The horror!

Fangoria is pretty tame stuff

"Hey, honey, buy my photo? Buy my video?"

"You talkin' to me?" She is, this ex-Hustler-magazine centerspread who has branched into starleting in straight-to-video sex-and-horror movies. Her name is Ruby Honeycut, and she's in her underwear behind a card table hawking her total cinema oeuvre: Caress of the Vampire 2 and Teenage Foot Ghoul A-Go Go.

I decide to take a pass: I'll catch them at the Harvard Film Archive.

"No, thanks," I reply to Ruby, answering as bashful-polite as Gary Cooper. And I walk on to the next table, where another such splatter-movie chick, one Jennifer Huss, has found a mark. Shy and 50ish, he's asked her for one $10 photo, but she's coaxed him into "a limited edition. I'll give you 3 for $20." He nods, and she uncorks a magic marker to sign them.

"Cute shirt," Huss informs him, and he looks down at his slacker plaid and blushes. She collects his $20, then blows flirtatiously on the wet autographs.

I'm in New York, at Fangoria magazine's Weekend of Horrors at the midtown Pennsylvania Hotel. Except for this room of sci-fi and horror male video peddlers and dubious quicky-to-video female stars, there isn't a lot to do at the $18-admission convention. I wander to an adjoining ballroom for "stalkathon" talks by horror directors and stars.

First, a star, Amelia Kinkade. I never heard of her, but she's in a trio of Night of the Demons movies. Never heard of them. She talks mostly of Demons II, in which she transformed into a giant snake. "When the body cast starts to dry, your skin can't breathe. You panic. When my hands were set on fire, they really did set me on fire for 20 minutes. They didn't have a million-dollar smoke machine, so they'd sit off screen with a couple of Marlboros and blow smoke onto my dress."

Demons III is due out in April, but Kinkade, a definite trouper, yearns for legitimate movie roles. "If someone came to me and said about an actress that she was in a snake costume for 27 hours, I'd give her a break. But Hollywood snubs its nose at that stuff."

Kinkade leaves and the MC says, "Let's have a big welcome for Larry Cohen!" Sincere applause, even from, sitting next to me, a nerd with his face in a Dean Koontz paperback. The weekend's major guest is the veteran filmmaker of It's Alive, Q, The Stuff, and Fox TV's The Invaders.

Audience question: "What was the Stuff made of?

Cohen's answer: "Firefighting foam, from fish by-products."

Audience question: "What's the favorite of your pictures?"

Cohen's answer: "It's Alive, because I made the most money from the picture."

I'm ready to split, but then someone asks about the director's association with the late, unbelievably great anarchist comedian Andy Kaufman. Now I'm all ears for an anecdote.

Cohen saw him at a comedy club one night, where the malevolent Kaufman teased the audience to near-homicide by reading aloud from Great Expectations. Page after page after page.

"This kid had something," Cohen tells us. "So I went to him and said, `I don't know who you are, but I'm casting a lunatic who opens fire on a St. Patrick's Day parade in God Told Me To.' Andy said he'd do it, so I asked him what size clothes he wore, so we could fit him for a costume. Andy answered that he didn't know. He lived at home and wore his father's clothes.

"Did Andy have a day job? No. He slept all day, he said, and came to the comedy club at night."

There are two final stops for me at the Fangoria convention. First, a last gawk at the delicious coven of vampiresses pushing custom-made fangs at yet another card table. Then a chance to see ex-1960s TV panelist Betsy Palmer signing $5-a-scribble autographs in a hallway.

The cordial Ms. Palmer is here because of Friday the 13th. The 1980 original. She played Jason's mom, and few recall: she was the killer in that one, not her eternally returning berserk son.

"Are you going to make any more Friday the 13th pictures?" a fan inquires.

"They haven't asked me to: I'm dead!" Palmer replies, sadly. "But they bring Jason back, and he's dead!"

OSCAR TRIVIA, with help from Variety: the youngest director to receive an Academy nomination for Best Director was John Singleton, at 23, for Boyz N the Hood (1991). He broke the half-century-old record of Orson Welles, 26, for Citizen Kane (1941).

The oldest Best Director nominee: Akira Kurosawa, at 75, for Ran (1985). The oldest winner: George Cukor, at 65, for My Fair Lady (1964). Among oft-nominated directors who never won for Best Director: Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini.

In the 70 years of Oscars, only two of 172 Best Director nominees have been women: Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties (1976) and Jane Campion for The Piano (1993). In other words, no American woman filmmaker has ever been nominated for Best Director.