Screams, Scares, and Spike TV at the San Diego Comic Convention

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Screams, Scares, and Spike TV at the San Diego Comic Convention
By Al Kratina
July 27, 2007 - 03:32

At today’s Spike TV’s Scream Awards: Frak The Oscars panel , the audience at the San Diego Comic Con was treated to a lively discussion about the state of horror today, because that certainly isn’t discussed enough on the Internet. Thankfully, the talk, moderated by Henry Rollins and featuring Linda ( The Exorcist) Blair, Robert ( The Walking Dead) Kirkman, Mark (producer, Saw series) Burg, and Sig ( House of 1000 Corpses) Haig, managed to avoid the standard “things were better in the 70s” focus that the 14-year olds bitching about the Halloween remake tend to have. Rollins, an accomplished and always entertaining public speaker, kept things moving, and the panel never seemed to lose the attention of the crowd. Burg’s revelation that he and director Darren Lynn Bousman were working on a remake of Scanners was met with some suspicious murmuring from a crowd disarmed by Kirkman’s dry wit and the very real possibility that Rollins would make a particular audience member eat their cell phone. Sig Haig exhibited a down-home charm that only partially made him seem like a guy the family from Texas Chainsaw Massacre would send out to lure teenagers to an abattoir. Linda Blair was earnest, honest, and eager, with none of the downtrodden world-weariness that most genre convention hoppers tend to show. The inevitable discussion of remakes was mercifully short, with some shrewd, pragmatic observations by Haig and Kirkman, and was followed by the presentation of the 2007 Scream Comic-Con Icon award to Neil Gaiman. Gaiman took the stage and gracefully accepted the award with light wit and an English accent that doesn’t seem nearly fey enough for a fellow who writes about fairies a lot. “It’s a very wonderful thing to learn that you’re an icon,” Gaiman said, “I don’t think that I’ve ever been an icon before. Maybe they will make little models of me now and put them on car dashboards.”