Count Gore De Vol, the popular TV and internet horror host from the Washington, DC area, was among the many celebrity guests at Awesome Con. Scoop stopped by his booth during the event to chat about conventions, the upcoming anniversary of his show, and how he got into horror hosting.

Scoop: Are you having a good time this weekend?
Count Gore De Vol (Count): I, Count Gore De Vol, am having a great time this weekend because Awesome Con is truly awesome.

Scoop: You’ve been here a couple of years. Is there something specific that you like about this particular show?
Count: Well what I like about it most is, they have a facility big enough to handle the crowd. There are too many conventions that oversell the facility they have; they have a facility for 2,000 and sell 5,000 tickets. Some people just can’t get in, it’s too crowded, it feels like sardines. But here, it’s in the convention center in DC and it’s so big. You can put 40,000 people in here and you wouldn’t know they are here.

Scoop: Do you have any cons that you are a big fan of going to that do have decent space?
Count: Well this one in particular is probably the best I’ve ever been to. Some of the other shows are smaller shows that have nice facilities like Scares that Care in Williamsburg [in Virginia] ‒ which is also a charity to boot ‒ they have a nice facility that works well. Those are probably my two favorites.

Scoop: What is your favorite horror movie?
Count: Oh, boy that’s a toughy. I try not to say the answer to that because it pigeonholes the genre. How about if I answer this one: what’s my favorite scary movie?

Scoop: Okay, that’s good.
Count: That would be Alien. And people say, “Well, that’s science fiction.” Excuse me – if it scares the snot out of you, it’s a horror movie! [laughs]

Scoop: Absolutely. There are some great sci-fi/horror movies. There’s a bunch in the ’50s that were really good. With Alien, we started getting stuff like The Terminator, Scanners, and others like that.
Count: Yeah.

Scoop: Earlier, you said you were celebrating the 20th anniversary of your show. Can you tell me more about that?
Count: Yeah, in 1998 on July 11, we took my former television program that was on channel 20 in Washington, Creature Feature, and we took it to the internet to become the first horror hosted showcase on the internet, making Count Gore De Vol the first horror host of the internet. So that’s 20 years ago this year, and we’ve done over a thousand shows on the web, which changes every Saturday night.

So, here at Awesome Con, we’re doing a panel and I’m going to talk about it, we’re going to show some clips of what the show was like on television, what the early days of the web show looked like as we were able to go from dial-up to broadband and how it’s evolved. Then I’m going to answer questions from the audience. Some of them may even be truthful. Answers that is. [laughs]

Scoop: How did you get into being a horror host and what do you like about it?
Count: You want the truthful answer?

Scoop: Of course, absolutely.
Count: Okay, I stayed up too late one night with too much beer and I happened to be sitting there with the general manager of a station that was about to go on the air and we were watching film demos of program opens that they were going to buy a package of. One of the opens came up and said “Night of terror with M.T. Graves,” and after slurping down way too much beer, I said, [in Count Gore De Vol voice] “Yes, that’s what we need, a hosted horror movie.” He turned to me and said, “You’re hired.” That’s how I got to do it! [laughs]

Scoop: That’s wild!
Count: Of course, I also happen to already own a cape – it was the ’70s after all – and I had a tux, so they bought me a coffin and the rest is history.

Scoop: What do you like about horror hosting?
Count: I found out by doing it that I have a natural proclivity towards improv and I do very dry humor, but I don’t make fun of the movies – unless they deserve it, like The Beast of Yucca Flats, Manos: The Hands of Fate. There are a few out there that really, yeah, shouldn’t have seen the light of celluloid.

I don’t have a set thing, sometimes if I really admire a movie, we’ll delve into the film and the stars, maybe some of the background. Sometimes we’ll do trivia about the films, sometimes we’ll trivialize the film if it deserves it. So, it’s all over the place.

Scoop: What other conventions are you attending in the next couple of months?
Count: Well, I’m cutting back a little bit this year for a variety of reasons. The next one is going to be Scares that Care, which’ll be in August in Williamsburg. What I really like about this one is that it’s a very family-friendly convention. Lots of kids come, families come together. I produce and host the costume contest and they have a really great time with that. It’s a nice, small show. I also do Pensacon in the winter, down in Pensacola, Florida. I occasionally do Cinema Wasteland and Horror Hound.

Scoop: Well, thank you so much for chatting with me.
Count: My pleasure, and please come see me at countgore.com.

Our full Awesome Con coverage can be found in the Main Event and a photo gallery in our In the Limelight section.