By KEVIN HOOVER
Knoxville, Tennessee’s CREEPYCON doesn’t suffer from an identity crisis: it’s well aware of its distinction in the horror convention pecking order. Co-owners and organizers Jennifer Johnsey, Diana Waldeck, and Bradley Drake are excited to open their doors to east Tennessee’s horror fandom again on August 20-22, 2021, celebrating the show’s fourth year in business (fifth actually, 2020 notwithstanding). Leaning on their experiences working as scareactors in local haunted houses, the friends always knew they could gain traction in the convention landscape, and they chalk their success up to an approach that breaks the mold of what most expect from shows. While others sell tickets on the name recognition of horror celebrities, CREEPYCON’s film notables share equal billing with the many vendors and attractions. It’s a decision the group made long before they opened their doors for a single night when starting out several years back, and one that has proven popular among attendees ever since.
Horror conventions are a massive undertaking for their organizers, but the trio was able to carve out some time in the midst of planning their event (which features names like John Dugan and R.A. Mihailoff of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame alongside a zombie beauty pageant and scream queen competition) to talk with Rue Morgue about how their show is growing up and establishing itself as Knoxville’s premiere horror outing.
Give us some backstory on how CREEPYCON got its start.
JJ: Six years ago, I came up with the idea. I thought it would be really fun to have an event where Halloween and horror fans could come out to a show where we’d have vendor booths and attractions. I put it out to some of the businesses in the community, but it just sort of flopped. After sitting on it for a few years and thinking about it, I was like, “Alright, I like this and it won’t go away. It keeps coming into my brain, so there must be a reason for it.” So I developed the concept and decided to go with it [myself]. I made it a one-day event on an evening in early September, threw it out there on Facebook and people seemed to really like it. After we had the first event, I had some very good friends, including these two [Diana and Bradley] to help me get it off the ground and I couldn’t have done it without them. The initial show was well received, so the next year we expanded to three days because people were saying they wanted to have more time.
What were some of the challenges going into that first show, and what are some of the challenges now? How has CREEPYCON evolved since its inception?
BD: In the beginning, the most important thing we had to do was get people interested. Now, we know people are interested, and it’s more, how do we keep them [interested] while trying to grow in a way that’s not considered monotonous? We constantly work to change things up, so people aren’t seeing the same stuff year after year.
DW: We’re working to get more haunts involved because we all come from a haunted house background, which I would argue maybe gives us a leg up in doing this sort of thing.
JJ: Early on, the biggest issue was finding a date that we could hold it at our convention center. We’re a big college football town here in Knoxville, and if you’re going to have a gathering, you can’t ignore that. We also had to be really careful because almost everyone we work with, staff and vendors, belong with haunted attractions or Halloween-related businesses, so we couldn’t plan it at a time that would interfere with that. We decided on a late August date simply because we could avoid a lot of the other things that are going on in town and make it where vendors and everybody could come.
Vendors and attractions have always been a big part of horror cons, but your show emphasizes their presence just as much as you do the celebrities.
JJ: It was always important to me to have tons of entertainment and fun things to do. I do recognize the importance of having celebrities, but I wanted there to be just so many other things to see and do. People really took to it they and they love getting to see things they’ve never seen before. Our shows will always encompass all of those individual pieces.
BD: We’ll never be a convention solely focused on celebrities. We’ll have some but we’re not a show where you go to stand in line for six hours to get an autograph. We want you to enjoy your time here. Our vendors are every bit as important as any celebrity that we could ever have, and we go above and beyond to make them feel that way. One thing we do that differently for other shows, at least as far as we’re aware, is that we load all of our vendors in and out ourselves.
DW: And you can tell that our vendors are not really used to that, because they’re very surprised and grateful. If there was anything that was going to take focus away from the vendors, it’s going to be the other cool things to see and experience, like the performances and contests, but then everyone will still have enough time to get back and see the vendors. I feel like we all kind of share this feeling of not really wanting a big celebrity-based show because you don’t want a room full of vendors sitting around while everyone is standing in six and seven-hour lines on the other side of the show floor. We want there to be a lot of movement.
As a fairly young convention, do you have any insight into what your guest counts have looked like over the years?
JJ: Our first show drew a thousand guests. Judging from the pacing from year to year, we pretty well double our attendance every year.
BD: Our expectation was around five thousand attendees this year, and even with things starting to slow back down again, we’re still expecting somewhere between twenty-five hundred and five-thousand.
With 2021’s event on the horizon, what kind of plans are you making for the future?
BD: Our goal is to start adding more shows within the next year or two. It’ll be baby steps, maybe two shows a year, and then the following year maybe three. The idea is to do as many as we reasonably can without neglecting any individual shows. We won’t be holding them all in only one city, either. Maybe we’ll look at Nashville or Chattanooga next, and then maybe Atlanta or somewhere else after that. Then we’ll start adding cities until we’ve really gotten where we want to be.
CREEPYCON Knoxville 2021 takes place August 20th-22nd. For more details and to purchase tickets, visit creepyconknoxville.com.
