At the tail end of a nor'easter, the toughest part of NJ Horror Con was running from the car to the door. The weather had already made its point. After that, the day got considerably easier, and considerably stranger, in the best possible way.
Intake was fast, courteous and surprisingly human. The staff managed to keep people moving without treating the entrance like an airport security line. They stopped to have actual conversations with patrons, answered questions and still somehow kept the flow going. It was a small thing, but it immediately set the tone. This was a convention with a lot happening at once, yet it never felt like you were being pressed through it.
The Delta made for a very good home for the event. It had enough room for the show to feel dense without becoming oppressive, and I would like to extend a special note of gratitude to whoever decided hotels should have carpeting. Convention days are measured in miles whether your phone admits it or not, and my feet were extremely pleased with the decision.
The floor itself was a collision of interests. There were the familiar convention merchants selling the expected shirts, collectibles, art and memorabilia, but those tables were only the beginning. Turn a corner and the marketplace got much stranger. Oddities, niche vendors, handmade work, horror art and assorted objects that seemed specifically designed to make you stop and ask a question filled the room. If browsing was not permanent enough, there were also plenty of opportunities to leave with fresh ink.
That density is one of the things NJ Horror Con gets right. Horror may be the banner over the door, but the culture underneath it is much wider. Film people, collectors, tattoo artists, actors, craftspeople, fans and filmmakers all overlap. The event feels less like a single fandom gathering and more like a temporary neighborhood built by people whose interests happen to meet somewhere in the dark.
The celebrity area fit that feeling too. Guests were not hidden away in some inaccessible closed-door session. They were right there. You could walk up, talk, laugh and have an actual moment rather than simply watch a famous person move from one controlled appearance to the next.
That led to one of my favorite moments of the day when I turned a corner and saw Brian O'Halloran sitting at a table. I mentioned to him that I had been at Smodcastle Friday night for the Clerks All Night event. He joked that his Horror Con commitment had put a bit of a damper on his ability to be part of the all-nighter, then said he had imagined bursting through the door and yelling, "Stop! You can't watch the show without me there!"
There are opportunities in life you are morally obligated to take.
"Yes," I add, "then you could have said, 'I wasn't even supposed to be here today!'"
O'Halloran finished the line with me and broke into a hearty laugh. At that point, I could have gone home with my story.
Fortunately, I did not.
A little later I had the chance to speak with Paugh Shadow, one of those performers whose resume makes you realize you have probably seen, or heard, him more times than you knew. He shared a few stories from sets, including one that began with filming near a police station and ended with him accidentally wandering into the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. For a brief and apparently very uncomfortable stretch, officers mistook him for a prisoner.
It was the kind of story that sounds funny once everyone knows how it ends, and Shadow told it with the timing of someone who understands that the best behind-the-scenes stories usually involve something going slightly, spectacularly wrong.
There were plenty of other sightings and conversations worth mentioning. Too many, really, to cram into one recap without turning this into a convention inventory. But the biggest reason I was there was not to collect celebrity encounters.
It was to find the people making things and that became the real story of the day.
NJ Horror Con's film side puts emerging directors, independent filmmakers and small creative teams in the same physical space as established names and longtime fans. That matters. You can discover a project because someone is standing ten feet away from it, hear why it exists directly from the person who made it, and follow a conversation somewhere you never would have reached by scrolling a streaming menu.
I spoke with several directors and creators doing genuinely inventive work in New Jersey, and those conversations deserve more than a paragraph buried in a convention recap. I will be writing about them individually, because the interesting part is not simply that they had projects at a horror convention. It is what they are trying to build, how they are building it here, and what the local creative scene looks like when you stop treating it as background noise.
That is what I kept noticing all day. The famous faces gave the convention recognizable landmarks. The vendors gave it texture. The oddities gave it personality.
But the people making the next thing gave it momentum. A good convention lets you meet the people you came to see. A better one introduces you to people you did not know you needed to meet.
NJ Horror Con did both.
And after all of it, the merch, the ink, the stories, the filmmakers, the celebrities and one perfectly timed Clerks joke, the hardest part of the entire day was still running through the rain from the car to the front door.
SOURCE NOTES
• New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival — official site
• New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival — Celebrities (September 25-27, 2026, Delta Hotels Woodbridge)
• New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival — Hotel: Delta Hotels Woodbridge, 515 U.S. Rte 1 South, Iselin
• New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival — Film Festival/Panels
• IMDb — Brian O'Halloran
• FlickList — Paugh Shadow credits
• SModcastle Cinemas — Clerks: Open All Night 3
Observational passages are based on the reporter's attendance at the New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival at Delta Hotels Woodbridge. Venue, guest and film festival references link to the public pages cited in SOURCE NOTES.