SCARELA promises chills and thrills for horror fans this weekend

This weekend in Pasadena is SCARELA! If you're a horror fan, I think you owe it to yourself to be there. This year's theme is Season of the Witch, "Cast a dark spell on the summer." Unfortunately, I found out too late about it to attend, but it has some great guests and vendors set up. But I'll definitely be going next year, barring any of the usual hijinks that befall a Lao American poet.

As the organizers note: "This August 6 and 7th, join thousands of Halloween fans, vendors, and scare industry masterminds and creep through our 100,000+ sq.ft. showfloor at the Pasadena Convention Center! Founded in 2013, ScareLA™ is the first convention dedicated to Halloween. Situated in the entertainment capital of the world, we celebrate the scare season traditions by giving Halloween an early start every summer. This year we are thrilled to team up with none other but The Queen of Halloween, Elvira, and open a show bigger and better than ever before!"

Meanwhile, just for kicks, here's the Japanese poster of Elvira's first feature movie back in the day from emovieposter.com. One of our ongoing questions back over at the Laomagination project has been, what would Elvira have looked like if she'd started in Laos. Granted, considering that Laos didn't make it's first horror film until Mattie Do's 2013 Chanthaly and her newest, Nong Hak: Dearest Sister, she would probably have had a harder go at things. But so it goes!

One thing that I love about foreign movie posters is seeing the shift in focus and highlights the locals think will get butts in the theater seats, especially for films as distinctly American as Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. The translation of so many of the jokes must have been very interesting in this case, although some certainly were... universal.