I have to say the cosplays were blowing my mind every second.  I took a ton of photos and spent my Saturday looking for anything I could find that was tied to horror from toys to some awesome hand crafted soaps to creepy doll sculptures!  A lot of photos are posted to the Nightmarish Conjurings Instagram so please follow and like us on IG!  I waited in line for the Rancho Obi-Wan exhibit which was awesome!  I’m a rebel (haha get it??) so I FaceTimed a friend of mine that couldn’t make it because he’s also a huge Star Wars fan. There was so much to look for and I immediately became invested in scouting awesome cosplays and toys on the vendor floor.

After leaving to take a break and grab some food, we returned to attend the costume contest in panel room 1.  We did not have the best seats but they did have screens displaying the stage which was awesome!! The costumers were amazing!  Ranging from highly creative costumes to amazing cosplay characters such as Darth Frankenstein, Spyro the Dragon, Admiral Ackbar and Sailor Jedi.  Luckily, I caught a few of the participants on the floor for photos prior to the contest.  After the contest, we went downstairs to peep the game room which was pretty cool.  Slowly we made our way to the main entrance courtyard area and loitered for a bit getting lots of great pictures of awesome cosplayers before returning to the car and heading back to the hotel.

Sunday: I was rolling solo today!  I wandered the floor taking more photos and vigorously scouting booths for toys and horror collectibles (I got an awesome Evil Dead 2 poster in Russian).  I went through the line for Rancho Obi-Wan once more and FaceTimed someone else (still a rebel) that couldn’t make it.  I also made my way through the legendary Stan Lee’s exhibit which was also very awesome.  After killing time walking around getting photos, I realized it was almost 1pm and I had a panel to attend.  From 1-2 was the “Writing Scary: Creating Fear and an Atmosphere of Dread” panel with Dan Wells, Neo Edmund, Steven Sears, and Jonathan Maberry.  This was an excellent panel, not just for writers of the horror genre but writing in general.  They had excellent advice such as “when writing horror about a monster or villain you want to subvert and exceed expectations and the easiest wawy to do that is to establish the expectation first.” They also said that “good horror is like opening little closets throughout your brain little by little, but never fully opening them because an automatic big jump scare is a cheap scare.” Lastly, they quoted Stephen King by saying “The way to write to horror is to take the character the audience likes most and put them through the burner.” Which is absolutely true for any truly scary or unnerving horror flick.  I left this panel about fifteen minutes early to get in line for the creepy KOFY movie time panel.  We got excellent seats, second row from the front and smack dab in the middle.  I thought it was going to be a group screening of bad horror flicks.  NOPE!  It was a local cable channel show explaining their movies on changing networks and kind of going through their history.  Though at times I was lost, I was also very entertained.  I will be looking them up on psychotropictheater.com where they have episodes of their show up for $5 with features such as Blood Feast and Cannibal Holocaust.  After the panel was over, I scoured the floor once more looking for photo opportunities before leaving around my planned time.

In conclusion, Silicon Valley Comic Con was absolutely amazing!!  Although I wish there was a little more horror related cosplays and panels.  I want to thank Shannon McGrew for the opportunity to attend this event and SVCC for hooking me and Amy up with press passes.  I will definitely be returning next year!