Over the weekend, the Pasadena Convention Center played host to Midsummer Scream’s Awaken the Spirits. A two-day Halloween convention put on by Midsummer Scream production company Black Cat Orange in place of its annual Midsummer Scream event, which was canceled for 2021 due to the uncertainty of large event restrictions due to the pandemic, as well as venue constraints. Though smaller in size, the event kept the spirit of the larger Midsummer Scream experience, but perhaps more importantly, it brought the Southern California Halloween community together for the first time in over a year. And one thing was clear, while the event name “Awaken the Spirits” was in reference to ghosts, it also lifted the spirits of the mass of Halloween lovers from across Southern California that attended the event.
Thrown together in just two months, the event featured over 200 spooky vendors across three show floors, two stages, which hosted two days worth of panels from local theme parks and haunts, a surprise mini haunt experience from Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights, inspired by the maze “The Curse of Pandora’s Box,” and a lounge sponsored by LVCRFT.
Over the weekend, the halls of the Pasadena Convention Center were filled with laughter, screams, cheers, and a buzz about Halloween that has been absent since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and more or less canceled Halloween 2020. The event gave us a glimpse of normalcy, even if we were all still wearing masks (some protective, some scary). But more importantly, it offered hope. Hope for the return of Halloween, despite the threat of the pandemic still lingering over this year’s holiday. No one captured that hope more than Midsummer Scream Co-Founder and Creative Director Rick West, who in an emotional moment ahead of the Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights panel, had this to say about the event:
“This is a hell of a thing…This is a huge step in the right direction. The next stepping stone is in December, we will see you for Season’s Screamings, and then next summer we board the mothership in Long Beach for our fifth anniversary Midsummer Scream Show.”
Audibly choked up, West’s comments were met with aw’s and followed by cheers as attendees found hope in the words he spoke.
West’s optimism and hope were mirrored by Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights Creative Director John Murdy in his panel that followed. Before diving into 2021 announcements, Murdy shared a bit about the heartbreak he felt when Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights was canceled in 2020 before inviting the crowd to join him in a primal scream to help get out their frustrations with the last year. But then he reminded folks, “The monster always survives.”
And survive we have. Halloween 2020 looked like nothing most of us have ever seen. But as Halloween 2021 approaches, there is a sense of hope in the air that this year we might get to celebrate it with a bit more normalcy, and nowhere has that been felt more than at Midsummer Scream’s Awaken the Spirits, where folks from haunts big and small shared their plans to reopen, and in some instances bigger and better, in 2021.
