Assembled here, rough shod – slightly loose and badly edited, is the coverage piece I did for the 9th annual Dublin Horrorthon. Originally and unashamedly, I tried to write this as a sort of Gonzo-Lovecraftian parody that while presenting as much of the facts as I could meld in relatively healthy doses of humor and line blurring fiction.

The fiction portions would work like an insulating lining around the edges and protective throwaway cardboard in between the bits between the bits. I wanted to make something that for want of better words was a fun jaunty fast read. In part, I did this because, generally, I’ve found most journalistic pieces on any ‘-Thons’ or ‘Cons’ or any sort of ‘-vention’ to resemble the thinning hair of a bald man. Thread bare things a shadow of the other features, best skipped lest they affect the whole.

It could just become a staccato run of reviews, it might try pad-pace itself differently, but it still remains largely a boring affair of fans, journalists and movie people where you can be assured the good stuff will be off the record.

I was raised on a steady diet of Horror, comics and all other types of fantasy. I collected movies; Horror and Kung-Fu especially, from a young age. A childhood thing, I gave it up toward the end of my teens and only got back into it mid-way through my twenties with the discovery of the torrent community. The torrent community as a whole gave access to rare finds, discontinued movies and other stuff I’d only been able to read about.

I hadn’t really intended to venture back into the obsessive world of film collecting. I’d lost interest years before, hanging out with older film students revealed a world of one-upmanship. Where even if you knew what you were talking about if you mispronounced a foreign name – say Italian or Spanish, you were obviously an idiot. It was and still is a hollow competitiveness I could do without.

Upon dipping a toe within the torrent world, I discovered one of the communities had some people who were intent on setting up an online magazine. It would be a stage for people’s fiction, reviews and interviews. I was reticent at first as I had my own plans. But, after awhile, I got taken in with the whole thing and decided to submit fiction. Just a couple of short stories nothing more. Around the same time, information came out for the 9th Dublin Horrorthon. Everything snowballed and I ended up covering it for the fledgling online magazine.

Now in truth, this would seem like an amazing idea. The Dublin Horrorthon is one of the best film festivals I’ve ever been to. This is largely down to the relentless dedication and love with which Ed King and his people organise it. And if I wasn’t covering the thing for some website, you couldn’t really fault the fun times you can have in Dublin at the Horrorthon.

In truth though, this was a bad idea. From all sides, had I known what I was letting myself in for, hindsight, twenty-twenty vision, all those useless clichés you babble at yourself when you look back and go “Just what the fuck was I thinking, I’m a damn fool.”

Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. They were supposed to have a website up, not much, just something, anything to prove I wasn’t involved in a blag. Nothing happened, nothing came; I was left continually promising a site that never materialized.

So there I was, wandering about like a fool talking about a site that didn’t go live for a couple weeks after the fact. Part of me wishes it’d never gone live. Any time I tried to show it to people, in the hope that I could get us more contributors, people were put off by the hideous design. But I suppose these are the kind of things you do when you’re trying to find a way to be a writer. Something I’ve found seems to largely amount to feeling your way through the mud, hoping that you’ll make the beginning of something happen.

In the end, my relationship with the online magazine soured. Out of the blue they demanded my address book under the auspices of needing to check if what I was giving them was real. At the time, I didn’t know what to do, could they honestly ask me for this? Especially since I was doing the stuff for them for free.

In the end, I asked Jay Slater his opinion, he kindly told me to tell them to go fuck themselves, that they had no right to ask me for my address book. This just left the withdrawal. The withdrawal amounted to a time frame whereby they took my work down in stages. Although they didn’t, as I later found one of my interviews linked through the Wikipedia entry on ‘The Masters of Horror’. Which is great ye know, knowing that not only were you trying to help incompetents who tried to swindle you out of your industry address book, but also they then turn out to barefaced liars. Score. Result.

I suppose the most annoying facet of the withdrawal was being calmly and politely told that I was to be fucked. When I made mentioned that I wished to take my concepts and ideas with me. I was told straight up, that I couldn’t, that weren’t mine anyway, that they’d evolved from conversation. News to me, as I recall going “You know what would be a good idea…” and “This is a good idea, we should this…”

But no…

They weren’t my ideas anymore and I wouldn’t even get credit for them.

It’s always nice to know you’re being fucked.

Eventually, we haggled down to the fact that I would get some sort of contract document saying that if I used my ideas, I would be able to show that I didn’t steal my ideas.

Go Team. Go.

Anyway, I learnt a lot from the experience of covering the Horrorthon. From the trying to help and work with one site to the later trying to find another horror site. Previously, the world of writing had seemed like a hard nut to crack, afterwards, it began to look like some sort of Sisyphean task.

Careful, they’ll lie to you.

Mind yourself, they’ll condescend you and you’ll have to take it, because there might just be some light at the end of the tunnel. They might mention their website is starting to look at paying contributors, afterwards though, they’ll pretend they never mentioned that.

And really, once they’ve asked for work and committed a hatchet job on it to the point where it’s not readable in sequence let alone as a solitary piece. It won’t feel like it was an honest offer, but more an attempt to completely bury what you wrote.

But in the end, it’s a learning curve. You meet a lot of interesting people and have what some people would call small adventures and in the end, that’s all that counts.

So here we go, straight from the vaults of the mountain are collected pieces of BigRockCandyMountain’s time spent covering the 9th Dublin Horrorthon. Don’t expect towering literature nor on the button journalism, however if its content makes just one of you laugh or smile, then that’s all that really matters.

Stay well Screwy