Check out the rest of our photos on Facebook to see more, and be sure to follow us on our blog here and on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll tip you off on all the great monster-themed events with which we’re involved.
