LA’s Largest Halloween Convention Is Here: Midsummer Scream 2026 Takes Over Long Beach
Midsummer Scream has officially returned to the Long Beach Convention Center, bringing haunted attractions, horror vendors, incredible costumes and an early start to Halloween season in Southern California.
Midsummer Scream is officially back in Long Beach, and after spending our first day exploring the convention, it’s hard not to feel like Halloween season has already started.
The three day convention runs from August 7 through August 9 at the Long Beach Convention Center, bringing together horror fans, haunted attraction creators, artists, vendors and some familiar faces from the genre. Midsummer Scream has grown into a massive event over the years, and this year’s show gives you a pretty good idea of just how big the Halloween community has become in Southern California.
Friday was mostly an exploration day for us. We wanted to see as much of the convention as possible before some of the bigger panels and events happening later in the weekend, so we spent a good amount of time walking the show floor, checking out vendors and eventually making our way downstairs into the Hall of Shadows.
The vendor floor alone can easily take up a few hours of your day. There’s a little bit of everything, including Halloween decorations, horror collectibles, artwork, clothing, handmade masks and some seriously impressive props. A lot of the vendors also put quite a bit of effort into their booths, so you’ll occasionally come across displays that feel more like miniature horror sets than places selling merchandise.
Some of our favorite things to look at were the masks and practical props. Midsummer Scream is one of those places where you can actually get up close with work from independent artists and haunt creators, and there were plenty of pieces that looked good enough to be used in a professional haunted attraction.
The cosplay was just as impressive. Throughout Friday we came across characters from recognizable horror movies mixed with original monsters and costumes people had clearly spent a lot of time putting together. It adds a lot to the atmosphere of the convention because you never really know what you’re going to run into while walking between booths.
The Hall of Shadows
For anyone who hasn’t experienced it before, the Hall of Shadows takes over a massive portion of the convention center and houses a collection of smaller haunted attractions built by different haunt groups. Once you walk inside, the bright convention floor is replaced with darkness, fog, lighting effects and the sound of people screaming from attractions scattered throughout the room.
We managed to experience the majority of the haunted houses during our first day, and the amount of work that goes into some of these temporary attractions is pretty wild. Even though many of them are only a few minutes long, you’re still walking through fully themed rooms with scareactors, practical effects, sound design and detailed sets.
It’s also a great way to discover smaller haunted attractions before October. Some of the groups participating in the Hall of Shadows operate full experiences during Halloween season, so you can walk through a haunt you’ve never heard of at Midsummer Scream and end up wanting to visit their full event later in the year.
With Halloween Horror Nights starting at Universal Studios Hollywood on September 3, the timing of Midsummer Scream makes the convention feel like the unofficial beginning of haunt season. We’re now less than a month away from HHN, and Universal gave attendees another reason to get excited with an early look at some of the merchandise coming to the event this year.
We’ve spent months following construction and announcements for Halloween Horror Nights 2026, so finally reaching the point where merchandise is appearing and the event is only weeks away makes everything feel much more real. The convention also gives Halloween fans plenty to do while waiting for the major Southern California events to officially begin.
Outside of the haunted attractions and merchandise, this year’s Midsummer Scream has a huge lineup of panels and celebrity appearances spread across the weekend. One of the biggest focuses is the 30th anniversary of Scream, with Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy and Roger L. Jackson among the guests appearing at the convention.
There’s so much happening that trying to see everything in a single day would be difficult. Even after spending most of Friday inside the convention center, there were still sections of the floor we wanted to revisit and plenty of things we didn’t have time to experience.
That’s probably what we enjoyed most about the first day. We didn’t have to spend the entire time rushing from one scheduled event to another. A lot of the fun came from wandering around, finding a booth we hadn’t noticed before, seeing an incredible costume pass by or deciding to jump into another haunted house in the Hall of Shadows.
Our first day ended up being a mix of just about everything Midsummer Scream is known for. We experienced most of the Hall of Shadows, picked up some merchandise, checked out an incredible amount of masks and horror props, saw some great cosplay and got an early look at Halloween Horror Nights merchandise before the event begins next month.
There’s still plenty left to see over the rest of the weekend, but day one was a pretty great way to kick things off. Midsummer Scream has once again managed to bring a huge portion of Southern California’s Halloween community together in one place, and with the actual haunt season now only weeks away, the timing couldn’t be much better.
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