Macabre Daily Chats With Ben Scrivens of Fright Rags!

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you have at least a passing familiarity with Fright Rags.  At the very least you’ve seen their shirts worn by other horror fans.  If you’re unfamiliar with the name Ben Scrivens, President and CEO of Fright Rags, you should.  

Since 2003, Ben and company at Fright Rags have brought top-quality t-shirts, lounge pants, and other items right to your door, along with a custom trading card and a Warhead candy.  He sat down with me for a deeper look at the origins, inner workings, and challenges that Fright Rags faces that most people might not know about.

I joke to my wife that if Fright Rags is like the Starbucks of horror merch, you’re the Howard Schultz.

[Laughs] I like that, actually.  I'll take it.

Something I've always wondered about for years, but why are you based out of Rochester, NY of all places? Is it where you're from?

I was born and raised in Rochester. My family moved out to a suburb just outside called Greece, NY when I was six.  It’s interesting because when I was younger, I used to think “I should move out and experience life” or whatever you think you have to do when you’re 20. My girlfriend, who is now my wife of 17 years, was thinking of where she wanted to go after college.  We actually started dating when I was still in high school. She was a freshman in college when I was a senior, but we went to the same high school.  When I went to RIT for Graphic Design, I was looking at Boston or New York because they’re the bigger cities.  But what I love about Rochester is how it’s all grown over the past 20 years.  We’ve been able to encourage the scene around here.  We have monthly film screenings that we do at our little arthouse theater. We bring in guests on Skype and in person. We've actually been able to cultivate it right here in our backyard.  There was almost a sold out crowd at a showing of “Night of the Living Dead” last Saturday.  I always see those things in LA and New York and other cities, and we're able to do it here.  People sometimes travel to come here for those events.  We've had Tom Atkins, Fred Dekker, Joe Bob Briggs, PJ Soles...we even do short films sometimes to coincide with the movies that have cameos from them, as well.

How does Fright Rags balance how much attention is paid to big name brands like the “Halloween” collection with more niche collections, like the recent “The People Under the Stairs” collection? 

Obviously, certain things we know are going to be tentpoles like “Halloween,” but we really don't know what's going to be popular in terms of a property.  The first thing is finding who has the rights and “The People Under the Stairs” is a great example. We researched that Universal owns a lot of the rights to some of these movies, and we already had a great relationship with them.

A company or studio will often present their catalogue to you, but they don't even know what they own half the time. So they'll present “Jaws,” “Halloween” and “Shaun of the Dead,” or whatever. Then we're the ones that say, “We want those, but want ‘People Under the Stairs’ and ‘The Burbs’ and ‘Prince of Darkness.’” And they’ll go to research it, then come back to us and say nobody's ever licensed this from us.  You can have it but here's a limitation. Then we think of who we should get to do what. For “People Under the Stairs,” it’s like, do we get  Justin Osbourn to do the design for that one this time around? We keep our flagship artists like Justin and Kyle [Crawford] very busy.  Because of the detailed work that Justin does, it takes him a while to do a design, which is totally okay with me. But we also know that we can't give him like 30 designs at a time.  We're planning these releases so far in advance so we have to be strategic.  So it’s like “let’s give Justin THESE titles, Kyle gets THESE titles.  He works completely different from Justin and a lot quicker.  We look at “People Under the Stairs” and think this design could do really well but, let’s do a classic design, too.  We love that poster art and it's really never been done.   The problem with that movie is we can't use any likenesses, so we had to really be careful. Now if we get approval from the actors and send that to Universal, that's something that we would be willing to do, but it would take too long.  We had other ideas that got approved, but in this case, we said “let's limit it to these new shirts and see how it does. Depending on how well they do, we'll think about a second or third collection, then start thinking of other categories, like lounge pants or something.” Other items like those have a higher minimum order quantity from the factory. We can't just make a handful and see how they do. If they don't do well, then we're stuck with the inventory. But now with “The Burbs,” we went all out because we knew it would not only be popular, but also we just could not NOT release all the ideas we had. We still have more ideas but there's too many and they’re all awesome.

I mean, he’s not wrong about that original art

Yeah it's a totally untapped property.

There's no other official shirts because Universal said they’ve never been approached for that title.  And again, we couldn't use likenesses, but they were so good, I couldn't find a line to break them all up into two. We do have a few others that got approved later that we'll be doing more with it for sure.  Universal’s good about grouping designs together. We can have several titles and they're all “cross collateralized.” They're all under one contract and under one advance, and they all work on one against one advance, right? So as opposed to having three titles of three different advances and three different contracts. Some companies are like that where each title is its own contract. Often, especially with Universal it’s like a buffet.  You’re like “oooo I want the jello AND the pudding.” 

You already know you're going to be spending a lot of money upfront and they're really focused on the tentpole stuff anyway. So when we know something like “The Burbs” is a goldmine, it doesn't matter. Some people are like  “I don't even know we own this movie.” 

There have definitely been times where I've reached out about a property and it can work the opposite way. We ask for a property and the company or studio or persons want too much money for it. [Laughs]. Unfortunately, it just isn’t worth what you're asking.  I could be wrong in some instances, but I feel like we have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what we're doing. There are chances that I will take where I think I'm paying too much for a property, but I want to do it, because I think we need to do it, whether it's a personal passion, or I just feel like it's good for us to do. 

Can you give an example of any one of those?

Well, it had nothing to do with the money, but the one that came on my radar that I've seen over the years was “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.” I fully admit that I did not grow up with this show, but because it was Canadian, it did play in certain markets in the US.  I knew so many people that loved the show and I got put in touch with the creator and owner of the property several months ago by a customer of ours.  They're from Canada and they’re like “I would love for you guys to do it for the 50th anniversary of the show.”  So I did more research on the show and I had a really great chat with the owner, who is actually featured in the show. He's such a great guy.  I thought you know, if we could do a limited edition shirt for this property for the 50th anniversary, let's see how it goes.  If it does really well, we can do more stuff with it. It was really just fan service to the people who grew up with this show.

Were there any shirts or accessories you had high expectations for that did OK, or vice versa, where something you think is niche just explodes?

I wouldn't say we've had any absolute flops or anything. Luckily.  I'll be honest with you, you know, we've done “Hellraiser 3,” with Pinhead, specifically. And personally, I try to be as objective as I can, even though it's completely subjective. But I really try to be critical of every aspect of what we do.  If it's bad, it's bad, and I have to admit that because if I don't, we can't grow and change.  I really feel like we did a good job representing that property, considering our limitations. I thought we really put our best foot forward. For whatever reason, it just didn’t really do as well as I thought it would.  It did fine. 

Pinhead is up there with Leatherface and Chucky. He's popular enough, but it didn't pan out as much. I'll tell you one property that my production manager Chris and I keep pumping stuff out for is “Teen Wolf.” It never really does [the business] we want, but I’m just such a fan. It's a favorite of mine. But that's okay.

This kind of gets into a longer story, but my friend Joe Cena, who runs Fourth Castle developed this product called Nanoforce, which are these small army-like figures. 

Like the “Halloween” collection that you did. 

Who doesn’t love getting those “Coming Attractions” e-mails with upcoming designs?

Exactly.  In November 2019, he reached out to me and said “Diamond Selects wants to do some horror properties with Nanoforce and my lunchboxes. I don't have any horror licenses, but I want to work and collaborate with you on it. And they would really like to do ‘Halloween.’” I talked to the studio and they were like, yeah, let's try it. Now, this was going to be limited retail. We had our names on it, we were going to help design it, but we weren’t going to sell it ourselves besides a few units on our site. We were happy to collaborate and lend designs to it and stuff. The Nanoforce are twelve two-inch figures, half orange, half black. The one bonus four-inch figure was going to be our glow-in-the-dark Michael Myers.

We were developing it and showing it at Toy Fair in February 2020. Then a few weeks later, the world shuts down because of COVID. That basically killed the project for Diamond, who we’re still good friends with. In fact, we still have a standing call every week where we just chat. It's nice to have other people in the business where you can talk to and vent and stuff. 

And so we had already invested money into it and Diamond didn’t know what was going to happen. Nobody did. So I asked if we could take it over as our project and Diamond said, “go for it because we can't guarantee anything,” which was awesome. So Joe and I went to work and we developed the lunchbox with the thermos, which I knew was going to be popular.  I was so into it, but with the Nanoforce figures, I didn't know what people would think of it.. I understand people know what army men are, but do people want that?  Will they collect that? 

So we had already committed with the factory to do the minimum order quantity of both. We had to commit to 2,500 Nanoforce and 2,000 lunchboxes.  I didn’t know if they would move, so I said “let’s introduce this to our customers. Let's reveal one per week and make it a fun thing for 13 weeks leading up to this release.” We released them in September, and sold out in 10 minutes.  

I saw that press release and I knew there was no way I'm going to even try to get one of those because they are going to go so fast.

Well, I wanted to split up the releases because I wanted to give each one its space.  So we had already planned on releasing the lunchboxes in October. As soon as the Nanoforce sold out, I told Joe not to limit the lunchboxes. I do NOT want to piss off our customers twice in a month. We’ll accept the 2,000 that's on the boat already, but we have to open this up to a pre-order. I'm glad we did because we sold a lot more than 2,000 of those lunchboxes.

People ask why we can’t make more of our limited items. Sometimes it's just really hard to keep that stuff going while we have other things going on, including behind the scenes.  I legitimately felt bad for people that just couldn't get [the Nanoforce figures], even though we limited it.  Those were going on eBay and for crazy money, and it was just stupid. I really wanted to respect the people that got online and ordered one, but I also wanted to give other people a chance. So we thought if we could release a second edition and make sure it's labeled as such, and then swap the colors, the original collectors will have the one thing we will never release again, but then the second edition satisfies everybody else.  We did an open pre-order early this year and that was a huge success. We sold a lot of those two. Same thing with the Joe Bob Briggs figure last year in like half an hour.  Those are supposed to be limited, but we brought it back with a blue shirt. so you can still get a figure, just with a different shirt.

With figures and toys and things like that, it's a crapshoot, because you have to commit to a certain number.  The problem with doing pre-orders today is you've got a longer lead time and we're now running into all of the supply chain issues. We have thousands of orders that we cannot ship right now. We were supposed to start shipping them last month through the end of the year. A lot of this stuff isn't going out probably until December.  I hate having people wait all this time, but it’s literally out of our control and clearly it's a global crisis. Most people are understanding, but it's a really hard thing to be sitting on all these orders. People spent their hard-earned money 9 or 10 months ago, and they're still waiting. It weighs on you, you know?

Is there anything else that you just want people to understand about the position you’re in with shipping right now, and how all it’s such a conundrum all over the world, not just for Fright Rags?

Well, I want to make sure that people know that it's at EVERY point in the supply chain. Factories in China are dealing with an energy crisis and rolling blackouts.  So now you've got severely limited production.  Shipping costs have also doubled, at least, for this year. Now you got the containers on the boat. Well, there are literally a half a million containers waiting at ports in the ocean around the country right now.  Okay, now you finally get it through customs, it's coming off the boat, but there's a shortage of truckers apparently to get the stuff from out of the ports.

We aren't sitting on these products.  Like I said, most people have been understanding this time around because of the pandemic, but sometimes I think people think that we just want to take their money and not ship anything. And I get it.  There are a lot of shady companies out there that give people like us a bad name.   I know some people have been burned. I get it if they're not familiar with us, and they might think we're the same but we're not like that.  We literally want nothing more than to ship your order.   We take pride in being able to get this stuff turned around.  Our team is so quick and so dedicated to getting the stuff out the door. That's all we want. A lot of my time is spent talking to our partners in factories being like, “Where is this stuff? Where are we at?  I need dates.” It’s just out of our control.

It should go without saying, but sometimes you still have to remind people.  And I’d like to remind you that two of my favorite horror shirts come from Fright Rags.  They’re not just about having Freddy, front-and-center.  Do you feel you’re taking a risk by not showcasing iconic characters on certain items?

You’ll notice we haven't done anything like that, in particular in a number of years now.  We had done the other types of crossover parody-type shirts, because quite frankly, we did not have the license to “Nightmare on Elm Street.” We talked to lawyers about this, but we had these crossover ideas that we felt lived enough in parody that we could do them without too much of a risk. Even going back a decade or so ago, we actually did some [“Nightmare on Elm Street”] limited editions that came with Hypnocil mints and other things like that.  It was really cool.

Now, that was just all limited edition stuff, but, over the years, I thought if we're gonna do it, I want to do it legitimately. I want to get the rights and I want to do it the right way. Same thing with Jason and “Friday the 13th” and anything like that. But all of those are under Warner Brothers, which is this barrier to entry. Now, if we can get through that barrier someday, then yeah, we're going to do as much Freddy and Jason stuff as we can! It’s also not even just getting the rights to those characters in those movies. There are limitations beyond the likeness issue.  We wouldn't be able to use anybody in those movies other than Freddy, because it's a character, but even then, sometimes they limit you to what images you can use. So it's not even the Freddy rights that mean you can do whatever you want. Rather, you can use that Freddy in THAT image in THAT thing. So it's another hoop to go through. It's not just oh, you have the license and it's carte blanche.  We are limited to a very narrow scope.  And I know from experience that it can get like that. Even if we do get the rights at some point, it still might be very limited. But we will do whatever we can to do the coolest stuff that we can in our ability. And if we can bring those shirts back in an official capacity, I would do so in a heartbeat. 

Now it was a foregone conclusion you were going to do “Halloween Kills” because you've done all the other films in the series. But I was surprised that you had a lot of “Halloween Kills” merch coming out, maybe before we even saw a trailer. How does that work when you know you have a big release coming up and you can only use certain images? Do you get to watch “Halloween Kills'' early to know what you're putting out? 

So that's a good question.  Before there was a trailer for 2018’s “Halloween,” we got the scripts and a bunch of images of Michael Myers before anybody saw it publicly.  Like seven or eight months prior to the film's release. As a “Halloween” fan, it was a major fanboy moment for me. I literally called everybody into my office and they were hovering over my computer to see his new look.. It was so cool! Then we were able to use those images to craft our designs and we knew that they were going to get approved and we could release them. Enough of the trailers had been released so that we weren't spoiling anything major. 

“Halloween Kills,” was a little bit of a process because the movie was shot in 2019. Obviously COVID happened and I know they did some reshoots, but we were begging for images and assets from the four studios involved in this film.  As much as I wanted to read the script personally, I already knew the whole story of the movie anyway, We did have some likeness rights, but the issue was timing. We knew we had to get these done and approved by August 2021 so we could release them as a pre-order in September, because we did that for “Halloween [2018]”. We weren't sure what the demand was going to be, but again, I didn't want to limit it. Thank goodness we didn't, because the first day of the pre-orders, every record we've ever made as a company up until this point was broken.

We knew it was going to be big but we couldn’t believe it.  And then we still had a week of a pre-order to go!  Anyway, in June we were able to get access to a bunch of images of just Michael, which we decided to go with for now because we didn't want to add more time with getting actors’ likeness approvals.  We used Jamie Lee Curtis’s likeness, but we also knew that Laurie wasn't going to be such a pivotal role in this film, so we really wanted to play on the mob angle anyway.  I also love that Michael looks so rad with the burnt mask.  So we focused on what I thought people are going to want to see, and if there's room to do more after the movie comes out, let's go for it. 

Even like the one of him standing in the doorway of the flame that was taken from the trailer. Again, with a movie like this, the studio has to prove all over social media posts, all of our emails, all of those things ahead of time. We have to design those things way in advance and then we can release them. I'm so glad we did it that way because come October 5th, we were able to put them back in stock so people could order them in time for the movie.  There was a whole other wave, and then Jamie Lee Curtis wore our long-sleeve shirt and said she wanted more for some friends. I didn't know her friends included Demi Moore! That created even more demand.  So it's been an incredible blessing to be able to work with that property just in general, but riding this wave of this new movie has been awesome.

How do aspiring artists submit designs to Fright Rags?  Or do you just have your own stable of artists?

If people want to send us their portfolios, we will take people's submissions, not to use an actual design, but we're always down for looking at different people's art.  We've been working with Zachary Jackson Brown, who Chris, our Production Manager, shared a private commission of the Cryptkeeper he did with me. I thought it was wicked and maybe we could do the Creep from “Creepshow.” Different property, but similar styling.  Then he did a few more designs.  It’s very subjective but we kind of look at everything and ask “what fits?”

It's like putting together a mixtape. With a property like “Halloween,” we’ve done it so many times with our regular artists, but we always want to keep it fresh.  It’s a lot of us going “huh let's take THIS person and do THIS property. That would be cool.” You can also be a really good artist, but there's composition when it comes to t-shirt art.  Some people will submit all of these beautiful portraits they've done-

But they aren’t “shirts.”

Yeah and the other thing to consider is the shirt is a canvas that stretches all around.  it doesn't bleed off the edge unless you do a full color print, which we don’t do.  You have to think of it in terms of more than just the box that holds a poster.  That works for comic book art because you can kind of get away with framing it all, even though I still very much don't like that unless it works.  And again, I understand it is subjective, but we’ve got to figure out a way to make it work on a shirt. I'm not going to take a design and just plop it on a shirt. What if it’s not dynamic enough?  I think it just needs to have that process.

One last question.  Why do you include Warheads candy with every order? 

[Laughs]

Do you have the world’s supply of Warheads?  I never see them anymore unless I order from Fright Rags.

What we do isn’t sell t-shirts. We don't sell hats or lounge pants.  We’re selling memories.  We’re selling your connection to a property that’s going to make YOU feel a certain way.  It all goes back to being a kid.  The reason why you like “Halloween” is because you saw it at a certain point in your life and it's stuck with you. For me, seeing “Halloween” when I was 4 started me down this path. We all have that story whether it's “Halloween” or a different movie.  I remember when I saw it. I remember the experience. 

I think back to when I was a kid when my friends and I would go to our convenience store, which is directly next to our video store. We’d bring whatever cash we had and get Lemonheads and all those little box candies to stuff in our pockets. We’d sound like human maracas when we got home to watch a movie. Part of the fun was getting sour candies into my mouth, and I'm not kidding you, I once put 10 Tearjerkers in my mouth and literally burned my taste buds off.  I couldn't taste for a week and taste buds scraped off my tongue like a second skin. 

I didn’t even know that was possible...

Yeah, my tongue turned white.  So I remember ordering something from somebody years ago and I got like a mint or something like a cool trading card. That made me think, what if I made my own trading cards from horror movies and a Warhead?  It just sparked something in my head that made me smile.  It just took off and became something we did.  

We would actually buy online from places like Oriental Trading and Candy Warehouse and stuff we were having trouble over the past year, even pre-COVID.  Jes [Karakashian], who works in our warehouse is always good about ordering that stuff and finding good deals.   We got to the point where we would order from the distributor directly.  We ordered a pallet of tens of thousands of Warheads [Laughs] and now we just order them by the pallet and keep them in our warehouse.

It's funny, when we were going through a shortage we had to make it up with a different candy called Toxic Waste, which is similar but people were still asking for Warheads.  Years ago, someone sent a note thanking us for adding a Warhead, so I grabbed a bag of like 175 pieces and threw it in his order. I know it sounds cheesy, but I love it even when people post their mailbag. Those are all really special for us because we love doing this, but we can't do it unless we have people that support us. We don't take that for granted because we know that could go away. We're only as good as what we just did.  We have to go back in and do our best.

Interview edited for content and clarity.