'Is this your first Comic-Con?,” I was repeatedly asked upon arriving in San Diego for this year’s tribal gathering. It seemed more than a courtesy question. Perhaps it was the dazed look on my face that was the tip-off, or the dead-man shuffle induced by the sensory overload and crush of humanity on the showroom floor of the San Diego Convention Center, like being trapped at rush hour in the beehive. It was hard to move, tough to hear, and impossible to think—the ideal gridlock for this merchandising clusterhump and fan fair, catering to every taste-stroke of superhero, vampire, zombie, cyborg, wizard, witch, Starfleet commander, ghostbuster, and elf follower. It was like being booked into a Las Vegas casino hotel, bedazzled on day one by the lights and noise and professional flesh in tight outfits working the displays like the showgirl hostesses on The Price Is Right. The eyes are fed so much to eat that an orgy of pillaging for freebies could break out at any moment of critical mass. (As part of my induction into Comic-Con International, I was introduced to Olivia Munn, a Daily Show correspondent and Comic-Con-geek pinup goddess whose presence on the convention floor required a security cordon, lest she spark a Dionysian frenzy that would require a lot of cleaning up afterward.) But by day three the novelty has waned and a terrible mortality tolls through the bones, your sense of wonder turned inside out like a picked pocket (veterans refer to Comic-Con simply as “the Con,” an interesting double entendre), your feet belonging to a chain gang as you join another queue. All those faces of fun on the devoted fans dressed as their favorite characters acquire the rictus and pallor of Viennese dance-hallers painted in gaslight yellow. Masquerades were made for shadow and sexy night (Halloween, Mardi Gras, Venetian balls), and San Diego daylight strips those tributaries of enthusiasts and professional models in costume drag of mystery, provocation, gamesmanship. One Chewbacca blends into another to form a giant hairball, and the big boobs on Tinker Bell no longer seem worth noting, how sad.

Moderator: Please welcome Charlize Theron, Oscar-winning actress. Welcome to Hall H! Can you talk about how you got involved? 

Charlize Theron: I was offered a tremendous amount of money and I said, “Sure.” 

—At the panel for Fox’s Prometheus, still in production.

If Comic-Con has evolved into a Circus Maximus since its modest beginnings, Hall H of the Convention Center is its big top, where the tent-pole blockbusters of summers past, present, and future are trooped out for love and inspection. Seating 6,500, Hall H is where the major acts perform (the smaller rooms are where the more intimate byplay of fans and creators takes place), attracting pilgrims who camp overnight and fine up for hours like the lame and halt in search of a miracle cure at Lourdes to find a choice spot on a folding chair in this charmless hangar whose stage is as far away as the rostrum at a political convention, the miniature celebrities rendered larger than creation on video monitors suspended above the void. Despite Hall H’s roomy capacity, seating can become tight and contentious: last year a dispute over a parking spot for the owner’s butt resulted in a fan in a Harry Potter T-shirt being led out after allegedly stabbing another attendee with a pen. But mostly the atmosphere is festive, avid. Like the country singers who play Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and feel obliged to oil up the audience by telling them how honored they feel in this sacred venue, the directors and producers promoting their latest venture ritualistically hail the hallowed confines of Hall H and laud the Comic-Con congregants for being such great fans; the audience expresses its appreciation by applauding itself for being such great fans; then, the niceties over, it’s like, Now show us the damned film clips, give us kids something to tweet! The burlesque tease of Comic-Con is that the sneaky peekies beamed in Hall H may be red-hot exclusives (ushers patrol the aisles to chop off the hands of anyone recording clips on their cell phones or digicams—they’re really strict), but that window of exclusivity closes fast; by the time you get back to the hotel, the studio may have launched the sizzle reel online like a multiple-warhead missile, reducing your bragging rights to a big so-what. But the momentary frisson of seeing something first with thousands of other privileged characters does keep the atmosphere percolating, which is more than some of the A-listers do. There are those who bring a full compartment of charisma, such as Colin Farrell (Fright Night and next year’s Total Recall remake), whose movie-star walk converts every drab stretch of corridor into a red carpet, and Charlize Theron, sarcastically reminding everyone that she’s “an Oscar-winning actress,” so don’t mess with me. But there are others who look as if they’re being tugged on a leash of contractual obligation, their hello handwaves employing minimum wrist effort (which director Jon Favreau turned into a theatrical coup in 2010 when he dragged out one of the stars of the then upcoming Cowboys & Aliens—a grumpily reluctant Harrison Ford—onstage in handcuffs to a roaring how-de-do). Still others have been through this charade so many times before at so many different festivals that they can’t fake it anymore, such as that weary campaigner Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series, who hunched semi-sideways through much of the panel for Snow White & the Huntsman. This refortified Snow White will be no Disney soubrette trilling in the cottage and wielding a broom but a warrior princess in battle armor, a tribute to Hollywood make-believe, since K-Stew looks barely able to lift a plastic fork to scratch her head, much less make shish kebab of some beefy ruffian with her Joan of Arc sword.

BY DAY THREE OF COMIC-CON THE NOVELTY HAS WANED; A TERRIBLE MORTALITY TOLLS THROUGH THE BONES, YOUR SENSE OF WONDER TURNED INSIDE OUT.

The returning favorites are those who truly speak the Comic-Con language because they are part of that culture, not simply doing a parachute drop. Pop lore and gothic gore are the garlic air they breathe. Of the panels I caught, no one had thicker rapport with the Hall H’ers than producer-director Guillermo del Toro, who didn’t talk of cinema strictly in terms of product, technique, and toys-for-boys but of gargoyle archetype and devouring appetite, like a long-lost student of the lit-crit buccaneer Leslie A. Fiedler.

Question: “Del Toro, what is it you like about horror?”

Del Toro: “The first thing you love is monsters. I don’t like psycho killers with potato peelers; I’m a monster guy or a creature guy. I love the creature and the creation of that. I love universal monsters, I love freaks, and I love everything that is deformed because that is beautiful for me. I cultivate my body shape through that principle. Perfection is impossible, imperfection we can aspire to and achieve, and I think monsters do that beautifully. Monsters are a living and breathing Fuck you! One of the first duties of a horror movie is to be a Fuck you. I like the unsafe choices, and I think it’s a genre that allows you to make powerful images.”

Hollywood woos the Comic-Con set but trimmed back a bit this time, burned too often by hype backlash. Last year fanboy film bloggers hopped on their rocking ponies at Comic-Con to preach the gospel of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, raising dizzy expectations with their glee chorus, only to have the him dope out at the box office. Ditto other cult darlings that ended up underperforming domestically, such as Sucker Punch and Kick-Ass. This year’s Comic-Con showcased underdog insurgents such as Sushi Girl and Bellflower, but it was the technocratic potentates of pop culture who dominated the high-altitude airspace: Steven Spielberg, who teased Tintin and brought hobbit master Peter Jackson onstage to rapturous acclaim; Sir Ridley Scott, filing a progress report on Prometheus from remote Iceland; and fellow hall-of-fame director Francis Ford Coppola in an impresario role, presenting scenes from Twixt, an upcoming horror-film mashup that pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe (a souvenir Edgar Allan Poe mask with 3-D gels filling the eye sockets awaited on every chair), winks at The Shining (in Val Kilmer’s comic portrayal of a blocked writer), and, in a slate of mega-budget megillahs, cheerfully creaks with old-fashioned, homemade hokum. The Twixt panel was an amiable amateur-hour mess as Coppola attempted to demonstrate how each showing of the film could serve as a nonlinear smorgasbord with the director himself playing chef, orchestra conductor, and madcap Merlin, “performing the film” live by shuffling sequences and inserting alternate takes from a computer console. Fine in theory, but in execution, pure butterfingers. Coppola fumbled at his computer like Grandpa trying to work the remote control, pressing the touchscreen tabs and playing the same scene again and again, at one point chanting “Nosferatu” over the footage while Val Kilmer, mimicking his Jim Morrison from The Doors, intoned “Ride the snake.” As a sales pitch, Twixt missed the strike zone by miles, and it was hard not to be reminded of Coppola’s financially ruinous folly from 1982, One from the Heart, which also looked like a potluck dinner hung together by a mad scientist. (From Pauline Kael’s review in The New Yorker: “This movie isn’t from the heart, or from the head, either; it’s from the lab.”) But Coppola is the sweetest of mad scientists, and an audience member standing at the mike for the Q&A dressed as Captain Eo (the hero of the 3-D featurette Coppola directed for Michael Jackson) capped off the lunacy. It made for a useful contrast to the fan whose mike was cut off after he asked Patrick Stewart for “butt sex,” quite an inappropriate request at a panel for Dorothy of Oz.

Here is what else I took away from Comic-Con:

Popular though they may be, zombies don’t bring a lot of zing to the party.

Showing its legion strength for the first time, the fandom for HBO’s Game of Thrones—“throners”—is a growing army that won’t be denied.

He can perform all the shoot-out ballets he wants, but Justin Timberlake (In Time) will never be accepted as an action stud, while Ryan Gosling (Drive) has already sealed the deal.

If Andrew Garfield (the new Spider-Man) dials the adorability up any higher, we’re all going to break out in dimples.

Not even the prospect of a skeleton avenger urinating fire from his bony penis will entice me to see Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. And if that makes me a philistine, so be it.