Screen Legend William Shatner Beams Down To Nightmare Weekend 2025 For A Storytime Q&A
Journalism: The Final Frontier. These are the exploits of a demented fiction writer who masquerades as a member of the press, a place where words still pay. His open-ended mission: to explore strange, uncharted worlds for the entertainment site that he works for; to seek out new stories and new ways to engage with the lifeblood of pop culture within the depths of absurdly large public gatherings. To boldly shill where no geek has shilled before…
The crowd came alive when William Shatner strutted out onto the Main Stage on Day 2 of the Nightmare Weekend horror convention at the Donald J. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. The 94-year-old actor, who most people immediately recognize as James T. Kirk from the Star Trek series, showed no signs of his approaching centennial as he stood for the first several minutes of the Q&A, and addressed everyone with a voice that was as robust and full of authority as a man several decades younger than him.
Before taking his seat, the Shatner asked the audience a question that sent a majority of them into a stupor of stumped silence, and a few of the old school horror fans into a fit of chuckling delight: “How much glue does it take to stick a live tarantula to your face?”
Aside from traveling the galaxy, hosting informational docudrama television shows (like Rescue 911), and playing a lawyer in Boston Legal, the Captain has also explored the dark side of celluloid with B horror films such as Incubus (1966), The Devil’s Rain (1975), A Christmas Horror Story (2015), and the movie he’s referring to: A creepy-crawly creature feature gem called Kingdom of the Spiders from 1977.
The movie is about an Arizona town that is attacked by a massive swarm of tarantulas with venom that’s “five times more toxic than normal”, and it’s up to veterinarian Dr. Robert “Rack” Hansen (Shatner) to halt their highly illogical rampage. One of the scenes calls for him to have a tarantula fall off his face (at EXACTLY the right time) while his character is sitting up, and the camera follows the fanged creature on the ground as it scurries away. We never got an answer to the glue question, but it took an excessive amount of takes to nail the scene, and the entire experience left Shatner with a lingering phobia of large arachnids.
What was supposed to be a Q&A session turned into story time, but nobody was complaining, and he was generous enough to open the floor for questions when it got down to the last ten minutes. The first one up to the microphone was foolish enough to try asking him a Star Trek question, and that’s when Shatner’s famous razor-sharp wit activated. He asked the person if he knew where he was, and when he answered, “a monster convention,” Shatner demanded that he give him the definition of a monster. After the unlucky fellow couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer, the Starfleet officer took him on an intergalactic journey of chop busting that would’ve made Spock chuckle on the inside.
Unfortunately, this hilarious display of public shaming took up all the remaining time left in the “Q&A” and Shatner had to beam back to his table, where paying customers awaited. It was a slight letdown to anyone who was hoping to hear him talk about his two appearances on the greatest television series of all time (The Twilight Zone), and who even got in line to ask him about it.
Disappointment would reappear in hilariously charming fashion afterwards when this same individual asked Mr. Shatner if he’d like to do an interview for a C grade entertainment website. “I’m Sorry,” The Shat politely responded. “But I only grant interviews to places that are B grade, or above. I might occasionally do a B minus website, but that…is very rare.”
