Mike Lisa remembers as a child watching horror films. A love passed down from his parents, who allowed him to watch such scary classics as Night of the Living Dead.
“The grittiness of the black-and-white, made it feel so real, and I could see even at a young age that there was a message in the movie,” said the 31-year-old Bergen County resident about the 1968 shocker about residents in a small town combating zombies run amok.
Now as an adult, he gets to watch the movie again as it will screen at the Saturday Nightmares Expo taking place at the Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City from March 19-21.
“I even hope there are a whole pack of zombies out there who want to come.” – Mike Lisa
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The expo will also include screenings of other Romero movies “Dawn of the Dead” and “Creepshow”, the premiere showing of a documentary on “Dawn of the Dead”, a demo by a veteran movie makeup artist, and vendors.
Lisa, a filmmaker by trade but a horror movie fan at heart, said Saturday Nightmares was borne out of what he saw was the actual nightmare of various horror movie conventions that he has attended over the years.
“We are trying to stick to just the horror genre and focus on a particular theme, which in our case is celebrating George Romero,” Lisa said. “Having been to a lot of the conventions they go into subgenre and sub-sub genre, they move so far away from the original intent.”
A scary celebration
Lisa also wanted to focus on the works of an old scare master like Romero because the films he made are films that are being re-made into “crap,” such as the 2005 remake of Romero’s 1978 film, “Dawn of the Dead” and just released “The Crazies,” based on Romero’s 1973 film.
“Producers just want to remake his films for a buck, and they have nothing to with the film,” Lisa said. “I can’t remake these films, so it’s better just to celebrate the originals, and people who made them.”
And celebrating the originals also means screening celluloid through a projector in an old-style movie house like the Loew’s as Lisa was to able to get a hold of 35mm prints of the Romero films he will be showing.
But he hopes that people will be attending not just to get a glimpse of Romero but also to take in an old-fashioned horror-film convention, and indulge their love of fright flicks.
“So far it has been good in terms of advance ticket sales, with people coming from as far as the UK and Norway who have heard about this expo,” Lisa said.
He then joked, “I even hope there are a whole pack of zombies out there who want to come.”
Lisa admits that while he expects a crowd based on the “large following” for George Romero, he also sees this expo as an “experiment” that could meet his wildest expectations or become a horror show.
Advance tickets are $20 for one-day, Weekend pass for all three days is $55. At the door is $25 and $65 for weekend pass. Children 10 and under are free when chaperoned by an adult with a paid ticket.
Hours for the expo are: Friday, Mar. 19: 4 p.m. – 7 p.m.; Saturday, Mar. 20: 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., and Sunday, Mar. 21: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Special events are on Friday and Saturday from 7 p.m. to midnight.
For more information, visit www.saturdaynightmares.com.
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.