On a Saturday night in October, the marquee of the Akron Civic Theatre will glow over South Main Street the way it has for nearly a century. But the crowd filing through the doors on Oct. 10, 2026, will be there for something the old movie palace's original architects never imagined: hours of original independent horror shorts, made largely by Ohio filmmakers, projected onto one of the last great atmospheric theater screens in America.
The event is the Akron Independent Horror Short Film Festival, presented by Killer Video, a downtown Akron museum and gallery devoted to horror and the vanished culture of the video rental store. Doors open at 6 p.m. with a lineup of horror and film vendors selling merchandise and a curated selection of food trucks parked onsite. The screenings follow, running roughly three hours with a brief intermission, and the awards ceremony comes immediately after the last film. Then the night loosens up with an afterparty and "Scareoke" -- karaoke with a horror bent -- which the organizers promise attendees will not want to miss. The festival recommends the event for ages 12 and up, and anyone under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.
The story of how a VHS museum came to run a film festival at Akron's most storied theater begins with a collector named Jonathon Carmichael. A self-described "100% across the board nerd," Carmichael, 44, grew up in the era when Blockbuster ruled the suburbs -- though in his case the family ritual centered on Roadrunner Video in the Portage Lakes area. "The ritual of renting movies was like a pillar of our family and my childhood and my young adult life," he told Signal Akron. "And it was one of those things to where horror was ultimately what I went after. It was like the forbidden fruit."
That nostalgia became Killer Video, a museum and gallery tucked inside downtown Akron's sprawling Selle Building, which opened to the public for guided tours in February 2025. Carmichael and his partner and co-owner, Erika Fritz, built a space that functions as a time machine to a video rental store circa 1996 -- except nothing is for rent in the exhibit itself. The collection includes roughly 1,700 VHS tapes spanning the horror genre, organized by theme, with one wall devoted to films with "of the dead" in their titles and another to movies about creepy crawlies. There are movie posters for "Critters" and "The Blob," large cardboard standees for "Gremlins 2" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," a lightbox for "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3," issues of Fangoria, vintage Halloween blow molds, old McDonald's Halloween buckets and an especially creepy Chucky doll. A separate rental store offers hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays to members, along with freshly popped popcorn.
Before any of that, Carmichael worked as a sales manager in California for Manhattan Beach Studios. He moved back to Ohio, reconnected with Fritz, and turned a lifelong obsession into an institution. Killer Video has since become a nonprofit, with Carmichael serving as founder, owner and executive director and Michael Tolva as director of development.
The festival itself predates Carmichael's stewardship. It was developed in 2023 by Neil Sudhakaran, a Cleveland native and independent filmmaker whose short documentary "Dain Bramage: Voyages into Visual Collage" screened at the Academy Award-qualifying 49th Cleveland International Film Festival and who was named the 2024 Summit Art Space Emerging Artist. Sudhakaran earned a Cleveland Critics Circle Award for his film and projection work on "Angry F@#$" at convergence-continuum, and he spent years in development and advertising roles at Northeast Ohio theaters, including the Akron Civic Theatre itself.
The inaugural festival was held at the Civic in 2023. When Sudhakaran relocated for a job offer -- he is now managing director of Flashback Theater Co. in Somerset, Kentucky -- he entrusted the biennial event to Carmichael, who took on the planning, confirmed the venue, chose judges and sifted through 48 horror short submissions for the 2025 edition. "At that point we didn't have the nonprofit, but knowing that we were heading in the direction of the nonprofit, he felt that we were a good steward," Carmichael told Signal Akron. "I think that he had seen that myself and the team were truly passionate about everything, and he had offered that to us, and I didn't even think twice."
What matters most to Carmichael is the local angle. "We're really passionate about providing the platform for these filmmakers to have their works shown and their voices heard," he said. "For it to be for Ohio-centric filmmakers is really meaningful for us."
The venue gives those filmmakers a stage unlike any other in the region. The Akron Civic Theatre opened in 1929 as Loew's Theatre, built by Marcus Loew and designed by the famed theater architect John Eberson in the "atmospheric" style popular in the late 1920s. Eberson's idea was to make audiences feel they were sitting outdoors in a European courtyard at twilight: the Civic's interior was fashioned after a Moorish castle, with Mediterranean decor, medieval carvings, authentic European antiques and Italian alabaster sculptures. Its ceiling was painted to resemble the night sky, complete with clouds and twinkling stars -- and it is one of the few theater ceilings in the world that can rotate, drifting clouds across the artificial sky.
The Civic is one of the remaining atmospheric theaters designed by Eberson in the United States. It seats 3,000 people, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and underwent a major renovation in 2001 and 2002. Locals know it as "The Jewel on Main Street." It has also acquired a reputation for being haunted -- an appropriately atmospheric detail for a horror festival, and one that a certain kind of attendee will surely bring up during Scareoke.
For a grassroots festival built on submissions from independent filmmakers, that setting is the point. The event is not a studio showcase or a red-carpet premiere but a one-night gathering where the future of fear gets a big screen, a live audience and an awards ceremony, with merch tables and food trucks in the lobby and a museum's worth of horror history standing behind it. Tickets and details are available through the Akron Civic Theatre and Killer Video. One night only -- dare to attend.