GGB Pittsburgh: Horror Brunch and Film Festival

This month, we celebrated all things spooky! We celebrate Halloween all month, so we started and ended October with a bang boo.  It turns out we have a lot of horror fans here in Pittsburgh, so we decided to host a horror film festival this year to coincide with our horror themed brunch.

For months, officers compiled a list of horror movies to screen at our film festival. We whittled it down and ran a poll on Facebook to see which two films we were going to screen. It all came down to Troll 2 (“ooooh myyy gooooood!”) and Chopping Mall (“THANK YOU. HAVE A NICE DAY.”), which we showed at The Hollywood Theater on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  With about 30 people in attendance, there has already been suggestion after suggestion about what we should watch next year!

A couple of weeks later, we headed to The Yard‘s newest location at The Galleria for our brunch, and things really got spooky there.  We talked about our favorite subgenres of horror (shout-out to gothic horror, which was a topic we lingered on for a while!), the legend of Bloody Mary (while sipping on some from The Yard’s endless Bloody Mary bar!), horror-themed cakes, and even real-life horrors (flat tires! apartments with no heat! coworkers!!).

We also talked about many non-spooky topics, like how much we love The Yard.  This is our third October spent with them, and we’re hoping they open a new location in time for next October! They’ve been a fantastic place to spend our birthday. Their grilled cheese menu is expansive, their brunch items are tasty (I’m lookin’ at you, Snozzberry Pancakes), and their drinks are to die for (but we promise we won’t!).

We had A LOT of swag to give away this month. From fake blood chokers to horror movie killer pillow cases, a copy of You’re Next to classic horror movie pins, and even a neat promotional tin for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

As you can see, we went a little above and beyond for this month. There were just so many bases to cover! We have something for the witchy-types in the group, the artsy types, the candle lovers, and for those who bathe (all of us, I imagine!) we even ordered a bath mat with bloody footprints. We even had a sports pennant supporting New Jersey’s own Camp Crystal Lake, the camp kids have just dying to get into!

What were everybody’s plans for Halloween? We had one lady have a scary movie night, many of our brunchettes took their kids out trick-or-treating, and some of us just stayed in and watched whatever was on cable or Netflix (horror movies, of course, but some of us watched It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

I think the main topic everybody was either avoiding or delving deep into was season 2 of Stranger Things. Since it had been exactly 24 hours since the premiere, some of us took all of Friday to binge watch, some of us started casually, and others just hadn’t had the time to start. Regardless, it was clear that EVERYBODY was excited about Eleven and the boys making their return to our screens. All of us were very cautious not to reveal any spoilers!

And just two weeks later, we were already setting up for our Geeksgiving Brunch. Stay tuned to hear about one of our best turnouts and brunches we’ve had to date! Our winter schedule has MANY amazing things to come, but you’ll just have to take our word for it!