INT: Mick Garris

Got a chance to join in on a
teleconference with Mick Garris last week since Season 2 of the
MASTERS OF HORROR premiered Friday night. Gotta say that the man was
a really engaging and knowledgeable guy, who didn’t even get mad at
some of the amateur hour questions being posed (seriously folks, do
your research before an interview). I’ve tried to whittle it all
down to just the juicy interesting stuff, and leave out boneheaded
portions such as someone asking a man who is directing an episode he
wrote, why he didn’t write the episode he’s directing!
Anyway, on to the meat!

Mick
Garris

Did the fate of Imprint
last season have any direct impact on the freedoms for the directors
this season, or the approach they all took to picking projects?

You know, absolutely not. I
know a lot of people were afraid that that might be the case, but it
was very specifically a cultural thing. It aired in Japan, as well
as played theatrically in Japan. It aired unimpeded in Australia, in
the U.K., in several other nations, but in North America, both in
the U.S. and in Canada, it did not air.

It’s very much a Miike movie,
the movie Miike wanted to make, and the reason why we wanted Miike
in the first place was to express his vision. And Showtime doesn’t
produce the show, they license the show. They have the right not to
air any episode, but because they don’t produce it, they can’t come
in and make changes. So, everybody felt – everybody on the
producer’s side felt, anyway – that we would much rather have it
unadulterated and be true to what the series was founded upon, and
bring it out on DVD the way it was intended.

I know that Miike San was
disappointed that it didn’t air in the United States, and might have
even been willing to make some changes to get to air, but we really
didn’t want to set that kind of a precedent. And to Showtime’s
credit, they did not try to talk us into making changes. It wasn’t a
choice that we made, we would much rather have had it air. But it
did not influence anything this year. I think you’ll see we do
stretch the envelope as much as ever. Just maybe not to the point of
Imprint.

Going over the titles of
some of the episodes you have this season, Pro-Life, Right to Die,
things like that, it seems like you’re definitely pushing that
controversial content a little this year, like you did last year
with the Joe Dante one.

The success that Homecoming
had last year certainly inspired other people to go for
controversial topics. Nobody is out to preach. Homecoming might have
been a little preachy, but in a way I found endearing. But I think
John Landis put it really well last year, when he was interviewed,
he said, “When we were told we could do whatever we wanted, Joe
did something important and I did something silly with Deer
Woman.”

And this year, I think other
people thought it would be interesting to tackle social and
political issues, but never at the sacrifice of the story. I mean,
Right to Die is a definite horror story, it’s a ghost story that is
set in that field. Pro Life is a monster movie, but it has that
theme at the heart of it. So, yes there’s – and The Washingtonians
is something that is also politically relevant right now. So I think
the filmmakers felt free because of what happened with Homecoming,
to tell stories that would straddle issues.

Why do you think horror
films have seen such a resurgence?

Well, I think in times of
social and political strife, they often seem to come up again. The
horror film is something that, like its subjects, will never die. It
will go into remission for a while, but then blooms again in its own
form.

As in the case of the
post-nuclear big bug movies, the post-World War II Universal
Pictures, 1930s Universal Pictures that happened starting with the
market crash in ’29 was followed by a huge resurgence in that, and
with what we’re going through now, there will be a popular horror
film that kind of touches on the national psyche. And people want to
see more of it.

I would love to think that
Masters of Horror may have been influential in having people’s
attention peaked again.

Do you think Masters of
Horror was trying to bring it to a higher level, to be more than
just shock value?

Well, that’s what we would
like, is to have the broadest possible definition of horror. Horror
can be literate, it can be smart, it can just be rude and assaultive.
We’d like all of them to be smart and scary, but we also don’t want
the umbrella. It’s not Mick Garris’s Masters of Horror. It’s the
Masters of Horror because each of these guys has a personality, a
cinematic personality that they can best express. And so, we don’t
get in the way of what the story is that they want to tell. What we
ask for is smart and scary. And some of them are more literate, or
literary than others, but we are drawn from a lot of literary
sources this year. We have stories by Clive Barker, and Poe, and
Bentley Little and all these published authors that are the
antecedents to the films that come from them.

Do you think there are any
more taboos that haven’t been broken, like Hitchcock broke it by
having a toilet flush onscreen. But now when Takashi’s Masters of
Horror was banned and then they released it on DVD, what do you
think is the next taboo to be broken?

I don’t know. I think Imprint
goes as far as I want to see, and even a little further in some
cases. I’m sure there are taboos to break that I would not want to
imagine. I would imagine that one day a snuff film will become a
reality. I don’t know if it will ever be broadly distributed or
available legally, but I’m sure that that’s going to exist. There
are certainly taboos that are going to be broken that none of us are
going to be happy with at one point.

Could you talk a little
bit about the premier episode, The Damned Thing, and why you chose
that one to kick off the sixth season?

We had to choose from one of
the films that was completed. And Tobe is such a grand master of the
genre, we wanted to start with one of the real major names. And the
Ambrose Bierce story is a true classic. Admittedly, this is a loose
adaptation of that Bierce story, but it has a lot of classic
elements that I think are what we want to represent the show with.
There’s a lot of tension in it, there’s a lot of mystery in it, and
it’s a true Tobe Hooper film. It’s very Texan in its outlook, and we
just felt that it was a really – a great way to start the series,
with this kind of classic Tobe Hooper telling of this classic
Ambrose Bierce story.

Do you find yourself
getting calls from directors who want to be a part of the series, or
are you still going after people that you haven’t heard from yet?

We definitely get lots of
calls from people who want to be a part of this, and there are a ton
of people that we’ve been in conversations with that we’ve not been
able to get yet, that it’s all a matter of timing. Because of the
way the show is made, we shoot them all back to back like a
television series with continuing crews. Every ten days we start a
new one, so it has to fit specifically into that slot. And that’s
one of the biggest problems, is getting all of these feature film
directors to take a couple months out of their life and commit to
doing this.

The people we’ve talked to
who we haven’t been able to schedule yet are people like Guillermo
del Toro and Rob Zombie and Wes Craven and a whole bunch of other
people that we hope we’ll be able to get if we get a third season.

Would Eli Roth be one of the
directors?

Yes, we definitely talked to
Eli, but he’s in Prague shooting Hostel 2 right now, and once you
have a hit film, getting two months out of your life to do a ten-day
shoot and the pre and post production, it becomes incredibly
complicated. But we’d love to get Eli to do one.

How did you select the new
directors? Was it purely a case of availability, or were there
particular quirks or traits that you were looking for?

Well, we want to get the
broadest definition of what horror is. And we’ve tried to get as
many different types of horror filmmakers involved as possible,
which is why we’ve reached internationally as well. Peter Medak is
somebody we reached out to, because I think The Changeling is
probably one of the great ghost films of all time. Tom Holland is
someone I’ve known for years; he did Child’s Play, he did Fright
Night, and those are just classics of the genre, and have these very
specific personalities.

I’ve known Ernest Dickerson
for a long time and I thought he would be a great contribution and
bring a new form to it, and was delighted that he chose the script
that I had written to attack. And then Rob Schmidt is our Lucky
McKee this year. Rob came in, and he had done a great job with Wrong
Turn. He’s a terrific guy, and a very good filmmaker, and he came in
to do Right to Die and made it very much his own, did a great job
with it.

How much input do you have into
the DVD releases?

Not a whole lot. I mean, I
could certainly ask for things to be changed if I wanted to at a
certain point, but Anchor Bay has done a fantastic job with them. So
I haven’t really needed to have much input. They did a great job.
The only thing I was not happy about – I like the style where all
of the packaging matched, but I really wasn’t thrilled with the
artwork. Some of the other directors felt the same way. Some of the
artwork, the drawings of the directors themselves were not the best.
But other than that, as far as all the content on the discs
themselves, I couldn’t be happier.

Any episodes from this
season, outside, of course of the two you’re directly involved in
that you’re particularly looking forward to?

I know this sounds like
smoke, but I really think Season 2 is even stronger than Season 1.
Some of the things that are really unique that don’t kind of fall
under the normal rubric of the standard horror film. I’m a huge fan
of Brad Anderson. He did The Machinist and Session 9. And those are
very intense, very personal, very quiet horror movies that don’t
have much to do with blood and guts and thunder.

And he did an episode called
Sounds Like, that I think is a masterpiece. I think it’s really
great. Joe Dante’s Screwfly Solution is one of the least humorous
things he’s ever done. It’s the darkest thing he’s ever done. And I
think it’s great. Stuart Gordon did something really unique with The
Black Cat, in that he blended the life of Edgar Allan Poe played by
Jeffery Combs, and his 14 year old cousin who was his wife, the
story of their lives, he blended it with the short story of The
Black Cat and did something really special and powerful and unique
there.

I think The Damned Thing is
extraordinary; I think Family turned out really well, John Landis’s.
That script was the least funny thing I think John has ever
directed, but you can’t get a John Landis film and not have humor
show up in it. The Carpenter thing, Pro-Life, I think, is really
good. I really do think it’s become a much more adventurous year of
horror films for the series.

So was that a conscious
decision to head toward darker episodes? Because I know a lot of
people were complaining about the more comedic aspect – I love
them myself – but a lot of people were complaining that it was
sort of more of a Tales From The Crypt-ish kind of thing, you know,
funny episodes.

Right. Well the last thing we
wanted to be was Tales From The Crypt, because that had an attitude
that was the same every week. Which was great for that show, but we
wanted this to be much more varied. And, yeah, there was humor. I
think the ones that had humor worked really well, there were plenty
of them that didn’t. Like Toby’s episode last year, Dance of the
Dead and some of the others. Certainly, Dreams in the Witch House
was not a laugh riot.

But I think what happened
was, when the show worked, Season 1, and it was well received by the
fans and even got, to our astonishment, great reviews by the
mainstream press, I think it unlocked the filmmakers to go for
something, to realize, “Oh, we really can do what we want, and
we really can make something that’s kind of quiet and personal if we
choose, or something more overt, if we choose.”

And I think it allowed them
– and again, with people like Joe Dante doing Homecoming and other
kinds of shows that were done, it made them think, “Well, what
else can I do that’s really, really going to be different and really
going to reflect my filmmaking personality?” Yeah, it’s darker
this year.

I just watched Halloween,
and I still think it’s better than most of the films that I’ve seen
in the last 10, 15 years, in terms of horror. Why do you think that
is, that the originals stand up so much more than the remakes?

Well, it’s interesting. I am
of an age where my hair is gray, and so I don’t know if it’s the
nostalgia factor, but I would love to take someone who’s 20 years
old, and completely a blank slate, take them to see the original
Halloween and see how it plays with them. Take them to see the
original Hills Have Eyes, Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, all these
things, and see. Because they’ve got a history of increasingly
desensitizing stuff.

And I just wonder. We’re not
making these shows for teenagers. We hope that they’ll embrace it as
well, but we think there are people who are my age and even older
who are horror fans and are interested. And maybe it’s the
opportunity. But a show like Sounds Like, the Brad Anderson one, is
more about internal horror than it is about blood and guts. But I
don’t know. I can’t speak for how the other films play now. I agree
with you that I’d rather see Halloween than I would a movie with a
number at the end of it that came out this year. I think part of it
also has to do with marketing. I think everything is about the
trailer and the 30-second TV spots and getting kids in on the
weekend. And to do that, you toot the horn of the familiar and hope
that that’s a clarion call to the zombie walk to the theater. How’s
that for mixing a dozen metaphors?

Speaking of Halloween, do
you think Carpenter’s new episode may be too much of a blood fest?

Well, that’s just entirely a
matter of taste. I think there are movies that are just blood fests,
and that are not stories being told. I think Carpenter’s is a really
terrific story and it’s a really good screenplay that does go over
the top at times. But again, horror is supposed to be transgressive
and make you uncomfortable, just by its very definition.

However, I would love tension
and suspense to play a major part of it, and I think in most of our
shows, it does. And I think in most of the theatrical horror films
of recent years, it’s not been a big part of it.

When you guys were at the
dinners, what was your big – did people share with you? I’m sure
they want to challenge themselves as filmmakers.

Those dinners were mostly
social events, but we did talk about it, and we did talk about,
“Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to make stories that we would like to
tell.” Carpenter doesn’t work that often, not because he
doesn’t get offered movies, but he doesn’t have to work if he
doesn’t want to. And he’s certainly not getting rich doing a couple
of Masters of Horror episodes, where we pay scale to the directors
and to the writers.

But there were a couple of
stories that he really responded to, and he had a great time doing
the first one and realized, you know, this is really fun. And came
back and did a second. And yeah, we definitely – that’s how the
show came about. We talked about the frustration of what the genre
had become a couple of years ago, and it was pretty distressing and
disappointing. I’m somebody who used to go to the movies three or
four times a week, and if I go once a week, that’s a lot, these
days. And it’s not just horror, I think movies in general have
definitely hit the skids, creatively, for a while, and I think the
studios have kind of brought it on themselves.

And why did Showtime
respond, do you think, when you first –

I think, for me – for
Showtime, they weren’t looking for a series when we got the
commitment. A company called IDT, which is now Starz Entertainment,
Starz Media, they own the Anchor Bay DVD company. And we were going
to make the movies even without a network. But we knew it would be
better if we had one. Showtime wasn’t looking for this program, but
when it came to this doorstep, they saw the value of it. And, you
know, part of this is a real star fucking thing. We’ve got John
Carpenter and Toby Hooper and John Landis and Stuart Gordon and all
these…

But it also gives a series
– an anthology horror series – a hook that you can hang on to,
and a sort of guarantee of quality, if you like the show. If you
don’t like the show, maybe not. But –

Do you agree with John
Carpenter that the films you see when you’re like 12 and 13 are the
ones that have the most influence?

I think so, to a point. I
think it’s hard to – Well, that’s an age… They are the Wonder
Years for a reason, and it’s definitely people, as they reach
puberty and adolescence, that’s when things kind of stick. For
better or for worse.

Make fun if you will, but this f-ed me up more than any
other movie in my youth!

Have you heard anything
about Season 3? Do you have plans, or are you waiting to see how
Season 2 is received?

It really is all a matter of
Showtime and Starz Media deciding when to go forward. We are
optimistic about a Season 3. The show is very successful around the
world. I’ve been taking it to film festivals in various places, and
it’s unbelievably well received, and it’s – I guess it’s all a
matter of selling DVDs, which I’m told we just hit the million mark
on selling Masters DVDs. But we’re hopeful and optimistic for a
third season.

I had a question about the
desensitization of children and teenagers to horror. I mean, they’re
expecting so much more… What do you see happening next?

I don’t know what the next
stage is. And the people who understand the genre the least think
that It’s all about throwing entrails at the screen. Certainly that
works for a while, but again, you’re right. The desensitization is
important when that’s the kind of movie you make. Now, if you’re
telling a story, I hate to trot out The Sixth Sense again, but
that’s an incredibly suspenseful, extremely successful movie that
doesn’t do any of that. And Brad Anderson’s Sounds Like is another
one that doesn’t do much of that. So if you are making films that
are all about the kills, or all about the splat, or all about the
blood, then yeah, you have to keep going further and further and
further.

And in the case of Masters of
Horror, yeah, we go far, because it’s unfettered. Some of the
filmmakers feel that that’s where they want to take it to get the
reaction they’re going for. Dario Argento’s episode is a perfect
example of that. It’s quite bloody and gruesome, and there’ s a
grand tradition of Grand Guignon, and this is definitely following
in that tradition.

But people, I think, — not
everybody – but people like to be safely confronted by their
fears. And the body – I don’t know how many of you have seen –
probably most of you have seen Toby Hooper’s sequel to The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre. It’s one of the most wonderfully profane films
I’ve ever seen. You know, it says, “You think the body’s a
temple? No, the body is meat, and here’s how.” It just
confronts you with it in ways that make you go Eeeeyow! And it’s so
effective, and yet it’s really witty in the way that it does it.

So I’m not one who would ever
call for any kind of ban against distasteful material, but I think
there’s a great way to do it, and there’s a not so great way to do
it. And I’m not going to be the arbiter of that.

In the case of your
casting, you get some of the most wonderful people. How many of them
come to you and how many do you approach?

Many of them come through the
directors. Most of us filmmakers on the show have relationships with
a lot of the actors that we’d like to work with again. When I did
Chocolate last year, Henry Thomas and I had just made Desperation
right before that, and 15 years earlier had done Psycho 4 together.
Christopher Lloyd and I had done a movie years ago called
Quicksilver Highway. Matt Freuer and I have worked together many
times. I know that’s been the case with a lot of the other actors as
well. But something like the Screwfly Solution this year, Joe Danté’s
episode, that brought in Elliot Gould because he loved the script so
much. And Michael Ironside was somebody I had met at a film festival
earlier this year, and recommended him for The V Word. So, a lot of
it comes from relationships, but we have had a lot of people,
particularly in the second season, come to us because they are, a)
fans of the genre, and b) fans of the series.

Cool. Just two thoughts,
if there’s a third season. James Gunn and David Cronenberg.

James Gunn we have talked to,
and he was very busy this year. David Cronenberg, we’ve talked to a
lot. He seems to be sort of open to it, he’s making another movie in
London now. Sort of open to it, but a little resistant. He’s very
iconoclastic, and I get the feeling he doesn’t like to think of
himself as a horror director. Even though he’s one of the greats.

David and I have been friends
since Scanners. I worked in publicity on that film way back when.
And he’s very much the big fish in Toronto. Being part of a group is
not his thing.

Are there any plans for
the release of the Season 2 DVDs yet?

Yeah, they will be out within
– it’ll be the same sort of schedule as Season 1. It’ll be
probably two or three months after the first one that they start
bringing them out.

Are there any plans for a
box set of the first season?

I’m sure there will be. I
think all of them will have come out individually within the next
month. I think Haeckel’s Tale is the last one to come out.

What about Stephen King?
Is he possibly going to be involved?

Well, Steve and I have a long
history together, and I would love to bring him into this, but he
had his own show, the Nightmares and Dreamscapes that were based on
his stories. And most of his material has been optioned, and a lot
of it was only being allowed to be used for that show. So I don’t
know if there are going to be more or not, but I would love to get
King in to do one.

I actually was the first one
to adapt one of the Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and wasn’t able to
shoot it because we got our second season in. So maybe I can pry it
away from them to do for our show. But we’ll have to see what
happens with Nightmares and Dreamscapes. I’d love to get him to
direct again too, to have him direct one of these, so I’m trying to
talk him into it.

Do you have any projects
outside of the Masters of Horror season that you’d be excited to
share a little bit about?

My first novel just came out
this month, called Development Hell, and that’s really exciting. And
something that I may well be adapting, either into a limited series
or a feature. And there are other things coming up, but I’m hopeful
that Season 3 will happen, which will kind of make it hard to
concentrate on other things. But I’m just now seeing the light at
the end of the tunnel of Season 2. We’re wrapping up the Japanese
episode for the next week or so. And so yeah, I’m starting to take
meetings and starting to talk to people about various projects. King
and I are talking about a couple of things together, and we’ll see.

And is Development Hell
something that you pictured also for television, or for a feature?

Well, the original reason to
write it in the first place was to do something that did not count
on budgets and personalities and Standards and Practices and all
that. It was just to write for the page. But now, seeing what we
were able to do with Masters of Horror, it would be great to do it
with an HBO or Showtime, or somebody as a series of nine one-hour
chapters. There are nine chapters in the book. Or as a feature film.
But it’s ironic that I’m thinking of it that way, because the whole
reason I wrote it in the first place was to not be chained to all of
that stuff that you have to think about.

Presumably you’re not
going to want to stay as the main guy organizing all the Masters of
Horror stuff, ad nauseam? Have you given any thought to how far out
you’d want to keep the reins before you pass it on?

Well, I would always want to
be involved in the selection process and who’s there. It is Masters
of Horror, and it really has to be people who have made influential
horror movies, influential and/or successful horror movies. And I’d
always want to be involved. Whether it would be 24 hours a day, as
it has been for two years, who knows? If there’s a third season,
I’ll certainly be as involved as I have been. But beyond that, it
would be nice to get back to making movies again, and to do things
that aren’t a part of something else.

A lot of the episodes have
gotten a chance to screen in theaters. It must be great to get the
audience reaction.

Well, you know, horror and
comedy are best shared with an audience, because they both go for a
physical reaction. In the case of comedy, it ain’t workin’ if
they’re not laughing. And in the case of horror, it’s not as
constant, but you want to see people gripping the edge of their
seat. You want to hear the scream. You want to sit in the back of
the theater and watch the jump from the collective fear. It’s much
greater sometimes than when it’s all by yourself in your living
room, when you’re making trips to the bathroom and the refrigerator.
Or you have family and friends around chatting, the phone ringing,
and all of that stuff. But the shared experience is an important
part of horror films.

You know, I watch it too. The
good job that I’m able to do, is to keep my hands off of other
people’s films and to keep other people’s hands off of them, and to
allow – Showtime and Anchor Bay have allowed us to let people make
movies this way. These people know better than anyone else how to
make these films, and so I couldn’t be prouder of being involved
with this show, and with these movies, these unbelievable filmmakers
have gathered together to make. I mean, it’s quite humbling.

How do you feel about the
inevitable Masters of Horror imitators?

Masters of Fear, I’ve heard
about, and that’s the one that really bothers us the most. They
changed one word, and it’s the same concept. I don’t think that’s
going to happen. Masters of Sci-Fi is a spin-off of Masters of
Horror by a couple of the other producers involved. I’m not really
involved in that one. And it’s for commercial television, it’s for
ABD, and it’s not all about the directors, it’s more about the
writers.

Because the only three
Masters of Sci-Fi directors would be Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron.
And I don’t think they’re going to want to do scale one hour – or
42 minute TV shows. But imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
I’m told that the Masters of Italian Horror may not be happening
after all. I don’t know if it is or not. But it’s nice to be
influential, and I’m not used to that.

So thanks to you guys, and
again, it’s so important that you guys have helped us out. Just the
fan sites have been so great, and there’s been so much interest. And
I really appreciate the coverage and support that you’ve given us.

A big thank you has to go
to Mick Garris for being so damn patient and gracious. What a great
guy!