A decade of screaming was about the last thing Claire Dunlap was expecting.
One of the founding minds of the haunt community’s biggest shindig is neck deep in the planning of this year’s Midsummer Scream as we chat, and is still surprised the thing has lasted this long.
“I never thought that far, to be honest,” Dunlap says. The tenth annual Midsummer Scream is about to creep around the Long Beach Convention Center (Aug. 7-9), but started out something, well, less ambitious.
“Oh, a few years will be great,” she says of their original plan, “We thought the bottom would fall out of the halloween frenzy. We’ll be happy to break even operating on a shoestring.” But the creation of a convention of where hundreds of mostly small vendors, a motley crew of home haunters and some well-themed panels really had legs. Ticket sales were strong and Claire says that as long as she and co-founders David Markland, Rick West and Gary Baker stayed steadily in contact with the haunt community via social media and various events, it was obvious pretty quickly “we could see we had something good going.”
The haunt community is wide, yet remains un-corporate, with a slightly punk rock-DIY ethos that helps set Midsummer Scream apart from a lot of other events its size. “Keeping that small business mentality has helped,” Dunlap says, and that people know the founders “are part of the community, not just sucking money from it.”
And over the years, there have been far more highs than lows. “We’ve had a lot of goals met that were wish list items, about celebrity appearances and attendance,” Dunlap says. She also credits things like magnetometers, which sped up entry for the thousands of attendees, while keeping people safe and especially fellow co-founder David Markland’s business philosophy. “He wants to make it fresh every year. We have cornerstones but everything is fresh ideas and presentations, so it’s not stale. We haven’t had one identical year.”
That approach has helped the event grow. “To provide a show people want to keep coming to,” she says. “Look at the demographic and how it’s changed. The first year it was all the halloween community and now it’s more and more civilians.”
But what’s special to her is how it been instrumental in creating different career paths for a lot of people in the community.
“This year’s theme is broadway horror musicals,” Dunlap says about the 2026 event. “We tried it before and it didn’t work out, so now we’re bringing it back and people are really excited. And every year the Hall of Shadows gets bigger and bigger,” She’s also eager for fans to see the sound of Scream 30th anniversary panel, as well as the new app that helps fans create their own schedules based on their interests. Other scheduled guests include John Carpenter, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy, Barry Bostwick, Dee Wallace, Bob Gurr, and Bill Moseley.
The ten years of success has also kept Dunlap deeply grateful to the haunt community and to the staff that make each year possible. “They’re the reason why we do this show. It’s seeing the enjoyment on everybody’s faces that keeps us driving forward. And our staff is incredible because they love it.”
But Dunlap and the other co-founders are always looking forward. “I’m cautiously optimistic. We never want to take it for granted. I would say we definitely have room to grow and we have had to talk about what that looks like in Long Beach.” But Dunlap says “there will be surprises to come.”
