April 20, 2024

In April of 2004, Mike C and I launched Icons Of Fright. Which means… It’s our 20th anniversary RIGHT NOW! The original idea was very simple. Mike and I had just met and started going to East Coast horror conventions regularly. I had finished a course on web design and was unable to land a steady job in that field. I figured I should get some practice and build a website revolving around something I loved. Why not do a site about horror movies? Remember, this was the early days of the internet so there wasn’t a lot out there in 2004. And while Mike and I always loved meeting and chatting with genre celebrities at these cons, we had always hoped we could make those conversations last just a little bit longer. So he said, “let’s do Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, but for the horror fan.” And that’s how we kicked it all off!

We were so fortunate and lucky for the following people early on: Jason Alvino, Adam Barnick, Kevin Klemm, Danny Price. They helped shape what would become our unique celebratory voice and identity.

I have since fully restored ALL of our Icon Exclusive Interviews from the very beginning to roughly 2011 on this very website! If you go in chronological order, you’ll see that we gradually got better and more comfortable with the interviews. We advocated for a lot of independent horror films, from MALEVOLENCE to HATCHET to BEHIND THE MASK and THE SIGNAL. We spoke with so many great people, a lot of whom are no longer with us: Gunnar Hansen, Ben Chapman, Betsy Palmer, Jeff Burr, Dick Durock. We were on the ground for everything from Rob Zombie’s two HALLOWEEN movies to THE OMEN remake.

And we had no aspirations or expectations, we simply did it because we genuinely and sincerely LOVED the horror genre with all our hearts and souls. Icons of Fright was where it all started for both of us. We never could’ve possibly imagined the paths it would lead us on, the friendships that would be born out of it, the creative endeavors it spawned. We’re just eternally grateful to every single person that read along, supported, contributed, or partook in any capacity along the way. We invite you to revisit and explore 20 years of Icons of Fright again.