About

In 2012, a man set out on a mission to find like-minded people who enjoyed Halloween and horror movies as much as he did. I wanted to find folks who made their own decorations, built awesome yard haunts, and spent their summers thinking of clever ways to carve jack ‘o lanterns.

Unfortunately in those early days, there weren’t many online resources for that sort of thing. With the exception of a handful of forums that were basically copies of one another, there just wasn’t much there. So, I set out to create it.

I started Scarydad.com as a way to showcase my own creations and hoped to attract others to show off their own arts and crafts and ideas. I didn’t really have an end-goal in mind, just that I wanted to get to know and build a community of fellow horror fans. I wrote articles several times a week and haunted the existing forums looking for people to talk to. It was fun and I was making traction when in 2013 my second child was born and blogging took a backseat to baby stuff.

Scarydad was essentially shuttered in mid-to-late 2014 and left to the bats and things that lived in the attic. I never officially closed it, as I always had plans to return, but how and when were unclear for a couple of years.

In 2016, I was in the market for some comics and was told a dude named Scott was selling them. In that first conversation, we connected over similar tastes in books, movies, and music. We both loved horror and wanted the scattered Houston scene to come together and do something awesome. So, we began by grabbing a microphone and talking about all the stuff we found cool.

The show got off to a great start and we decided we needed to up our game to really get things going. We discussed throwing a party or some kind of event– something for and by the various artists and authors and craftspeople we’d met in the short time since we started. We decided on a pop-culture event and in 2017, Scarydad’s Haunted Halloween Show was born.

We did well that first year in spite of a colossal punch from nature in the form of Hurricane Harvey. We did it again in 2018 and 2019. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be year 4 got torpedoed by Covid-19, but our heads are held high. Battered and bruised, we stand and fight. We are familiar with unstoppable killing machines, pandemics, and zombified beavers, after all. We’ll survive. And if we don’t, we’ll claw our way out of the grave anyway. It’s what we do.

So, in 2021 we’ve decided to join forces with our brothers in horror- the Houston Horror Film Festival. We have yet to work out the details, but it should be awesome.

In the meantime, enjoy over 160 episodes and counting of the podcast, and look for news and updates on HHFF and other things happening in Houston and across Texas. And just a reminder, Scarydad Podcast host Billy Stuart is also a bestselling horror author with two very-well reviewed books available for purchase right here. So, hopefully that fills your bucket of horror for now.

Thank you for joining us.