This weekend past I was speaking at the Manchester Monster Convention, which was a blast. My talk dealt with two so-called ‘real life’ vampire cases, while other speakers and authors covered the waterfront in terms of werewolves, psychopaths, dragons, cryptids, zombies, and, uh, Japanese zombie whales. We watched clips from the forthcoming Yorkshire-based zombie horror film Before Dawn, and stayed deep into the night to take in a brilliant triple bill of Island of Lost Souls (1932, with Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau, and Bela Lugosi as the half-man Sayer of the Law – wooo!), The Whisperer in the Darkness (a top-notch adaptation of a Lovecraft story by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society) and Reel Zombies (in which a bunch of Z-grade filmmakers craft a rubbish zombie movie during an actual zombie apocalypse). Many thanks to Hannah, Linda, Linda and Rob for the invite and the hospitality.

There was however a bizarre episode at the venue. Delegates and speakers alike would venture into one of the lifts – and not be seen for many minutes afterwards, making talks start late and overrun. The reason? The main convention venue was on the second floor, but if you pressed the button for that level, the lift would take you to the third floor (while sneakily telling you were on the second floor). Subsequent attempts to return to floor 2 resulted in the lift ascending to the sixth floor (indicated as the fifth floor) before jostling between floors, including the basement. As a consequence people found themselves wandering around random corridors in the Hotel of Lost Souls…

The lift only had a problem if the first button to be pressed was for floor 2, so the malign intelligence that controlled it was clearly duophobic…