Masters of Horror creator Mick Garris

The company that produced it was not nearly as good at distribution. They tried to distribute it themselves and pretty much dropped the ball. But at least I got to make the movie the way I wanted to within certain budgetary limits. I’m happy with the movie and it is out there for an audience to see. It’s gotten very varied reactions, but it’s the movie I like.

We’re actually shooting the last one in Vancouver right now and another one is still shooting in Tokyo. Those are the last two.

That’s right. I just came back the day before yesterday from Tokyo in fact.

I did indeed. It’s my baby so I had to. I was there for the first four days of production to hang out and help in any way that I can. It’s his first English language film, but a lot of the actors in it are Japanese actors who are speaking English phonetically. So we had to make sure that it was understandable.

It is. But that’s one of the great things about this show is that it’s so varied and flexible. Every episode is completely different from every other.

He did not write it, but he oversaw the writing of the script, which is based on a popular novel in Japan called Bokkee Kyotee which literally translates as really scary.

We wanted this to be a varied series of films and so we definitely wanted Asian horror. Audition was one of the most shocking movies I’d ever seen and it was so disturbing. So he was one of the first people we talked about and we were amazed to get him.

It’s a script I wrote based on Clive Barker’s Haeckel’s Tale, which is being directed by John McNaughton.

I’ve seen a couple days of dailies and it looks great. It looks like a Hammer film. It was originally intended for Roger Corman to direct. But Corman had health issues and McNaughton came in and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.

Romero never committed to one in time and then his schedule got booked up. It may have been Romero’s slot originally, but the script was originally developed for Corman and then Lucky McKee came in after Romero backed out and we filled that slot with Lucky’s show. When Corman’s health issues became a problem, then McNaughton came in and he’s making it very much his own. It’s great to see. It’s the first script I’ve written that’s been directed by somebody else since Amazing Stories. So it’s really fun to watch that happen.

It kicks ass. He’s a great guy. Bubba Ho-tep is such a classic.

The point I tried to make when we were putting this all together was these are little movies. I’d rather a feature shrunk into an hour than a Twilight Zone stretched to an hour. So what we don’t want is the punchline. We want a movie that stands on its own with or without the punchline. If there is one, fine as long as the movie holds up all the way to it. We’re not going for Oh Henry or a Twilight Zone or even a Tales from the Crypt sort of thing. But what you’ll find is each of them is incredibly different from each other. Don’s is probably the most traditional, contemporary one. It’s very much in the vein of the movies that have been in theaters recently. Tobe Hooper’s is very Tobe Hooper. John Carpenter’s is very John Carpenter. It wasn’t something where I was trying to guide it. Every week on Tales from the Crypt, you knew you were going to get a very campy, winky horror story. In this you’re going to get a horror story that’s smart and scary every week, but that’s all they have in common.

About half of them were that way. About half of them the directors developed themselves like John Landis wrote his with his son, Max, and Stuart Gordon developed an H.P. Lovecraft script with Dennis Paoli. Then we developed a Richard Matheson story that Richard Christian Matheson adapted and that was the one Tobe responded to.

Absolutely. We’ve got Richard Matheson, Joe Lansdale, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and David J. Schow. It’s a really great collection.

He wrote one, but we aren’t shooting it this season. We hope to do it if we get our pickup to do another batch.

For the others, they would come and pitch stories to us and we really responded to the ones that would make great episodes. We developed 19 scripts for 13 shows. There are a few that have not been attacked yet.

It’s a great one. In Creepy magazine in the 70’s Bernie Wrightson illustrated a story that Bruce Jones wrote. When we were shooting last year on Desperation, Steven Weber, came up with the idea of doing that story. I encouraged him and originally we were going to write it together. But I was too busy and he was too eager. He just sat down and wrote the first draft on his own and it kicked ass. It’s really a good script and Argento loved it and then did some tweaking on it to make it his own. It’s unbelievably rich with sex.

Yeah, it’s pretty amazing and Weber stars in it as well. Steven is a big horror fan so he was thrilled to work with Argento as all of us were.

I’ve met him briefly a couple of times. The first time I met him was at one of the Saturn Awards dinners right after I did The Stand and I was seated at his table. He spoke no English, but I was introduced to him as the director of The Stand. He goes, “The Stand is big.” That was my first conversation with Dario, but we got to be very good friends on the shoot. Everybody just loved him. He’s really funny and delightful to work with.

I’d met Drew when he was working at Dave’s Video, the local laserdisc store that became the DVD store. I’d read some stuff he had done. He’d written a play and a thing for Showtime. He and Scott Swan pitched us a few stories together and Cigarette Burns was great. We showed some stuff to John Carpenter and Cigarette Burns kept haunting him so he committed to that one.

I’m sure he has but that doesn’t have that much to do with it. I don’t really read Ain’t It Cool that much. I’ve enjoyed it at times, but I don’t spend a whole lot of time surfing the site.

Yep. He always wanted to and we always wanted him to. I think you can’t get better, more unique and original horror movies than It’s Alive, God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent.

Everybody who’s involved has proven himself as more than capable in the genre. Even Lucky McKee has only made two movies, but all of us were really impressed by May. Bill Malone has done some really good work. He did a Tales from the Crypt that’s one of the best ones I ever saw. My work has included a lot of the Stephen King things that have been seen by giant audiences and the like. Basically we had an obligation to fulfill with the financiers because they had to approve people as being brand names in the world of horror. We knew because of the nature of the show and because all of these guys are feature directors, that things would change. But schedules and health issues came up and all that so we had to make some alterations. But I think we got a pretty damned impressive group of 13 people that I would’ve thought were impossible to commit to something like this. I know on the Internet there will be those complainers, but go make your own show.

There’s no host. There’s no running theme. There is a generic opening title sequence. Then it just goes right into these little, self-contained movies.

It’s not official, but let’s just say that there’s a very strong chance that there will be another 13.

We’ll see. As soon as you assume something’s going to be successful, that’s when it sets out to prove you wrong. All we can do is make the best movies we can under the time and budget and hope for the best.

Exactly, I wanted to get the best people working in the genre to tell a story they wanted to tell and tell it the way they wanted to tell it. Basically we just wanted to give them the opportunity to work at the peak of their powers for what we could afford and to not have to do movies that are all about teenagers that are test marketed at a mall in the San Fernando Valley.

Yeah and the great thing is they’ve all had a great time doing it. We’ve got a really good crew, much better than you’d expect for a television series because we’re not treating it like a television series. We’re not shooting it like TV, we’re shooting it 16 x 9 the same way we’d shoot a feature film.

Yeah, it’s actually based on a short story that I had done over 20 years ago also called Chocolate. It has almost been made as a feature film several times over the years. The story and the feature script are both in my first book, Life in the Cinema because I thought, “Oh, it’s never going to get made. I may as well just show the progression from fiction to script.” It’s a nice personal piece I’ve been wanting to film for a long time. There’s nothing that’s better than working with Stephen King on a project, but it was really fun to do something entirely my own.

It was that I was able to do whatever I wanted and Chocolate is a story I wanted to tell. A lot of my fiction and a lot of my work is really personal, it’s just I don’t often get an opportunity to choose something of my own. Obviously Stephen King’s work is going to get an easier nod than an original by Mick Garris. A lot of my stuff is a little unconventional. Riding the Bullet was certainly an unconventional horror ghost story and Chocolate is also a very unconventional film for Masters of Horror.

It will be on in May.

When he was 18, he was the perfect young Tony Perkins when we did Psycho IV. When we did Desperation it was a great casting idea to bring him in as the Janet Leigh of Desperation, which you’ll understand when you see it.

There you go. Or not. That just renewed our friendship and work relationship so he was the first guy I thought of for Chocolate. He really does a great job in it. It’s a very moody, atmospheric and unusual performance.

Anchor Bay will start releasing them two at a time in February 2006. Each one will have its own disc with an hour of supplemental materials.

These are pretty much the director’s cuts. There may be some stuff we might have to add some materials for overseas for the shows that run a little bit short, but those will be done by the directors.

Immortal Music handles most of the music and the bands are either represented by them or on their label. We made a deal with them. They provide us a ton of material and then the directors choose from what’s available there. Some of the songs are inspired by Masters of Horror as well.

Mudvayne has a really great tune in mine.

Actually he’s in the Tobe Hooper episode.

I’m hoping that most of them will, but we hope to have some others who we weren’t able to work it into their schedules. I’m hopeful that we’ll have Hooper, Carpenter and Landis and a bunch of the guys back. I’m hoping this time we’ll be able to get Guillermo Del Toro, George Romero, Roger Corman and people like that.

The Pang Brothers is somebody I’d love to have. There would be a bunch of people who would be great for us.

I’m not sure yet. I hate remakes but yet I’m talking to people about doing a remake of an Australian film almost nobody saw called Thirst. It’s a great, weird kind of vampire movie. There’s a bunch of stuff in the works, but if season two goes, that’ll be keeping me busy as well.

Those are easier, but I would love to not have to travel that route unless it’s something that really could be an improvement in something that’s not overly familiar to an audience.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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