Original subtitles

The '90s, it was this very special time.

Pop culture was really important.

Maybe The X-Files is right.

It was a very, very exciting time.

It is time to go back.

I think everybody was looking for a way to do something original,

to sort of stand out.

It's kind of a carnival atmosphere.

Exploding with like a new kind of energy that I don't think anyone had seen before.

What does it want? What is it thinking?

We really don't get the credit that we deserve

for what we brought to the party.

The whole machine changes.

There's no room for imagination.

- There's some really brilliant moments in the '90s.

Rodriguez and Tarantino killed it.

Wes Craven, he really started a whole era of filmmaking. It's pretty amazing.

It's a scream, baby!

- Meta on meta.

The studio had no idea what this movie was.

This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer

comes back to life for one last scare.

The resurgence of teen horror movies.

The fear of being in high school.

The fear of being an other.

The fear of people really knowing who you are.

I think those are really universal.

But aren't you tired of being something you're not?

I love looking at the misbehaviors of the human psyche.

I know this book will drive people crazy.

- Humans are the monsters in movies.

They are an amalgamation of who we are.

Extract now!

We're dealing with a lot of social and political themes

that even then, when we were doing it, scared people.

The emotions that it brings out of you are real.

The world was shifting in various ways that led to the 2000s.

Technology was advancing. Culture was getting kind of uneasy.

Lent an air of uncertainty and anxiety to the general atmosphere,

which is always going to transmit itself to movies.

It is a direct correlation to the way the generation

at that time is living.

I am the face that stares back at you from the shadowed mirror.

Part of the reason the independent film industry was so alive

and the mainstream film industry was so vibrant in the '90s

was because of the advent of DVD.

You gotta love this technology.

- It was sort of the new chapter in a way,

but there's always change and you never know

which direction things are gonna go.

Please, I don't want to die.

Hollywood always burns it out to a crisp before they jump

on something new,

fueled my desire to make something different.

Hungry, cold, and hunted.

If you really pay attention, you can find gold in the '90s.

Gold is power.

That's what's great about horror.

There's so many things I haven't seen and I can just explore.

That's what people wanted. That's what audiences wanted.

It is time to get seriously scared.

As you wish.

IN SEARCH OF DARKNESS 1995 - 1999

JOURNEY BACK INTO ICONIC '90S HORROR

I think there's such an interesting relationship

between horror and culture, like a dialogue between them,

probably more so than any other genre.

In the late '80s, the Berlin Wall fell

and the fear of imminent nuclear death was over

or it felt like that was on pause.

And I just don't think people were as afraid.

It was like some you know, turning point.

And there was a degree of optimism that the Cold War was over.

And that sort of blanket of fear that had shrouded

the world for decades and decades came to an end.

We will no longer let the powers that be control our minds.

Peace was breaking out all over.

And people had nothing to pay attention to except things like Monica Lewinsky.

There was a lot of fluffy news going on.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

It wasn't like there was a war happening.

It wasn't like there was a recession.

It wasn't like there was anything specific for people

to be mad about.

But that's not to say they weren't mad, you know?

This is when we're getting our Alanis Morissette,

our Limp Bizkit, the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

There was definitely something happening, but it was hard to put our finger on.

We will go together to a world without pain.

I think we were learning that greed was not so good.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

I never particularly believed that in the first place.

But people who have bought the whole greed is good thing

were coming rather unstuck to an extent in the '90s.

And you see that start to feed in, I think, to the horror landscape.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

For we never know how much is enough.

Inevitably, when people are afraid,

they want to experience that kind of fear in a theater,

in a safe environment.

Like those two things are inextricably linked.

In the '90s, it was like really about psychological turmoil.

It was about the feelings that people had about themselves

and maybe their place in the world, and their disappointment with themselves.

I guess you were right, Worth. There is no way out of here.

Suddenly, society started turning their anger and frustration, hostility,

depression on themselves, it seems.

I don't know why. And maybe I don't want to know why.

There's a devil inside everyone.

We could see that there were individual lone wolves

who could shoot up a school or bomb a building

or create mass tragedy.

These were unpredictable and therefore, uncontrollable.

-And I'm very upset. -Oh.

That sense of dread.

The sense that something random and horrific could happen

to you at any given time.

I think it speaks to the pain that kids are going through.

That they feel like they don't have any kind of avenue besides violence.

Payback's a bitch, isn't it, Natalie?

Signing up on AOL.

Eee, woo, wee, dwoo, dwee, dwaa…

The internet starts to take hold in the middle of the '90s.

What it promised was the idea that the world is gonna get a bunch smaller.

And there's now this device, this network, this method

to find your people,

which is an exciting thing for a lonely horror nerd, right?

It's just your fate. You're that geeky Stephen King kid.

There's one of you in every school.

I was using it to chat with other horror fans

and connect with people around the world and find community.

That nascent technology gave rise to a glut of these cyber horror movies.

There was some anxiety hurtling towards the turn

of the millennium.

There's always knee-jerk reactions to things that evolve

that come from the fear of change.

I deal with this in all my tech docs. It's how I feel about technology.

So the world was upside down, because of this new thing.

New wonders, majesty, new splendors.

The late '90s, you thought,

"Okay, 2000's coming, the millennium's coming.

What's gonna happen? How are things gonna change?"

It's unsettling at times.

- The folks here are ready for the big moment

where we turn the millennium over to 2000.

That moment where the calendar was go switch over

to a zero at the end.

And what does that mean? Is that the end of the world?

There was a lot of millennial fear rolling through

a lot of popular culture in the late 1990s.

For years, we had grown up being told that the 2000s

were either post-apocalyptic hellscape or a world with flying cars.

And all of the Star Trek science fiction leisure

and comfort that we expected wasn't coming to pass.

So, I think that did provide a sense of anxiety

that the turn of the millennium is coming.

Are we ready? Are things actually getting better at all?

The time for trickery is past.

In this game, we show ourselves as we really are.

I wasn't so jaded.

What were the 2000s?

What were they gonna bring us?

And there was this anticipation like we don't know,

but I hope it's good.

Something like The Matrix comes out with the idea

that we're all living in an illusion and this world that we inhabit,

as shitty as it is, the real world is even worse.

This is our playground. This is our illusion.

The Matrix really resonated with people

and why we're still using the terminology of the red and blue pill even today.

- You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland,

and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

People are so afraid of the next millennium

that they become very fundamentalist and concretized in their thinking.

You have no idea what's going on.

There's a lot going on in the world at that time.

A lot of cults and mass suicides.

- You had the Branch Davidians

and David Koresh and you had Heaven's Gate.

The world is gonna shut down and we're all gonna go

fucking nuts and kill each other.

It's a modern-day biblical story.

A doom and gloom, end-of-times scenario.

We weren't quite sure whether we were going to get

to see the noughties when the Y2K scare came along.

Like everyone here is waiting for the same thing,

the stroke of midnight.

It's hard to explain to a Gen Z person

the amount of anxiety that Y2K generated at the time.

It was a weirdly scary moment in our culture,

because we didn't know.

End of Days with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Not even Arnold was going to be immune from the worst-case scenario of Y2K.

Catastrophic failure. No one wanted to be on an aeroplane.

All of our clocks weren't gonna reset and never go back.

You were gonna lose everything on your computer.

All we can do now is batten down and ride it out.

I never really subscribed to that.

I was with Prince, you know, let's party like it's 1999.

So tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999

We were all in shock, because we were told by the media,

by commercials, by movies, by television,

that it was gonna go very bad and then it didn't.

This whole Y2K thing never made any sense to me.

What's gonna happen is the sun's gonna burn out.

It's gonna get big uh, it'll toast what's left of the earth

and we'll be a little cinder and that's the end.

I won't be around. So, I-- you know, good luck.

1995

Thank you.

This is how much I love Demon Knight.

I bought these and I have kept them for 29 years.

So glad you could join me.

Your old pal, the Crypt Keeper, has gone Hollywood in a big way.

Demon Knight is the pinnacle of like what a B movie is for me.

Shout out to Ernest Dickerson. He directed the hell out of it.

Demon Knight is about a group of desperate people

who are trapped in a church in the middle of the desert.

A church that has become a seedy motel that's under siege

by this demonic person called, "The Collector" to possess

an object of awesome power from a mysterious stranger named Brayker.

-Drop the guns or I'll kill her. -Don't!

I said, drop your goddamn guns!

With the success of Tales from the Crypt, the series on HBO,

Universal, who owned those rights,

approached us and said we should make movies.

We came upon Demon Knight.

I felt it wasn't something I wanted to direct

and we found Ernest Dickerson, who was a much better choice

than I would have been for that particular script.

Heads up!

What I was really fascinated by was that it was creating

a mythology and I wanted to be part of that.

These kinds of movies, they're very hard to make,

because you have limited budget, limited time,

and so the collaboration is crucial to get what you want.

And so I found working with Ernest to be a delight.

I mean, just a delight.

This property is hereby condemned.

The great thing about it was that it was all shot in one location.

We were able to actually get a decommissioned

airplane hangar at Van Nuys Airport.

You know, we didn't have to shoot at night.

We had much more control and it wound up being

a great experience.

I first saw Billy Zane in the Australian film Dead Calm.

And here's this really, really handsome guy who plays

this really psychotic killer.

He had a lot of fun with the character of the collector.

Come on out, everybody. Time to play.

I wanted to give the impression that the collector loved his job.

You know, just total contempt for humanity.

- Humans, you're not worth the flesh you're printed on.

Fuck this cowboy shit!

You fucking hoedown, podunk, well then there motherfucker!

Billy Zane improv'd the hell out of that movie.

He really did a great job.

Do we have a deal?

Something tells me you don't trust me.

I just loved you know, being able to balance the horror

and the humor in the horror.

At least we're all in one piece.

I'm sorry about that, Irene.

It's okay. Vodka's kicking in.

And Bill Sadler, who played Brayker.

Bill had this great reputation for playing, you know, pretty bad guys.

If you don't want those planes to start splashing

into the Potomac as they run out of fuel, what I want is very important.

Which was ideal, because in the beginning you don't know

who's the good guy.

It defies your expectations pretty much at every turn,

because the characters you think who are gonna survive don't.

And the characters you think are gonna die and die first don't.

It's so subversive in that way.

Jada Pinkett. I remember I'm just like, "Wait, hold up.

Is she the protagonist of this?"

And then it's like, "She's the final girl?

Oh my God."

And you're the only one left. You're the chosen one.

That's what I came here to do. Give you this key.

I wanted an African-American, because everybody's gonna think

she's gonna be one of the first persons to die, you know?

'Cause that's what always happens.

If I can't have your soul, I'm gonna take your heart.

I was 14, I think, when the movie came out,

I had not seen a black female character lead a horror movie.

It was a revelation for me at the time and probably one of the big reasons

why I cherish this movie so much.

We were able to design some really cool demons.

You know, we had these mime artists,

who wore leg extensions and they did an amazing job.

I had started putting my mother in some of my movies.

And my mother thought she was gonna play a demon in this one.

And I'm thinking, "Oh no, I can't kill my mother on film."

Fuck that, shoot 'em both.

I loved working with Ernest.

We just had the best time making that picture together.

It kind of broke the mold of what the typical

Tales from the Crypt story was.

It wasn't that comeuppance kind of a thing.

What the hell are you doing? You call that acting?

You know, Demon Knight, when you look at it,

is really cosmic horror.

To me, that is true horror.

The horror of the unknown of the universe.

Now that's entertainment.

Wendigo, aka Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo,

directed by Tom Chaney.

This movie was made in the '80s but did get released

in the '90s by Troma.

Troma put out a lot of independent filmmakers

in the '90s and it still do, of course.

Leave my land.

I'm not about to let some old bum tell me where I can't hunt.

You have no idea what you may be the cause of.

This movie is fantastic.

It's about a group of hunters that summon an evil,

so to speak, in a cabin, and all hell breaks loose.

And now a woman has to go and clean up the mess,

which is pretty much like life.

You are the chosen one, you must complete the circle.

It has a Sam Raimi camera movement.

Let's wear our influences on our sleeves, and I love it.

So many practical effects, including a little creature

that comes out of a pot of, quote, "bodacious chili".

Want some of my bodacious chili?

Dipped in feet, this shit's getting thick and the dinner's good and ready.

We'll never see chili the same way again.

Oh, get off me!

One of my favorite parts about this movie is this plane

that gets attacked by this creature.

The creature is a puppet in this scene, and it's absolutely charming.

It's all about reactions.

I told you I can't see 2 feet fairly, how the hell can I land?

Is it a plane? It's not a plane, but they're gonna sell it

and this is what I love about low-budget filmmaking.

They need a plane. They're not gonna shoot around it.

They're gonna just make this plane,

and everyone's gonna be on board literally for it.

The music in this movie is jazz. It's rock.

It's a little bit of everything. It changes.

Come and get me, boys.

Get it out of here!

Who's first for my tasty treats?

And speaking of rock, Ron Asheton is in this movie.

He's from The Stooges.

Why is a punk demigod in a movie like this?

I have no idea, but however you got him, I'm glad you did.

That's right. It's everywhere and it's everything.

And spoiler alert, we do get a Wendigo,

and it's straight out of the Ray Harryhausen handbook.

A stop-motion creature that just looks fantastic.

It uses every trick in the book.

And if you look at someone like Tom Chaney can do it

inspires you to think, "I can do this, too."

Join me. We must stop the Wendigo.

This is a great example of something that was plucked

from the '80s and we're able to see it in the '90s,

because of Troma doing the Lord's work. Hail Satan.

Here's to the three-breasted women of good old Tibetan.

I know this book will drive people crazy.

Well, let's hope so. The movie comes out next month.

Apocalypse Trilogy is something that I realized

I was doing a couple movies into it.

These movies are about the end of everything.

I suppose that comes from my upbringing.

I was raised where you read the Bible in school.

Some of that stuff's really spooky and about the end.

Holy Toledo, really?

And I got fascinated with the end of things.

- We have gotten reports, um, sketchy at best, of people mutating.

Their bodies swelling and distorting. In the Mouth of Madness kicks serious ass.

It's one of my favorite Carpenter movies.

It centers around a private investigator

who's hired to track down a genre horror novelist who's disappeared.

Sam Neill plays the investigator who's off trying

to track down Sutter Cane, because his new novel,

In the Mouth of Madness, is starting

to drive people literally crazy who are reading advanced copies.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

What?

It's all homage to H.P. Lovecraft.

It's not an homage to Stephen King.

It's all Lovecraft.

That crazy world of his.

- The Stygian world yawning blackly beyond.

- A pulp writer. Science fiction horror/horror stories.

His ideas were so incredible.

He had a sense of the apocalypse.

The Cthulhu mythos. Creatures imitating men.

And monsters that are just beyond our grasp

are waiting for a portal to come in.

All those horrible, slimy things trying to get back in.

Michael De Luca and John wound up working together a lot

on the script and beating it into a more Lovecraftian story.

Something he could really sink his teeth into.

Do you want some, too, buddy?

John has a habit of asking people to look in the mirror.

Look at themselves.

We are battling in a Sutter Cane story.

This is not reality.

Reality is not what it used to be.

Sam Neill, who I'd worked with on the Invisible Man movie,

was my star.

And Julie Carmen and Jürgen Prochnow.

I loved working with them. Loved it.

…He the guy that writes that horror crap?

Maybe he's too sophisticated for you.

Sutter Cane happens to be this century's most-widely-read author.

Over my shoulder here is Mrs. Pickman.

Frances Bay. She's an amazing actress.

You look as if you've been up all night.

Been reading.

When the stars align and I'm given

the extraordinary gift of a project like

In the Mouth of Madness, it is such a peak experience.

When someone who's as thought-provoking

as John Carpenter and Sandy King Carpenter,

when they make a film, you can self-reflect

on so many things in your own dream life and unconscious.

Today is Mommy's day.

I remember John saying to me and to the people around

who were the monster makers that with monsters, you just show a flash.

So it goes into the psyche, but you're not even sure what that was.

When Jürgen Prochnow pushes my eyes into the manuscript,

it's like a drop acid.

My mind is blown.

We succeeded at doing things

out of nightmare sequences you could really have.

The contortionist Julie Carmen out of the car.

The insane asylum pieces.

One of my favorite points is when Sam Neill gets chased

down the hallway by the 18-foot-wide wall of monsters.

To me, that really comes together as a great nightmare piece.

A lot of times, I don't know what a movie is about

until I see it and all the pieces are together.

A lot changes in the editing.

It felt like we were documenting the effect of anarchy

on civilization and the aftermath.

- If for any reason you are one of us

who hasn't become infected, take shelter immediately.

I loved how it turned out. I think it was pretty good.

- Not reality! Reality--

Such an existential, nihilistic thunderclap.

It's haunted me ever since I've seen it.

In 10 years, human race will just be a bedtime story

for their children.

A myth. Nothing more.

Evil Dead was a cornerstone for many horror fans around the world.

And I had the absolute privilege of working with Sam Raimi

on The Grudge.

Sam Raimi inspired a whole generation of filmmakers

to take glee in the absolute fun in gore.

And Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is a clear, shining example.

Shinichi Fukazawa, he wore his Sam Raimi love

very, very openly.

This is the Japanese Evil Dead.

He's the writer, the director, the star.

And it is his tribute album.

Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is about a bodybuilder and his girlfriend.

They find themselves trapped in his father's house,

pursued by a vengeful spirit.

So as not to risk you missing the point,

the main character's dressed like Ash, and he recycles

some of Ash's dialogue.

And true to the spirit of Sam Raimi, this is a man

who had almost no money with which to work.

And he's ending up with something that's running

just barely over an hour.

But every single penny is on the screen.

He is putting all of that into practical effects

and visual images.

You see his love and his work ethic throughout it.

This filmmaker got a free location.

And in doing so, he shot the film

in that location with friends and favors and his acting class buddy.

And when they got home, they realized that

they couldn't use about 80% of the footage.

Instead of taking the L and taking the loss,

he went back and started refilming the movie

over and over in little pieces.

And it started shooting in 1995 and it didn't complete until 2012.

The ethos of the do-it-yourself, get-it-done mentality

was so important.

You see the personality of the filmmaker

and that's part of what you fall in love with.

- This is a filmmaker that did not stop until his film was done.

And that is what the spirit of independent filmmaking is.

See you in hell, baby.

- Tales from the Hood.

Tales from the Hood is really an interesting film,

because it is a response to the racial strife

from the earlier parts of the decade.

I've got nothing against good cops,

but I will see lowlife scum like you run out of the department.

You shut the fuck up, cock.

A kind of broad-stroke allegory about race relations in America

put in a kind of an EC Comics context that is just like a spoonful of medicine.

Tales from the Hood is an anthology horror film

that reflects what I thought was scary in the black community

in the '90s when we made it.

Shit, man, that place does look evil as hell.

- Man, both of y'all need to shut the fuck up.

Dead people ain't who y'all need to be worried about anyway.

It's not the dead that you have to worry about.

It's the people around you.

-Oh dang! -Psych fuck!

I've been waiting for you boys.

Clarence Williams III, who was our mortician

in Tales from the Hood when I was growing up,

I knew him as Linc from Mod Squad.

And working with him was a highlight of my career.

Where's the shit?

You'll get the shit. You'll be knee-deep in the shit.

There's a wraparound story that kind of carries us through

four other stories about some kids who are coming

to a funeral home to pick up some drugs.

And we see stories about people who have left our plane.

Death, it comes in many strange packages.

How you deal with cops.

You'll lose your badges over this. You had no reason to pull me over.

How you deal with someone attacking you within your own race.

Where you want me to shoot your ass, motherfucker?

How you deal with domestic violence

that could be happening in your house or next door.

Teach you and that boy some respect.

And how you deal with your political environment.

What you believe and what you allow yourself

to be manipulated to believe.

Listen, by the time I finish with you,

you might even get a few black votes in the till.

Well, the start would be just getting the bastards off my front lawn.

This character, this racist politician, as an actor you say,

"Can I do that and try to put some humanity into him?"

Not make him right, but just make him human.

You think you and some old voodoo bitch could scare me out of my house.

I don't care how many slaves died…

This is on a set where everybody is black, except for me.

And I'm doing this racist rant.

I'll kill you all, you-- you little nigglin's.

It was intimidating, but it was also very freeing,

because I could just be this thing in front of these people.

So it's a little dangerous.

I think I did it after and say, "Hey man, that's just--

everybody, love you.

This is not me. I hope you liked that.

And I hope you probably went like, 'Ooh man, that's real.'

You know, like, but that is not me."

For us, the horror was always human.

You little motherfucker.

You like to draw fucked-up pictures of people, huh?

And the monster or the supernatural or the paranormal was always redemptive.

So we were killing the things that we hated for the most part.

It was a way of getting back.

I think there is a delightful natural reckoning to all things

at the end of the day.

Welcome to my world.

- Here I am with these dolls.

They're just sitting there and moving.

And I got to look around and act at 'em.

And when I realize they're coming after me,

then it's like the whole world's on me.

It obviously looks so much better on screen

than it does when I'm sitting here acting to a little doll right there.

What we tried to do is create our evil villains

to be as reprehensible as possible.

Because some of the things that we were dealing with are things

that you know in your real world.

That catharsis becomes even bigger.

- What's wrong, Jerome?

You don't like seeing black people get killed?

Studio executives, and this is not all of them, but enough,

want to be creative.

But they want to be creative in your fucking shit.

Spike Lee, who I met as an actor during School Daze,

became our executive producer on this.

And you know, they would say, "Hey, Rusty, you know, do this."

And I go, "Huh, I don't want to do that."

And I call Spike, "Hey, Spike, they want me to do this."

Spike said, "What?"

And then Spike would call the studio and say,

"Yo, leave him alone."

Actually, he would say, "Leave him the fuck alone."

And then they would leave me alone.

Because he was a creative guy in his own right.

He just supported us, so that we could do it.

I don't owe no responsibilities for these motherfuckers.

But you are responsible for the lives you've taken,

for the dreams you've turned into nightmares.

I am one of those people that believes that art can

influence and educate, and sometimes change minds.

Every single human horror in Tales from the Hood

is still with us today.

I don't think you can rehabilitate those types.

Nah, you just kill them.

Who do you think you fucking with, old man?

It just shows that humans are very flawed

as we see the same issues constantly bubble up again and again,

you know, through time.

Welcome to hell!

Motherfuckers.

- Get out!

The '90s had a great amount of serial killer films,

which was very popular then.

Mine being one of them.

Are you following me?

Oh, kind of.

Skinner is about a sociopathic and psychopathic drifter,

who charms his way into a modern day Los Angeles home.

Good morning. How you doing, big guy?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Using it as a base all the while he is terrorizing

the community around him.

Hello, are you alright?

Everything's just fine.

You have a person that is living publicly among

a group of people, but in his own personal world

he really is a true psychopath.

A murderous one at that.

- Told you not to look while I was getting dressed!

We're gonna have a talk, you bitch!

Paul Hart-Wilden wrote it. English guy.

Very interesting guy.

And I suppose it had, of course, correlations

with Silence of the Lambs.

You've got a guy that-- skinning people.

But then, of course, so does Ed Gein and all of those guys.

They're all referencing, all going back to that.

Just total different ways.

When you're playing someone who's as unhinged

as that character Dennis Skinner, you begin rather carefully.

But like any character you do, you get more comfortable

as the movie progresses.

So you might as well go all the way, because there's no going back.

I reach down and I pulled your face right off.

I wasn't worried I was going to start chopping the crew up.

But you do become much more comfortable in that character's…

…well, for lack of a better word, skin.

Yes, baby!

It couldn't be now!

It was disturbing, but it was made much easier

by the fact that my cast was great.

Especially, Traci Lords.

You've become so predictable even after all this time.

It's the beginning of the end, Skinner.

She would come on set knowing every one of her lines

and everybody else's lines in the scene.

That is rare to begin with.

Cheerful, positive attitude all day long.

Had crap tons of prosthetics on.

It's horribly uncomfortable.

She didn't complain once for all the weeks we worked on that.

It made me judge actors I worked with after that based on her.

This is what he did to me.

The money for that movie came from some legitimate,

but also some very dubious sources, which I don't even understand to this day.

It had a very fast release and then they yanked it

from the theaters very quickly.

I suspect some legal troubles, some financial troubles.

They gave a really lousy VHS print, which was mediocre.

The DVD print looked like someone had just stuck

a Sony Handycam in front of the TV when they ran a version of the videotape.

I mean, it was really bad.

And then it was forgotten about, which is fine.

I just expected it. I'd done horror films before.

It's not the first time.

Then Severin gave it this big, glorious 4K release.

And I was like, "What?" You know, I couldn't believe it.

Now, whenever I'm at, you know, horror conventions signing,

at least 15, 20 people come up with you know, Skinner DVDs

and-- but I think the real prized ones are the VHS copies,

'cause those are very rare.

Do you agree with me that you and Jeff were talking

about me behind my back?

-No! -Don't fucking lie to me!

- Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions.

The Last Illusion is a brilliant story.

And Harry D'Amour is an amazing character.

One of the few of Clive's characters that he created,

particularly in the Books of Blood that I coveted.

I loved the idea of him being this you know,

mad New York paranormal investigator who's doing it,

because he's driven by his own demons rather than

because he's interested in the subject.

It's the darkness, D'Amour. It's been waiting for you.

Lord of Illusions is about the detective genre

colliding with the world of magic.

Come with me into the great beyond.

- I always found Clive Barker very interesting.

I had just got cast in another movie, a big epic.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Verhoeven called, the Crusades.

They started building the sets and everything in Spain.

And that movie fell apart. So I auditioned for Clive.

And I found the role pretty interesting of Philip Swan, the magician.

Have you seen this before?

Clive Barker, the thing that surprised me most

is he's very funny.

Obviously, he's very smart, very intelligent.

Cared very much about what he was doing.

And he was a very responsible director, too.

I worked with Scott Bakula previously

on Richard Rush's movie the Color of Night,

such a nice guy.

One of those lead actors that makes it easier

for everybody else.

Famke Janssen, who I had worked with her on that

and then I worked with her again on Deep Rising.

We became friends, her husband and I.

So that was a very friendly atmosphere.

Nix ran some kind of a cult, right?

A Charlie Manson deal?

He could get into people's heads, make them see things, terrible things.

When it came to the cult elements of the movie,

Nix was obviously this big presence, evil presence.

Fire said to me, "You are my instrument.

You shall be known as the Puritan."

Working with Daniel von Bargen, playing Nix on the movie,

I really liked Daniel.

Sort of interesting casting, serious actor.

Later when I would see him on Seinfeld…

-George. Check it out. -Yeah.

Three times around, no feet. Hmm?

It's so funny, I can't get the character of Nix

out of my mind when I watch that.

I've come back to bring you the wisdom of the grave.

The horror elements of the film, putting the mask on Nix

was such a throwback to the Black Sunday with Barbara Steele.

Clive was directing Lord of Illusions

at the same time that he was executive producing

Bloodline and Candyman 2.

We were on a night shoot on Bloodline.

And Gary Tunnicliffe, who was my special effects makeup artist

on Bloodline, who was also doing work on Lord of Illusions,

said to me he had to go and deliver a mandrill…

to the set of Lord of Illusions.

Did I want to go with him?

If I had been the first AD…

…on Bloodline, I would never have let me go

driving off into Los Angeles in the middle of the night

in Pinhead makeup, but gave permission.

So Gary and me, and the mandrill climbed into a car

and we drove across Los Angeles.

I don't think Clive was too impressed, because I brought filming to a standstill.

It was worth it to see Clive's face when Pinhead

suddenly walked onto the set of Lord of Illusions.

I think we were all afraid of the baboon.

I remember the young actress, the mother came up to me

and said something like,

"Uh, do you think my daughter is um, is she showing fear enough?

Is she afraid? Do-- do you really read that?"

And I'm like, "There is a drooling, angry baboon in front of a 9-year-old.

Yeah, I think it's working."

I think he's in love.

When I am levitating the car, part of the gas line broke in the car.

So I was you know, acting, breathing this in,

and I was you know, very dizzy all of a sudden.

And then there was a paramedic next to me.

But then I used that in the film, little actor things

for myself that helped.

You need me alive.

Why? So you can fuck the woman I love?

Lord of Illusions.

I saw it at the premiere also at the Chinese theater.

I liked most of it.

And then when I saw the director's cut, I think that was even better.

He got into my head, showed me what we really look like

when the veneer's gone.

No illusions, just the truth.

I think it fleshed out the characters more,

and it helped the plot move along, and it made much more sense to me.

So I really preferred that one.

What the fuck are you?

A man who wanted to be a god.

Seven.

To me, the two archetypal '90s horror films

were Seven and Scream.

And they were both very different from each other,

but they seemed to kind of lead the vanguard

of what was being done in horror at that time.

I feel like those two films, which both landed somewhere

in the middle of the decade, started up the engine again

and got horror more in the driver's seat culturally.

Oh, fuck me.

Seven, it felt like it was starting to push horror

into a deeper, darker place than it had been in a long time.

Exploring the boundaries of aberrant human behavior,

and doing that through the vehicle of procedural.

He's alive! That cocksucker's alive!

When I first read the script, the prospective producers,

the guys that had it, they were terrified of it.

They just thought it was just too extreme.

It was pitched to me as a low-budget film.

I think they were gonna try and make it for like 8 million.

And they said, "Well, what about the movie?

Don't you think it's bloody, and gory, and-- and too much?"

I said, "No." I-- I said-- I said, "You want the audience to think

that they saw it, but they didn't actually see it."

Each of the crime scenes was a work of art.

Call for help and you'll live, but you'll be disfigured.

Or you can put yourself out of your own misery.

Next day, my agent said I talked my way out of a job.

I said, "What do you mean I talked my way out?"

She said, "Ernest, before you walked in there, they were getting ready

to just toss the script in the garbage can.

You told them how to make the movie."

They said, "Well, that's how we should make the movie.

We can get an A-list director."

And so I went to this guy that had directed Alien 3.

It was David Fincher.

There are seven deadly sins, Captain. You can expect five more of these.

- You're dealing with the seven deadly sins,

and each one is just a little bit more effed up than the last.

You're dealing with a serial killer, so it's not paranormal.

It's, this shit could happen.

The sins were used in medieval sermons.

Sermons were about atonement for sin.

These murders are like forced attrition.

- Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, and Brad Pitt.

Probably three of the greatest actors to ever be in a ho-- a horror film.

A cast that so elevates what could have been

your basic serial killer, slasher kind of film

and you know, put it into the realm of the philosophical.

What sick, ridiculous puppets we are, and what a gross little stage we dance on,

not knowing that we are not what was intended.

The killer was trying to make a moral statement about

how destroyed society was.

We're all coming from moral high ground,

judging people and making them feel like absolute fucking shit,

when, if they turned that mirror back around,

they would see they're just as guilty of it

as everybody else around them.

Could you even try to say these were innocent people

and keep a straight face?

We see a deadly sin on every street corner. And we tolerate it.

Most people walk into the movie thinking Brad Pitt's the star of the movie.

The movie is Morgan Freeman's movie.

It's about Morgan Freeman's character reconnecting with his humanity.

If we catch John Doe, and he turns out to be the devil, that might live up

to our expectations, but he's not the devil.

He's just a man.

The whole atmosphere of the film, which is like

Dante's Inferno, you're constantly going down,

and it's dark, and it's raining nearly all the time.

It's probably one of the smartest scripts ever written.

He made me do it. He put that thing on me.

Then he told-- he told me to fuck her.

It was a puzzle. It was a mystery.

Kind of ripping out the underbelly

of what happens in a city, and showing the ugly side of it.

Detective!

You're looking for me.

Kevin Spacey's killer. Unassuming. Nothing remarkable.

He's thought ahead of the moment that he's arrested

and set up the final denouement in the desert.

And then goes on to do to take the gloves off,

as far as the fallout of it goes.

I mean, and the person you think is the hero is not always going to win.

- I visited your home this morning.

I tried to play husband. It didn't work out.

"What's in the box?"

What's in the box?

-Not till you give me the gun. -What's in the fucking box?

- It's just disturbing.

The studios really didn't know what they had.

You know, I remember talking to someone at New Line,

and they were so ready to pull the advertising budget on Seven,

'cause they just didn't think it was gonna work.

It hadn't tested particularly well, 'cause it was dark.

And they didn't know that people were gonna engage

with that kind of darkness.

Wanting people to listen, you have to hit them with a sledgehammer.

And then you'll notice you've got their strict attention.

It, in itself, created a genre.

It suddenly gave an aesthetic that nobody had ever really given credit to.

- There were endless Seven imitators after that movie came out,

just like there were endless imitators of Scream after that movie came out.

This is a movie with much more on its mind than tracking

a serial killer who kills in really cool ways.

This is about how did we lose our humanity,

and how do we get to reconnect with it again

in the midst of all these horrors?

And ultimately, the best horror movies always celebrate that idea.

You know, this isn't gonna have a happy ending.

Michael Myers came back and came back with a vengeance in the '90s.

Michael Myers was particularly haunting and occupied

a special space in my brain,

because I did see the original Halloween on a VHS

that my brother had smuggled into the house

when I was way too young to see it.

And it really messed me up in a great, wonderful way.

There's something so unspeakable about Michael Myers.

There's nothing that's going to stop this monster,

as Dr. Loomis called him.

The Halloween franchise, I always thought

there was no story left in that whole deal after the first one.

And boy, was I wrong.

The audience wanted to see this Michael Myers over and over again.

Say what you will about the Halloween franchise,

they took some swings.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, of course,

is the biggest example.

But The Curse of Michael Myers, the fact that they took

the storyline and really followed it through

this whole cult of thorn business…

The thorn symbol is actually a constellation of stars

that appears from time to time on Halloween night.

Whenever it appears, he appears.

- Halloween was in a tricky spot in the '90s.

If it kept doing the same thing again and again,

it would just be more of the same and it would get boring.

So you have to respect the filmmakers for taking a swing.

Curse of Michael Myers brought back a lot of familiar faces,

including Donald Pleasence.

What makes you think he'll come back here?

This house is sacred to him.

He has all his memories here. His rage!

And it also brought a fresh face into the mix.

But by the time it came out,

it wasn't quite a fresh face to audiences.

Paul Rudd made his big debut in Clueless,

but he had actually shot Curse of Michael Myers before.

I was only 8 years old when I saw him...

but I was one of the lucky ones. I survived.

I thought it was really cool how they revisited

Tommy Doyle's character.

Laurie Strode like babysat these two, him being one of them.

And the fact that it's his story, I thought was kind of a unique twist.

Michael's work isn't done in Haddonfield.

And soon, he'll come home to kill again.

- It was directed by Joe Chappelle, a terrible example of studio meddling.

It's a film that required lots of reshoots

that were really tricky to do, because unfortunately,

lead actor Donald Pleasence had passed.

If you think that Joe Chappelle's movie

with the whole Cult of Thorn sounds bonkers,

consider what might have been.

It the Weinsteins had actually asked their golden boy,

Quentin Tarantino to write a script.

And what he came up with saw Michael Myers

on a road trip with The Man in Black driving down Route 66

slaughtering everyone in sight.

Now when I say that this film was meddled with,

I mean it was really meddled with.

Now there is a producer's cut in existence that I believe

adds a good 45 minutes to more and more cult business.

It's out there for you to find.

Michael, your final sacrifice.

Terror has a new name.

♪ Mr. Jack will steal your soul ♪

Jack-O.

Growing up what got me into horror was probably going

into a video store and seeing all those VHS tapes

that had crazy, gory covers and that had wild titles

and everything that had the word, evil or demon or blood in it.

And of course you would bring it home

and you would watch it, 'cause you wanted to get scared

and you did get scared as a kid, especially for the low-budget movies,

just renting and hiding it from my parents.

- Mr. Jack will break your back.

Cut off your head with a whack. Whack!

Jack-O is one of those films that you could have sworn

you've seen a million times just because you saw

that VHS cover at the video store.

Maybe you took him for granted,

maybe you picked him up and checked him out,

but he was always there waiting for you.

Jack-O, directed by Steve Latshaw is a classic,

pumpkinhead rip-off where an old warlock is reincarnated

in modern times in the '90s.

No!

And now is out for revenge for the ancestors

who had banished him and who had killed him.

I am the last of the ones who brought you into this world.

Now go back to hell.

This movie was produced by Fred Olen Ray,

Linnea Quigley is in it, a Steve Latshaw regular.

Carolyn.

How's my boyfriend?

Ooh, you look so scary.

But also John Carradine and Cameron Mitchell,

some old Fred Olen Ray players.

Welcome to my asylum of horrors.

And Brinke Stevens also makes a cameo in this movie.

- Nice costume, butthead.

You're scaring my girlfriend, now get the hell out of here.

He has a scythe, he's killing people in the neighborhood, what more do you want?

His eyes light up.

A little big for trick-or-treating, aren't you bucko?

You can enjoy the pumpkin head in this movie as he's going

and killing the entire neighborhood on Halloween.

Trick or treat!

- Vampire in Brooklyn.

I would love to have you for dinner.

People get pigeonholed into their genre, which happens,

unfortunately, all the time.

I know Wes had to use bargaining chips.

"Okay, I'll do this horror movie so that I can do this movie

that doesn't have horror in it."

To make passion projects and projects that people

don't think they're capable of making

or that aren't going to be commercially viable.

What's sad to me is that after giving our world

so many amazing films that have made you know, their money back,

they have to kind of create these strange bargains

to be able to do the movie that they really have wanted

to do their whole lives

when they've already proved themselves 10 times over to the industry.

It's a really hard business that way.

Who the fuck are you?

I'm Maximillian. A connoisseur of death, you might say.

I was so fucking excited for a Vampire in Brooklyn to come out.

I was like, "What? It's Eddie Murphy as a fucking vampire!

What part of that don't you love?"

Put a little heart into it.

It's Wes Craven directing, Angela Bassett as a fucking badass.

I thought it was funnier than hell.

Drive the limo and shut your fucking mouth.

Vampire in Brooklyn's about a ancient vampire

from the old world coming to Brooklyn, to America in contemporary times.

-I need you to help me find a woman. -A woman?

Oh, well, you came to the right spot, man. I mean, Brooklyn's full of hoes.

I'm not interested in your hoes.

- Comedy-horror film.

It was a project that Eddie had written with his brother, Charlie Murphy.

They had sought out Wes to direct the film.

We shot almost entirely on the lot at Paramount,

although we were in and around LA a little bit.

And we shot down at the docks for the opening of the film

with the boat smashing into the harbor master's dock house.

It was a wolf, goddammit, son of a bitch turned into a man!

Did the flip-flop shit on me!

Seeing Eddie Murphy lean into that.

Just watching him just mop the floor with everybody.

Playing multiple characters, because, you know,

God forbid we give work to other people.

He was great as possessing the pastor and making everyone say evil is good.

-Evil is good and ass is good. -Uh-huh

And if you get you a piece of evil ass, whoo!

He was good as the white Italian thief.

-Garlic bread, signore. -Oh, the fucking garlic.

Next person to offer the garlic product is gonna get

one in the ass, alright?

There was a real kind of glint in his eye where you could see

that he was really enjoying doing this.

You ain't got to pull that Blacula shit with me, alright?

If you're hungry, I'll run you down to KFC

down the street and hit you up with a two-piece.

I already had Italian.

Eddie was really cool to work with. He's a trooper.

He loves to wear makeup,

so not problematic putting makeup on at all.

What was a challenge on that?

Eddie Murphy, who normally would have like Rick Baker doing the project.

Rick couldn't do this project, because he wasn't gonna be

given the time to develop the makeups,

test the makeups, rework the makeups if necessary.

Most of the makeups are successful.

Not crazy about Guido, the Italian guy.

That was a makeup that totally needed tested and reworked.

We probably had 8 weeks, 10 weeks if we were lucky

to build everything for the film.

My favorite things in the movie are the makeups that we did

once he see was in the second stage makeup,

where it really starts to show his vampire look.

Your turn, Rita. Taste her and quench the hunger.

- And then the final look that particular vampire

I really thought was cool.

Vampire in Brooklyn, for me it doesn't work tonally,

because it doesn't find the happy medium between horror and comedy.

It doesn't find its groove, but there's some fun stuff in it

and there's some good performances.

Oh, you're not afraid.

It was Coming to America,

but with a vampire in the middle of it.

I think people had they known that going in,

I think they would have enjoyed it more, but I fucking loved it, man.

To this day, I love that film.

Still don't believe in vampires, detective?

- If you thought it was over, think again.

Xtro: Watch the Skies.

Xtro, when it came out on video and in those days,

it was good old VHS, it grew legs

and it just ran off and did very, very well indeed.

I needed a job on the second one, which I'm not happy with at all.

It was unfortunate.

-What the fuck is that? -Shh, let's go!

The third one of these, I wanted an excuse to make a film in Los Angeles.

Daryl Haney put together this script from after,

you know, various drafts and various firings

about this island where this alien had been secreted

and closed up in a concrete kind of sarcophagus.

These marines go there and discover it.

And it gets out and all sorts of dreadful things happen.

This alien is essentially tracking us, hunting us down.

He doesn't want us on the island, doesn't want us

to find out what's going on.

I was thrilled to do that. I'm a water sign.

And when I found out we were gonna be in a boat

and we were gonna be on one of the Channel Islands,

I was in seventh heaven, man.

If you should come across any documents or uh,

let's just say any remnants of the camp, you ought to bring them directly to me.

I love playing the antagonist. I absolutely love it.

I've played two good guys in my career.

Never been so bored in my life.

Shoot to kill?

That's an order, Friedman! Shoot to kill!

- Harry is quite a character. It was quite a trip.

He would insist on getting his shot and was adamant about it, and rightly so.

I was absolutely in control.

So that anything that's wrong with that film is my fault.

And there's plenty of stuff wrong with it, you know,

plenty of stuff wrong.

I think that's where I really did feel the budget cramping us.

There are silly things that happen, like

they're in this boat going across to this island

and you quite clearly see this jeep, right, sitting on the boat.

And then they get on the island and suddenly the jeep is there.

And they've been swimming to the island on little rowboats and things like that.

People always ask, "How did the jeep get onto the island?", you know?

"Well, it's movie magic, you see."

The specials on that and how that sort

of mirror-mirage thing happening in the movie,

I thought that was really spectacular.

The alien in Xtro.

We all feel for it.

You could take it to all the horrors we have visited upon

our fellow humans, be it in camps

where we imprisoned people that we were afraid of.

I just wish it were better.

But it was our film, you know, and we did our best.

For some reason, I find it rather bitty.

I should have been tougher.

- I have a spot in my heart for Xtro and for Harry.

We say they're little movies. No movie is little.

We understand how difficult it is to have a movie made.

Having been made so long ago that it still has legs,

so to speak, is a beautiful thing.

I know what I'd like to believe.

That there might be hope yet for the human race.

- Stuart Gordon's Castle Freak.

Another film that was shot at Charlie Band's castle

in the heyday of Full Moon was Stuart Gordon's Castle Freak.

Anybody there?

- Stuart was like the top director in that bunch of us

who were directing for Charlie.

Charlie really exploited Stuart to make more and more movies.

Castle Freak, we're talking about a third movie shot

at the castle I owned for many years.

It started with a piece of artwork.

So much like Dolls, when I had this creepy image of a doll,

the eyes being pulled out.

Many years later after Stuart had made other pictures

and Fortress, I said,

"Stuart, we gotta make a movie at the castle.

Let's keep it simple.

We can do like we did with Pit and the Pendulum,

but not, you know, a medieval epic.

We'll shoot it at the castle." We'll design it around the castle.

He said, "Sounds good." He said, "Do you have an idea?"

I said, "Not only do I have an idea, I have a poster."

So I pulled out this poster of this creature. Castle Freak!

And he loved it. He goes, "Okay, we gotta go make Castle Freak."

He said, "Do you have any ideas of who should be in it?"

I said, "We gotta get Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs."

I mean, come on. It'd be so cool to reunite them.

Hello, ladies, I'm gonna start making an inventory

of what we got here. The booty.

You wanna tag along, Beck? Get the lay of the land?

The team of Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs together,

they're both incredible.

And they all kind of shared a unique vision

and were able to kind of bring out the best of each other.

You brought a woman here!

I was lonely.

You were drunk!

One of the things that makes Castle Freak so disturbing

is the design of the freak himself.

He is so damn freaky that even a hardcore horror fan

would have to kind of turn their eyes away on occasion.

Castle Freak was definitely-- especially being there on set,

and seeing the suit, and the poor guy with his dick cut off, and thought,

"Oh my God, what are we doing?"

It's only about a handful of these stories where someone

would come to me and go, "We want to make a sequel",

or "We want to make a remake", or "We want to", whatever it is,

"Can we license the rights?"

And in this case, it wasn't during a time where we were starving for money,

but I love Barbara, and we're still very close.

I thought, "Alright, well, she's got in with some investors

and there's no reason why we can't make another Castle Freak.

It can't hurt, you know, it just will bring more attention to the franchise",

so she went off and made that.

This was the last movie, sadly, that I made with Stuart Gordon,

but I'm really happy with the film.

META OR NOT, HERE WE COME

RETURN OF THE TEEN SLASHER & META-FUELED HORROR

Usually a movie is trying to ignore

and pretend everything that happened before it

doesn't exist, and Scream said,

"Nope, let's all agree right now, all of us have seen

all of these movies that brought us here."

We know that you stopped screaming at the scares

and you started laughing.

We're gonna reinvent the slasher.

You're not safe from this movie just because you know how slashers work.

Every character in this knows it, too.

The audience's knowledge of movies becomes

a key ingredient to the success of that picture.

- Name the killer in Halloween.

Michael. Michael Myers.

- Yes! Very good.

Scream is probably the generation-defining movie

of the '90s when it comes to horror.

And to all the major studios out there,

it showed us that horror no longer is being shoved

into this corner of the remakes, and the sequels,

and the straight-to-video.

It's a juggernaut at the box office again.

Ooh, you wanna play psycho killer?

Can I be the helpless victim?

What Kevin Williamson did was what is now referred to as, "meta",

and that is the commenting on what is happening

as you're watching it by the person

that you're watching without them breaking the fourth wall.

This is standard horror movie stuff.

Prom Night revisited, man.

The fact that we're so savvy as horror-movie watchers,

let's just now start to investigate what that means.

Let's throw that out to the audience

and let them partake in this fun that we're going to have

in trying to figure it out.

- Scream is not the first movie to be a meta horror movie,

but what Scream does is it takes that concept

of meta filmmaking and it breaks it wide open

in the mainstream.

Suddenly, that's what everybody's talking about.

- Never say, "Who's there?"

Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish.

You might as well just come out here to investigate

a strange noise or something.

Scream, of course, was in some ways, I feel like,

riding on the coattails of Pulp Fiction.

It was like a very Gen X kind of horror,

kind of a meditation, really, on the genre.

Look, here comes the obligatory tit shot.

Certainly, Tarantino's influence in his non-horror genre movies,

coupled with his own publicity and interviews that he gave at the time,

built in this audience awareness, this intertextuality.

- Andy, have you got the ring? - Why, certainly.

Quentin Tarantino is a fantastic example of the person

who had absorbed so much film culture

through his experiences as a video store clerk

and his broad-ranging reach of obscure genre films

to the classics of cinema, so that when he starts making movies,

he's able to bring those references.

He's taking his love of film and sharing it with the world

through more films and creating this kind of feedback loop,

where people can fall in love with Quentin Tarantino's films, then quote him.

- You hear me talking, hillbilly boy?

I'ma get medieval on your ass.

Kind of a conversation with the genre and that just became, I think,

increasingly interesting to the audience.

There was a story in the LA Times about how

teenagers didn't go to teen movies anymore,

and the teen genres weren't working at all,

that teenagers were more likely to go see movies

with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone

than they were to see movies about themselves.

It isn't possible.

What's not possible?

He's fantastic.

This is his best performance ever.

Scream really changed the entire game.

It opened it up to a different audience beyond perhaps the true horror fans,

because I think people could hook into it more

when it was a little bit more meta and a little bit more ironic.

Movies are not responsible for our actions.

It's a classic case of life imitating art,

-imitating life. -This isn't--

Suddenly, the floodgates were opened for the horror genre

to embrace a new kind of intelligence.

Well, it's a long story.

In fact, if it was a movie, it would take three

or four sequels just to do it justice.

I mean, the '80s had John Hughes, which was teen angst and mostly comedy.

And then in the '90s we had Kevin, and he brought it to horror,

but he brought it across many things.

He also had you know, teen angst with Dawson's Creek,

and I think he ruled the '90s.

I'm not putting that hack drug up my nose. It's so '80s.

Aliens have taken over the Earth. Weigh it.

Kevin Williamson's so interesting,

because he went back to the teen-driven horror

that he grew up on, that he was inspired by.

Scream made a movie that brought the teenagers back out again.

It was going to see all these young, pretty faces

on a very slick-looking movie,

turning my friends who weren't horror fans into horror fans.

"I know what you did last summer." Ooh. What a crock of shit.

A level of polish that allowed people to feel okay about watching them.

You know, The Burning looks like The Burning,

but I Know What You Did Last Summer,

like Jennifer Love Hewitt's just luminous. This looks like the cover of a magazine.

This is acceptable entertainment where sometimes a slasher from the '80s

might have looked like three clicks over from a snuff film.

We can tell old slasher movies again, 'cause remember,

when Scream came out, slasher movies were dead.

The only slasher movies were thrillers.

That's how the mainstream kind of viewed these movies.

And all of a sudden, "Wait, these 1981-style slasher killers

are cool again?

Hell yeah, let's go."

It's also important to note that these films

were such big-budget blockbusters that A-listers

were just lining up to be part of them.

Everybody wanted to be in a horror movie.

You got like Bill Pullman in Lake Placid.

You got Sam Jackson in Deep Blue Sea.

These talented people, you know, who presumably have the option

to say no saw something in this, so it must be worthwhile.

If you only sat down and watched Dimension Films

from the '90s, you would get an absolute taste

of what horror in the '90s felt like.

The Weinsteins of it aside, like the Weinsteins were hated in the '90s.

They did a lot more than just what you know them for

in the later years, uh, with MeToo.

They were making very interesting pickups.

Studios are like, "Horror's done, we're done,

we don't need Michael Myers anymore", and they went yoink.

They're like, "Hellraiser". Yoink.

You'd see that Dimension logo and you would get excited,

because that meant you were gonna not just watch something

that was quality, not just something that had

big name actors in it,

but something that was probably gonna swing for the fences.

As an actor wanted to be a part of Dimension Films,

you wanted to be in a movie. "Dimension? I-- I gotta do it."

They wanted good actors and people that got cred to lend

to small budgets that could be big-budget franchises,

which is very smart.

Look at all the directors, all the different people

that came out of Dimension.

The genre stuff also became very respected.

I think sometimes too much of a good thing…

Maybe that genre got watered down for a moment.

If you eat peanut butter everyday, you're gonna get sick of it eventually

and you're not gonna eat peanut butter for a year.

- Baby, I just win!

That tail ended up wagging the dog.

They became so self-referential that they weren't having

the courage to kind of be actually what they were.

I do think that when self-parody kinda runs aground,

people will ask themselves, like that scene at the beginning

of the Twilight Zone, "What is really scary?"

You wanna see something really scary?

Okay, go ahead.

Quite a new way of actually provoking and exploring

those really fundamental things that the genre does

in ways we haven't seen before.

Ah! Shit! Fuck.

- There was just a hunger for that.

Back to kind of basics, but the main kind of goal

was to scare the crap outta the audience, you know?

And we hadn't seen that in a while.

Blair Witch kind of was at the beginning, you know,

the cusp of that.

Like a month later, you know, The Sixth Sense came out.

So there was this kind of pivot at that time.

Finally, it seemed like there was some movement

in horror away from the bubblegum and more towards like,

"Okay, we're gonna scare the crap outta you here."

But there was an appetite for that, you know?

1996

- From Dusk Till Dawn.

Dusk Till Dawn is an amazing movie.

It is awesome. It's got sex. It's got underworld vampires.

It's got some kitsch to it.

It's over the top, but it's scary. It's cool.

And what did I say to you?

I said, buy the road map and leave.

What the fuck am I supposed to do, Seth? He recognized us.

From Dusk Till Dawn is about a family

who is taken hostage by criminals on the lam

who are heading to this town called, "El Rey",

which is taken from the book, The Getaway.

After getting across the border successfully,

stop at a all-night strip club called, the "Titty Twister".

A lot of people were surprised.

You know, they thought they were seeing

the standard Quentin Tarantino gangster movie

with the criminals on the run.

Using a lot of time to establish the characters

is not the norm in the horror genre.

You didn't really see it coming in the beginning of the movie.

And then you were like, "Okay, something's coming. What is it?"

But you still didn't know it was vampires.

Dinner is served.

And then suddenly it turns into a siege film.

- Does anybody know what's going on here?

- We got a bunch of fucking vampires out there

trying to get in here and suck our fucking blood. And that's it.

- Night of the Living Dead and Assault on Precinct 13

were kind of the inspirations for it.

What the fuck?

I wanted to direct the film. I created it to direct.

I'd written a 24-page treatment.

What Quentin Tarantino brought to the script was, first off,

he has a love for all cinema.

All the genres we were trying to uh, mix together.

-He signaled the ranger. -I didn't!

When they were talking, he mouthed the words, "help us".

You fucking liar! I didn't say shit!

Why don't you shut the hell up?

He brought a sense of humor and the sense of violence,

even throw in the meta thing into it.

I know silver bullets are werewolves,

but I'm sure silver has something to do with vampires.

Well, does anybody have any silver?

Okay. Then who cares?

Basically, it took almost eight years

to get it off the ground, even after the success

of Reservoir Dogs and then Pulp Fiction.

It was still a hard sell for a studio.

At one point, we almost had it set up as Tales from the Crypt movie.

Thank God we didn't, 'cause they wanted us to put the Crypt Keeper in it.

Once Robert became interested in it, then everything changed.

Welcome to slavery.

I already had a wife.

Suddenly, the project became bigger.

Initially, it was like, you know,

3 million or under movie is what we were trying to do,

and then it became an $18 million production.

Then the cast that was brought on, so I was like,

"Yeah, let's let Robert do it.

He's a hot new guy in town, and he's got a lot of energy,

and I love his movies, and I love how he shoots."

So it-- it kind of became a no-brainer,

and it was gonna be an effects showcase for us at KNB.

So, and you know, I got my story credit,

a producing credit, and I got to work on a bunch

of cool effects stuff in this show.

People still think that I did the makeup effects

on Dusk Till Dawn.

I can give Greg Nicotero some credit for becoming Sex Machine.

Greg said, "Hey, what about Tom Savini?"

And Quentin, "Well, let's send him the script

and let him send us a video audition."

They wanted me to play Fred Williamson's part,

'cause he has a speech about Vietnam.

So the script arrived, but then I saw Sex Machine,

and his lines were much better.

-What's your name, girlie? -Kate, what's yours?

Sex Machine. Pleased to meet you.

So I wrote his lines on cue cards and put them around the room,

and I was just reading cue cards, but it looked like

I was talking to a bunch of people.

So it made Quentin laugh. So they changed the body types.

Sex Machine was a little guy, not Fred Williamson,

and Fred became Frost with the Vietnam speech.

It was a movie that had a lot of visual effects in it,

and the way we achieved 'em was kind of a weird hybrid

of like, practical and digital at that time.

Now you do it all digitally.

I love you too, Seth.

The interior of the Titty Twister was built

in the old Lawry steak seasoning factory

somewhere right near Glendale in California.

It was a elevated set, so we could get underneath

and do some gags and puppeteer the big rat sequence and everything.

Tom Savini has this really cool vampire look.

He goes, "Whose idea was it to give me the dick nose?"

Tom's always like, "You guys did this on purpose

and put a dick nose on my makeup."

It was never a dick nose, it's literally a bat nose.

Fucking bit me!

What are you gonna do about it?

Come on, Sex Machine!

Robert, he shoots so fast, which is great,

because he's shooting everything guerrilla style,

like he did with Desperado and El Mariachi.

You'll have a wheelchair, he's just sitting in it

and they're wheeling him around, he's doing crazy shots.

So we never got bored. It was always just fun.

And the soundtrack, that was a wonderful case

of some great bands,

Tito and the Tarantulas was phenomenal.

Robert Rodriguez he had actually temped Dusk Till Dawn

with Dead Calm.

But I spoke some nonsense and said,

"I think the best thing to do is write a mariachi surf opera."

But that was like the perfect three words.

I think the vampires and the gore were-- were the glue in that one.

In its initial release, it didn't do as well as they thought it would.

It wasn't a huge success for Miramax or Dimension,

but in the years since it's a perennial.

It's always on television, it's always on at Halloween.

Everybody knows it,

so it's made a lot of money over the years.

It got made the way it was supposed to get made.

And I think that's why people love it to this day

is because it didn't follow the norms,

it didn't have the standard three-act structure,

pulls a rug out from underneath you halfway through.

And it gave us a great chance to just have so much fun with the effects.

Now let's kill that fucking band.

Fuck you, everybody! Goodnight!

Don't Look Up was co-written by Hideo Nakata,

who would later go on to direct the Ring, and by Takashi Shimizu,

who would later on direct Ju-On:The Grudge.

It's widely considered to be semi-autobiographical,

because it's the behind-the-scenes story

of a first-time director making his first feature film.

And unfortunately for him,

he's trying to make this first feature film

in a completely haunted set, very dangerous set.

Yūrei Yanagi, an actor who reappears

in Ringu as a TV reporter, is the figure

of a newbie director who's seen by many critics

as an on-screen surrogate for Hideo Nakata himself.

You get a really self-reflexive meta-narrative about filmmaking.

This previous production had a terrible traumatic event

that may be left behind some angry ghosts

who've projected their psychic visions out onto whatever might be nearby.

Inadvertently, both the crew and the actors find that

their gazes are always drifting upwards towards the rafters above the set.

And sometimes they end up seeing a spectral figure,

a woman in white.

They find, as they're checking their dailies,

that a lot of their footage has been compromised by the fact

that maybe the film had been previously used

by another production

and they've just shot new footage on top of it.

The ghost has somehow imprinted herself.

The process of continually rewinding, replaying,

rewinding and replaying the recorded footage actually

brings the ghost to life.

Don't Look Up starts like a drama.

And it plays like a drama until gradually shifting

into horror movie mode.

The actress falls to her death and now this trauma

is urgent, and real, and present.

Don't Look Up is really a beautifully put together piece

of horror filmmaking that has all of that disquieting aesthetic

that makes the later J-horrors work.

It's the one that's showing the pathway that they're gonna follow.

- Hellraiser.

Bloodline.

I saw Hellraiser: Bloodline in the theater.

I played hooky. I snuck out of class.

And I have revisited that movie unapologetically since.

The story's pretty cool.

It's three timelines where you're dealing with generations

within one family.

The inventor of the Lament Configuration.

All three of these stories are braided together to tell

one kind of epic, sprawling and complete Hellraiser story.

This triple timeline, generational family's struggle

with their inadvertent role in evil.

A summoned demon is yours to command.

Unless you stand in Hell's way.

Outer Space. Why not?

It's by far in a way the most ambitious of all the Hellraiser screenplays.

Bound together by the story of the LeMarchand

who becomes Merchant family.

You know me from dreams, John LeMarchand.

We have a destiny together.

Clive is back on board as executive producer again.

This is his storyline that Pete Atkins again has written

brilliantly as a screenplay.

It's a very ambitious way to try and make a film,

'cause you're really making three films.

Three separate films.

There are separate casts, separate budget requirements,

design requirements.

It's a lot of sets. It's a lot of locations.

Hugely ambitious.

There were problems baked into the cake.

And I think the fundamental problem was that they gave us

the same amount of time and the same amount of money

to make Bloodline that we had had to make Hellraiser III.

Help me.

- I had a great working relationship with Kevin Yagher.

Aware of his work as a special effects makeup artist.

First time director, but I got on great with him.

Temptation is worthless, princess.

I will teach your human Merchant about the value of suffering.

It's very famously meddled with by Weinsteins

who are famous meddlers when it comes to these kind of movies.

It's really tough.

Especially, in the '90s when that factory mentality

in the studios, you know, is still really kind of oppressive.

Oh, you suffer beautifully but I am here for business not pleasure.

They kept messing with the ending.

The whole point about going into outer space

is that Merchant is bringing Pinhead there,

because he knows he is the end of the bloodline.

And so he lures Pinhead to the space station.

Welcome to oblivion. Boom.

The end. They wanted a happy ending.

The one that I wish they'd kept,

which I saw was seemed to me rather wonderful,

because it's a time loop.

And I thought that was brilliant. It was the end of the fight.

The end of Pinhead. Not.

I am forever.

I'm not party to all the politicking of it,

but I know that in the creation of the director's cut,

Kevin had a major falling out with the producers

and parted company with the project.

I've talked to Kevin about this subsequently.

He and I are still good friends.

But he was gone and they now wanted reshoots.

But it wasn't reshoots.

It was really three sets

of brand new principal photography which we shot

the following year in '95.

Joe Chappelle came in who had just directed

Halloween 6 for Dimension. And Joe was great.

- It's just a box.

Thank God for men of reason.

It was my second experience of working with finance on set.

When we came to some of the space things,

we were doing one scene, one shot, one take.

It's not a great way to work.

My understanding is the end of it all, they said to Joe,

"We'll put your name on the picture."

And Joe said, "No, you won't.

Because a lot of the work in the movie is Kevin's.

It's not mine."

And that's how it falls out that I have worked

with one of the true legends of Hollywood, Alan Smithee.

Industry code for nobody was prepared to take responsibility for this movie.

That often means that the movie was so awful that--

that nobody was prepared to take credit for it.

And that's not the case in Bloodlines.

I think a co-directing credit between Kevin and Joe

would have been the right thing, but it isn't.

It's an Alan Smithee movie.

I am pain.

- Tremors 2: Aftershocks.

Tremors to me is baby Jurassic Park.

It didn't have the push of the studio.

It didn't have any of that, but it had the power of the fans.

The character of Burt Gummer

is the glue of all of the Tremors.

It's fucking Burt's world and we're all in it.

Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't you, you bastard?

Tremors 2: Aftershocks.

I thought Tremors was gonna be a one-off.

It was not this huge hit that we all thought it should be.

Hungry? Eat this!

Of course, I was disappointed. There goes the feature career.

So I was as surprised as anybody when I got a phone call.

- I'm down in Mexico, see, and I find myself

in a sort of situation.

What kind of situation?

A graboid kind of situation.

Seriously? They're actually doing this?

It didn't do well in the movie houses,

but by golly, it's found its way in the aftermarket video.

"Who's gonna be in it? Not Kevin? Not Reba?"

"Fred Ward we think is coming back."

I said, "Okay, that's good."

1, 2, 3.

What's this?

Scissors cuts paper. I win.

I was thrilled to be back as Burt firing away.

More munitions than you could find in the average ammo dump of NATO.

World War I anti-tank cartridge.

And still getting it wrong, because the creatures had transformed.

Burt had dealt in Tremors 1 with these underground monsters.

What should appear in Tremors 2: Aftershocks?

These thing called, "shriekers".

They were walking about. They had a heat-seeking organ.

They were blind, but they could find your heat signature.

This was completely new territory.

How's a 30-foot worm turn into that little thing?

"I feel I was denied critical…"

…need to know information.

That line is still repeated back to me time and again.

I am completely out of ammo.

Great writing. Burt being caught off guard.

There's nothing better when a writer falls in love

with your character and says, "Oh, let's write

to the strengths of this character.

Let's run with it. Let's have fun with that."

It's gold for an actor.

You smoked his ass.

Doing what I can with what I got.

The funny thing is Michael like-- likes art.

He's a sweet guy.

He's more closer to the dad on Family Ties than he is Burt Gummer.

But yet, when he embodies it, he's a fucking animal!

And he's crazy with this shit.

If certain people had bothered to gather intelligence

on the creatures before bumbling into the situation--

Knock it off, Burt!

If I had one problem with the piece,

we were protecting an entire community in Tremors 1.

I said, "We're in an oil field. Who cares about big oil?"

Thankfully, in some ways, I was wrong.

People still cared, because the characters were so wonderful.

Doesn't anything ever get you down?

Well, I'm blessed with a sunny disposition.

Most people seem to like it.

They brought me in it 14 years later to be Burt Gummer's son.

Like, that's the biggest compliment.

I know that my lineage is now set in this world

and I get a lot of love off of it.

I'm very fortunate to be part of it.

You got something to say to me?

You're suffering from a severe case of getting too old for this crap.

So give me the vest and your flares.

- We have done seven Tremors films as of 2024

and one television series that lasted, I think, 13 episodes.

I will tell you that I have a special place in my heart

for Tremors 4: The Legend Begins.

I love prequels, a historic piece in the Old West.

I thought, "How marvelous is that?"

I feel I've not been privy to critical, most needful information.

Hiram Gummer started out as a man who wanted nothing

to do with these people, as I see, snobbish, somewhat effete.

And he came to say, "I'll stay."

An ambush. We will lead them into our very gun muzzles.

Someone who thought he was better than everyone else.

In the course of the piece,

he learns to accept these people, fight along with them,

and in a sense, fall in love with them.

I love a story like that.

Burt Gummer was the gift that kept on giving.

And the trust of a few people at Universal who kept saying,

"Let's do another."

Memo: 4 pounds of C4,

may be a little excessive.

Some of the best horror was coming out of Europe.

The Church, by Michele Soavi.

I love The Church.

The ambiance that he's able to achieve with it,

and some of the images are pretty interesting.

Which really set it up for what I think

is a masterpiece, which is Dellamorte Dellamore.

My name is Francesco Dellamorte.

Weird name, isn't it? Francis of Death.

It was released in America as Cemetery Man. Terrible title.

- Michele had done his two films for Dario Argento.

He was ready to break out on his own.

And this has to be the towering achievement of his career.

This is arguably the last great Italian horror film.

Certainly the last great Italian horror film that was made for theaters.

Give me the fucking spade!

Rupert Everett is a caretaker in a very ancient,

very old cemetery where when people get buried,

they come back after a few days

and he has to make sure that they stay dead.

He's just resigned to that life.

- What the hell was that?

Nothing, I'm uh, just working.

His bald-headed assistant falls in love with a girl

from the village, and then she ends up dying.

And he brings her head back in and is like living with this head.

It's so fucking bonkers, dude.

With your consent, I'd like to marry Gnaghi.

-This horrible thing? -Yeah.

It was based on the Dylan Dog comic,

which was a very popular Italian horror comic.

The design of the character in the comic was actually based on Rupert Everett.

So it made perfect sense to cast him.

The woman that Rupert Everett is in love with

is played by Anna Falchi, who is without a doubt

one of the most beautiful women on screen.

Why on your poor husband's grave, huh?

I've never kept anything from him.

We've trusted each other implicitly.

The character is called, "She", so She becomes emblematic

of so many different women.

Dellamorte Dellamore, of death and of love.

It's how we come to grips with the dead.

I can't forgive myself for having lied to you.

I don't have a degree in biology.

There's all kinds of strange perversities in this movie,

but it is an absolutely beautifully-shot film.

The mise en scène in the movie, the production design,

everything, the look of the film, all the colors,

all the blues and the reds, all the atmospheric smoke,

the fireflies, everything just gives this

kind of otherworldly, as if you're crossing over

to the otherworld watching this movie.

No one will ever make us part.

Gnaghi, the gun!

There's a beautiful scene where he's confronted

by the Grim Reaper.

And it's this incredible practical effect Grim Reaper.

It's like he's just accepting his fate.

And the Grim Reaper is-- is basically is telling him,

he's like, "You are my hand, you are my arm,

you are what keeps the dead dead.

It will always be your place."

If you don't want the dead coming back to life,

why don't you just kill the living?

If you've ever lost somebody that you love,

you can look at that film and really be moved by it

and really respond to the poetry of it.

Most beautiful living woman I have ever seen.

Will I see her again?

This really showed that Michele Soavi was on his way

to taking over the mantle from Dario.

But unfortunately, some life problems got involved

and also the decimation of the Italian film industry

meant that he hasn't made another horror movie to this day.

I'm the mayor!

Ex.

- The Craft.

The Craft is a movie that asks the question,

what if that group of very marginal girls

at the other end of the cafeteria, what if they actually were witches?

Oh, shit. It's the bitches of Eastwick.

-What? -Yeah, whatever you do,

stay away from them. They're witches.

And what if they actually had magical powers?

Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

- Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True,

three witches already have a trio, a coven of their own,

but they're missing their fourth.

Enter Robin Tunney, new girl at school.

As one tends to do, the misfits kind of gravitate towards one another.

You girls watch out for those weirdos.

We are the weirdos, mister.

At one point or another, everybody feels like an outcast.

Peter Filardi wrote a script about four teenage girls

in high school who dabble in witchcraft

and I was brought in to do a rewrite of it.

And as I worked on it, I realized that

I was personalizing it to a very large degree.

My experience in high school especially,

it was kind of heavy, it was kind of gothic.

I think teenagers feel things more intensely than adults do,

because it's all happening for the first time

and hormones are taking over your life.

Do you guys worship the devil?

It's like God and the devil. It's everything.

I thought it would be nice to invest

this supernatural story with real world problems.

-Don't you ever hit me! -Don't you touch her! Stop!

That said, the othe-- flip side of the coin is that

it's a little bit of a fantasy.

The only example that I had of a movie in a similar genre

was The Lost Boys.

At one point we jokingly referred to the movie as, "The Lost Girls".

But I really tried to ground The Craft in reality.

It just keeps falling out!

I don't understand it.

What's really cool about The Craft is that

it's a bunch of young women who realize that they are

so much more powerful together.

I really liked how they developed the relationships.

You saw how complicated it was and how terrifying,

but also how powerful and how exciting.

Do you want in or do you want to leave the circle?

Why does it always have to be that way with you, Nancy?

Because that's the way it is!

I believe in the casting gods that you think you want somebody

and you don't get them

and then the person you end up ends up being so much better

than who you originally wanted.

And I loved all four of those girls in those parts.

They were perfect.

The four of them really clicked in the scenes together.

But it wasn't a very social set.

Somebody had to cry almost every day in a scene or scream or be devastated

and they took the work seriously.

It was a difficult movie.

It was exhausting and everything was a struggle.

Sarah.

The soundtrack was very much a collaboration between me

and the music supervisor, Ralph Sall.

The music really animates scenes for me.

It's incredibly important.

As well as the score, Graeme Revell did an amazing score.

It was a great pleasure to bring all sorts

of different elements into the film scoring.

All of those instruments, all of those voices,

they just have such a beautiful human and magical element to them.

And I think the craft was a really good exercise in that.

The sort of the more magical little pieces that I wrote

that ended up on the soundtrack, that's what the audience wanted.

Fairuza was a practicing pagan when we made the film.

When we were doing the scene on the beach with the incantations,

the waves started coming up harder on the beach.

But at one point, when we had this shot with the cameras overhead spinning around,

a rogue wave came and wiped out the whole set.

Lend us yours powers.

Show us your glory.

We invoke thee!

I remember Fairuza telling me that was a very spiritually-enmeshed area.

We were courting danger by making this incantation happen.

Did you feel that? He blessed me.

I can feel him running through my veins.

We hired this technical consultant, Pat, the witch, to help us.

I wanted to be casting spells that would be real,

to do incantations that would be real.

While not disrespecting any real entities.

Pat, the witch, gave me a chant when we were in post-production,

so that the movie would open number one.

I did it.

The movie did open number one, so you know,

think what you will.

-Surprise! -No.

Look in your eyes tells me you might not be so sure.

It's a movie about women, and it's not about the men

in their lives very much.

You are nothing.

The only way you know how to treat women is by treating them like whores!

And there's something very homoerotic about their relationship.

Something very intense and kind of sexual in their relationship.

And I cannot tell you how many people have come out to me

and said that the movie changed their idea of themselves,

because they saw the queerness of it.

And I realized that I had infused my gay sensibility into the movie

without ever uttering the word, "gay".

Put your fingers underneath.

Put your fingers where.

It's endured in a way I never would have expected it would.

Oh, relax. It's only magic.

We don't stop till the screaming starts, you dig?

- The Frighteners.

To us, who grew up in the '80s and the '90s,

Peter Jackson was a master of horror from another world

that created the bloodiest cartoons known to man.

I think people were surprised that this guy went

from these weird little independent horror films

then suddenly got eyeballed by Universal Studios

to do this movie and got a big budget, big names,

and then he became the guy

who brought Lord of the Rings to the world.

People forget that he's a horror nerd.

The wicked will be punished.

Carving out a career feature by feature, and he's so passionate about film,

no matter what the genre is.

The Frighteners, it had Michael J. Fox in it.

Yeah. What's not to like?

I mean, he's such a fantastic screen presence.

This is a letter from my bank.

This says they want $15,000 from me or they're gonna sell my house.

Michael J. Fox is able to see ghosts and he basically

is using the ghosts that he's befriended to haunt places,

so he can get paid to come and get rid of them.

Well, folks, I can do a clearance,

-but it's not gonna be cheap. -How much?

There's such a darkness at the heart of The Frighteners,

and sad at parts.

You just want to kind of hug Michael J. Fox in this,

because of some of the things that his character has gone through.

He didn't ask for this power.

He didn't ask to be able to see ghosts.

He certainly didn't ask for them to be hanging around,

so he could help them communicate.

What do you think? Pretty scary, huh?

Don't you ever do that again.

Not a straight up heroic role for Michael J. Fox,

which was the norm at this time.

He's either Alex Keaton or Marty McFly,

and here he's a broken man making his living

by swindling people.

He ends up crossing paths with a very evil spirit.

Jake Busey, he is just a sinister, sinister character

who is trying to beat the numbers of guys

like Charles Starkweather when it comes to killing people.

I want to kill her now, Betty.

That'll give us 41.

That's eight clear of Gacy.

Another nine will have broken Bundy's record.

Peter Jackson, of course, knows all those tropes

and really played with it in The Frighteners

and appreciated actors like Jeffrey Combs and Dee Wallace.

Patronizing do-gooder bitch.

Oh, Patricia, you kill her. I'll watch.

There's no one who was gonna steal a movie

from Michael J. Fox and then Jeffrey Combs says,

"Hold my beer."

You claim he's a bona fide psychic, yet all I've heard

is a lot of ill-informed meandering waffle.

As this crazy OCD federal agent

who has spent way too much time

in with cults and the fucking supernatural.

We have 28 unexplained deaths here.

I think you are involved in each and every one of them.

Filmed in Wellington, where I was living at the time.

In New Zealand, we have this ability to shoot things here

and pretend they're in the States.

That's a pretty cool trick. And we do it a lot.

The Frighteners, which I really enjoyed, design-wise, it was really satisfying.

It was really great to watch the form moving under the wallpaper and stuff.

In Braindead, it was all in camera.

Heavenly creatures came along and they started to experiment

with what digital could do.

And then The Frighteners was the next step

where it was looking really seamless and impressive.

The Frighteners is finally getting, I think, the love it deserves.

It did okay when it was released,

but I think a lot of people didn't know what to take from it.

And then the studio didn't really know how to market it.

It was up against the juggernaut that was ID4, Independence Day,

which everyone saw.

And then it opened on the same day as the Summer Olympics.

And so it just didn't have a chance. It got clobbered right away.

You are such an asshole.

Yes, I am. I'm an asshole with an Uzi.

I don't doubt for a minute that he's still a dedicated fan to the genre.

Peter Jackson always, in his head, knew the tone of this film.

He knew how it was gonna succeed.

I saw it in the cinema at the premiere, actually, with Peter.

I just watched it as a fan. I really enjoyed it.

They don't call me the “hanging judge” for nothing.

- Tales from the Crypt presents Bordello of Blood.

Alan Katz and I finished with Demon Knight,

and right away Universal says, "What's the next one?"

And Alan and I had read a script called, "Fat Tuesday".

It wasn't terribly right on the money, but it was close.

And so we rewrote it and called it, "Dead Easy".

And Universal said, "Great, let's go make it."

We go to New Orleans, where it's gonna take place.

We're looking at locations and we get a call from Joel Silver.

They want to do another movie that Bob Zemeckis

and Bob Gale wrote that they bought.

It's called, "Bordello of Blood".

-Hi, boys. -Hey, girl.

How would you like to take the Skin Express to Tuna Town?

"You need to rewrite it in three weeks with Alan,

and you start shooting in three weeks in Vancouver."

And we're like, "Is this a joke, Joel?

Is this-- is this supposed to be funny?"

"Just get on the plane. Get out of there. Stop spending money."

And that's how Bordello of Blood

became the second Tales from the Crypt movie.

Universal paid Bob and Bob a half a million dollars for that script,

and it was a time when Steven Spielberg had just started DreamWorks.

Universal was afraid that Bob was gonna go over to DreamWorks

and they were gonna lose Bob Zemeckis off the lot.

This here is the most horrible woman the world has ever known.

And she's all mine.

Now, I guess it's my fault in a way that I had the opportunity to say no.

I mean, I could have just walked away from that script, but I didn't want to,

because I thought, I may never get the opportunity

to direct a Tales from the Crypt movie.

And so I said, "Okay, we'll do it."

We have a podcast called, "How Not to Make a Movie",

and it started, because Alan said, "We should tell the story."

And it was relatively, I think, good therapy.

I know a place you can get the best goddamn piece of ass.

Bordello of Blood had an interesting cast.

It had Phil Fondacaro.

The mother of all vampires!

My favorite.

And then Angie Everhart.

I just love a man who gives you head and lets you keep it.

Eric Eleniak.

A whore house?

A house inhabited by whores.

Chris Sarandon played the preacher.

He was a delight to work with as well.

Vile, pernicious, disgusting little harlot.

You're not so bad yourself.

We had Corey Feldman in the cast.

Hey baby, don't touch me unless you love me.

Come on, dude. Let's party.

- Corey just nailed it and he was just delightful.

One of the stars of Demon Knight, Bill Sadler.

And then she rips his face off and she eats him.

"We'll put him in the wraparound with the Crypt Keeper,

and that should be, I think, very, very exciting for the fans."

He'd give his left nut to work with me, I know.

I'd give my left nut for this lunch to be over.

And the lead, of course, was a stand-up comic, Dennis Miller.

Last call, let's get it.

Cha-ching.

Dennis Miller, he said, you know, "I have an HBO show on Friday nights,

so I'm not gonna be shooting Fridays.

And I only work an eight-hour day."

And I would go, "No.

And nobody in this business works an eight-hour day."

So that's how it started.

Then he didn't like the script, and he said,

"I can't remember these lines, so I'm just gonna make up lines.

And then you'll edit them." I go, "No."

And he wound up doing mainly that anyway.

Guess where you've just landed, lover?

Larry Flynt's id?

So it was a terrible punching bag kind of relationship with him.

-Uh-huh. -You comfy?

Mm-hmm.

Bordello of Blood, you know, it was the worst experience in my career.

It was just terrible.

We had problems in every respect.

We had problems with crewing. We had problems with casting.

Once we did get cast, we had problems with shooting.

It was just the worst experience I've ever had.

You wanna try to keep it down here, please?

I'm trying to rest.

"Dennis, you know, you've given me a rough time the entire shoot,

from the very first day that you got here.

It's been like pulling teeth with you every bloody day."

At the end of the movie, though, he came over and thanked me

and said, "You know, if my wife and I invite you up

to Santa Barbara for dinner, you and your wife will come up, right?"

And I said, "No, I don't think so."

That's how we ended it.

Can we talk about this?

As far as I'm concerned, you and I are through.

After we shot it and it came out,

I just wiped it off out of my mind, pretty much.

It was that painful an experience. It really was.

First I'll rip your dick off.

Then I'm gonna grind your balls into guacamole.

The 20th anniversary of the movie.

Here in Vancouver, there's a theater called, "The Rio",

that has these retrospectives and they wanted to do a screening.

It's sold out. I'm going, "Oh my God, these people are out of their minds."

It's amazing how many people have fond memories of that movie.

It's beyond understanding for me.

I feel like I'm in a bad Tales from the Crypt episode.

- The Island of Dr. Moreau.

For me, horror is some of the best surrealist films

being made, you know?

Looking at life and looking at existence from a whole another side.

Oh my God.

The first filmed version of Island of Doctor Moreau

by H. G. Wells was in the '30s

and H. G. Wells famously hated this version, because the studio

put in a character called, the "Panther Girl".

They wanted some love and some kind of erotic element to it.

What's that?

It's the house. The house of pain.

They tried to remake it again in the '70s with Burt Lancaster and Michael York.

I created you. I created you.

And then they thought they would make a better,

more definitive version of all of that

with The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando,

Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, and that was a complete mess.

Move back!

Brando had made me curious, but then I saw what he was doing.

Oh lord, lord, lord.

He's such a great actor, but he did some crazy things.

It is here on this very island that I, sir,

have found the very essence of the devil.

I am a filmmaker who worked with Val Kilmer.

We are like a little club, the directors of Val Kilmer movies,

because we all share our war stories with each other.

Not without this you don't.

This is the Val Kilmer that thought he was the reincarnation of Marlon Brando.

And he would tell me this.

This was the movie where he felt

Marlon Brando's soul entering him. True story.

Tell me what I need.

Shut up! Shut up! Where is it?

That is a remarkable story in and of itself.

And by the way, also ended up becoming a terrific documentary

about that subject matter.

This was just a complete and utter shit show.

This is the most outrageous spectacle I have ever witnessed.

I understand that I must be shocking to you.

- I was working with Richard Stanley.

I put out the Blu-ray of Hardware

and I plucked up the courage to ask him like

what happened on The Island of Dr. Moreau and he just started talking like

he took a big breath and he just talked for hours

about what went wrong on The Island of Dr. Moreau.

It's amazing they got a film out of it.

When you've got two leads who are just not only

non-cooperative with the production,

but going out of their way to sabotage the production,

that is a very difficult thing to manage as a director

and the producers were halfway across the world,

so these stories were coming in from Cairns in Australia

that things were not going well.

Oh, what a surprise.

I didn't mean to startle you.

They'd actually set the set an hour away from where home base was,

so they lose two hours of the day just getting to and from the set.

There was a lot of drugs on the set that the extras,

the beast people were, 'cause they had nothing else to do.

They were just sitting around in the jungle.

They were in full makeup.

So they were just partying the whole time.

-I had a little methamphetamine, some morphine, some shrooms,

and some other shit.

Keeps you coming back for more.

The problem was that Richard and Hollywood weren't necessarily the best bedfellows

and so you lose a day, you lose millions of dollars.

Richard's defense is that there were storms

on the island and all kinds of things that just messed up the shooting.

But New Line just saw the dailies that were coming in

and they didn't see Val Kilmer in the dailies at all

and so they fired Richard and they replaced him

with John Frankenheimer.

Not only did he get fired, but he stayed on the location

and got himself made up as one of the half-human

half-animal characters and observed things like

in this very bizarre dangerous and kind of odd way.

Some say to sabotage it.

Some say just to be there to watch it go down in flames.

It is a movie where the madness infested

the production and the cast

and you actually watch it happen on film.

Who's the animal?

Be calm, calm.

We've got to think and reason this through together.

Fairuza Balk and all.

No one is immune from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

I want to be like you.

I mean, how would you look if you were like me?

You see? I've made you smile.

They knew that Brando was already being difficult,

so they decided they needed kind

of a military drill sergeant type of director.

John Frankenheimer fit the bill.

To walk on all fours,

that is the law.

I actually really love this movie, 'cause it is just so,

"What the fuck?"

Good doggy.

It's a movie about a crazy doctor creating craziness

and it itself is a crazy thing.

Look at these people! Look at him!

So here's a movie that was a box office disaster, right?

That disaster has somehow found its way into the zeitgeist

in such a strong way that other filmmakers were inspired

to make movies about what these guys had made.

What the hell are you supposed to be anyway?

It doesn't look like anything!

I would really like to have seen what Richard

would have done with it and I think it,

honestly, if it had gone ahead with Jürgen Prochnow as Moreau,

it would have been a $5 million movie and it probably would have got made.

Would it have been a masterpiece? Who knows?

But it certainly wouldn't have been the mess that it ended up being.

- Sometimes They Come Back… Again.

I found the idea of Sometimes They Come Back… Again

interesting, because of the demonic forces involved.

Close your eyes.

Okay. Surprise!

I had been a big fan of The Exorcist, saw it a number of times.

I watched it one Christmas with the family,

because I thought it was a very faith-affirming film.

Good versus evil. The exorcism. Conquering the devil.

Sometimes They Come Back… Again,

I thought, "Alright, this sounds like fun.

A bit crazy."

I'm your childhood friend, Johnny!

From the time I was hired to the time I wound up on set

was a very short amount of time.

So basically, it was dealing with the script itself.

Did not delve into the hundreds of pages of Stephen King,

nor did I see the first one.

It's like, "Alright, put your boots on,

pull up your trousers, and appear on the set."

I thought it was a fascinating cast.

Alexis Arquette? I didn't know what hit me.

I thought he was one of the strangest human beings

I had ever met in my life.

His looks, his attitude, fascinating. And well cast.

Looks great on you.

Just consider it an early birthday present.

The active threat that he was.

I thought, "He's so strange, what father would let him

into his house in the first place?"

You're disgusting.

That's true.

But no one does a tongue tango like I do, sweetheart.

I loved working with Hilary Swank before she became the Hilary Swank.

What was that all about?

I don't like him.

I noticed that. What's the deal?

He reminds me of someone I used to know.

A loving daughter who's put in life-threatening circumstances,

up for anything, thrilled to be working as a young actress,

and just a delightful human being.

That was my grandmother's pet,

and somebody stabbed it to death with a fire poker.

If you could please find out who did it, we'd all feel a lot safer, okay?

Sometimes They Come Back… Again

had a great number of uncomfortable situations.

Physically and mentally,

physically cutting off parts of one's own finger.

Fire, blood, electrocution, et cetera, et cetera.

A father's worst nightmare?

Seeing his daughter in a sexual situation with a demon?

Don't date that particular boy.

He's bleeding like a stuck pig in summertime.

There's no stopping this heavy flow.

- Character of the father had so much to confront.

He was literally saving his daughter's life

and his own life, his own sanity.

Uh-uh. Guns are not allowed.

What I find most interesting about dealing with the demonic

rather than a monster is a monster is something outside ourselves,

whereas the demonic is very much a part of human nature.

Looks to me like a bad hair day.

It's a very human condition having the past revisit you

in an uncomfortable way.

Catch you later.

- The Dentist.

I did L.A. Law, Major League,

and then you're trying to find what's the next thing.

And I've always enjoyed jumping around a bit.

When I got the chance to jump into the horror, it felt good.

- Oh, God.

People are generally petrified of the dentist.

You're just vulnerable. You're leaning back.

You're opening your mouth, which is like, can you make yourself any more vulnerable?

But the guy's got sharp objects and sounds.

You've got pain that you're already trying to deal with.

It's the culmination of the most bizarre experiences.

What did you do? He's bleeding!

The Dentist was really interesting,

because you have this guy who just wants cleanliness.

He wants beauty.

He wants everything beauti-- "I can make you beautiful."

- I am an instrument of perfection and hygiene.

The enemy of decay and corruption.

And catches his wife doing it with an oily, greasy pool man

on their anniversary.

Just enough for him to flip the switch and go off the deep end, as he does.

Dr. Feinstone! I am a dentist!

And this is my wife! You filthy piece of shit!

You don't want to be his patient that day.

Open wide.

The first draft of the script was by Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli.

Charles Finch, he added a bunch of elements.

I think Stuart said the scariest words

in the English language is, "The dentist will see you now."

Sarah, you're up next.

With The Dentist, once again, it's no money.

But what I did is I really tried to design it,

'cause it was a very enclosed thing.

It was just in a dental office.

There's no dark stuff. It's just bright lights.

And so that was kind of a challenge to me.

Power. 'Cause as much as it pains you, no pun intended,

to sit back with your mouth open and feel vulnerable,

to have those sharp objects and you're the one I'm looking at.

That's some power right there.

Needles really freak me out.

Have you ever had nitrous oxide?

It's very strange that these obje--

and they're obviously not as sharp as they would be

in the dentist's office, but you're in some-- another actor's mouth

and internally, you're freaking out.

You're angry.

Just like Matt.

I just basically copied some Hitchcock scenes

like the Dial M for Murder.

I wanted to play up the horror.

And so we built a huge mouth and so we had a giant needle

and we had big teeth,

but we could only afford one half of the mouth.

We couldn't afford to build a whole mouth

and then flip the film to show the other side.

Get it out of the way, goddammit!

The beauty of the opera and him on a stage.

That's where you really lean on a director to say, "Is it too far?"

And I think Brian just was like, "Bring it.

Just keep bringing it, man."

It was the most intense shoot I've ever been on.

The days were just brutal. Brutal.

I mean the place you just had to get to every day consistently

for I think what, three weeks or something.

It took me a little while to dump him.

I like how stylish the movie is.

I thought that movie was gonna be a disaster.

And I was really surprised when it worked.

I loved how the opening with Corbin in the padded cell

and how he's telling the story.

What I liked about that was that it just made it an unreliable narrator.

You don't know what happened, because this guy's crazy.

Leeches. Blood-sucking leeches!

My personal dentist at the time, I'd done Dentist 1,

movie was out, and he said, "I saw that Dentist movie."

I went, "Oh, okay."

He said, "Yeah, it was great." He said, "But I've got to ask you a favor.

Please don't do any more of these movies." I'm like…

And my mouth is wide open.

"What are you talking about? Ah." I thought he was joking.

"We spend millions, and millions, and millions

of dollars to uh-- and convince people that dentistry is safe and it's harmless.

And you come along and do these movies and destroy all of it."

I sort of promised him. I said, "Yeah, no more."

I said, "That was-- it was too hard to do."

Much worse than I thought, Mark.

The decay is out of control.

Then we went and made Dentist 2.

You'll never take it off.

- Stephen King's Thinner.

Adapting a novel is a very daunting task,

no matter what format you're adapting it for.

When you're adapting an author like Stephen King,

who writes such rich and dense worlds, adapting him

for a feature film is fraught with challenges.

And that's why you have this spectrum of quality

when it comes to Stephen King adaptations.

It's not easy to do.

And sometimes even the best intentions aren't enough

to contort that material in enough of a way to get it

to fit onto that screen.

-You weigh yourself? -297.

Billy, you were 297 last week.

Well, it takes some time for these diets to work.

A great film doesn't get a lot of lip service is Thinner,

Stephen King's story, directed by Tom Holland. Fantastic.

-To winning! -To winning!

May it ever be so sweet.

In which a very boorish, very rotund guy runs afoul

of some gypsies…

who are able to wield a curse against him.

The curse being that he loses weight.

283. Somebody call Richard Simmons.

All be so cursed, right?

However, this curse doesn't stop.

His weight loss continues until he is a wreck of a human being.

It's not anorexia. I don't have a tapeworm.

I've been eating like mad for over six weeks

and I'm still losing weight.

My buddy Robert Burke is in it.

I want to find the old guy.

Find him and tell him we don't deserve this.

I want you to kill that old bastard and you say it's from me.

Michael Constantine from Room 222 is in it.

I make sure something happen to them.

That justice, white man, gypsy justice.

Michael Constantine giving Robert Burke

the back of his hand and cursing him by saying…

Thinner.

…is pretty scary.

And it's a really, really enjoyable film.

Excellent special effects, great makeup and really effective performances.

-This is getting out of hand. -This has been out of hand.

And I'm just the guy to put it back in hand.

- It is hard to watch in the best sense.

It's a very effective movie.

Strawberry pie, mm.

For someone growing up in the '90s and for a Stephen King fan,

these things had a profound impact on me.

Not only as a fan, but as someone who would

in another decade be making my own adaptations.

I can see how all of these examples in this era

made me the filmmaker that I am today.

I'm being erased.

- Necronomicon: The Book of the Dead.

The '90s were a good time for me because I was able

to be generally working on one movie after another.

Mr. Lovecraft. Always a treat.

And even stuff that I had originated like the Necronomicon

which was just kind of an experiment in financing.

Getting the financing from Europe and from Asia.

Getting a director from each one and doing Lovecraft movie here.

I take great pride in presenting fictional possibilities

to enlighten the darkest depths of experience.

Necronomicon was an anthology and that's not generally a good thing.

It wasn't very successful. I had great hopes for that movie.

You are not alone.

Necronomicon was Christophe Gans' first movie.

He did the opening segment and he's a French critic of movies

and just has all these references.

And I think the episode that I did is very off-putting.

They took my mind.

They need us to breed.

But I really like it.

I think there's some really good stuff in it.

Seems inhumane but we needed it

for our self-preservation and it's all we can do.

I was able to do the body melt deterioration

just the way I wanted it.

I love that kind of stuff and I think it's a really good one.

It was fun to make Jeffrey Combs look like H. P. Lovecraft

and all the goofy stuff in it.

The Omniati monks and the great library which was actually a mausoleum in Compton.

You could smell corpses in there when we were shooting.

It was a little bit, you know, disgusting.

It's coming!

Most filmmakers are fans of anthologies, but the audience isn't.

They don't like the stop and start.

But we got to do a lot of really cool stuff.

I like that movie.

Consider your privileges revoked, Mr. Lovecraft.

Killer Tongue, one of the stranger movies I've been involved in.

I got the chance to work with Chris Figg again

who had produced the first two Hellraiser movies and Nightbreed.

He contacted me with a script, called, "La Lengua Asesina",

Killer Tongue.

Maddest thing I've ever read.

In Killer Tongue I play a convict called, "Wiggy".

Robert Englund plays the chief screw.

We're on a kind of chain gang.

The fuck are you looking at, huh?

You wipe that smile off your face!

A meteor is falling through space, cut back to Melinda Clarke as Candy,

the pregnant nun, and her poodles.

The fragment of comet lands in each bowl of soup.

And when the poodles drink the soup, they get transformed into drag queens.

It's us. You're bitches. Remember? Little fluffy things?

The effect that the meteor tainted soup had on Candy,

Melinda Clarke's character, was an alien in her mouth.

She is now possessed of a 6-foot-long tongue

which has a mind of its own and a very, very bad attitude

to almost everything and everyone around her.

And she can't quite control it.

-Goddamn, I'm sexy. -Get out of my body.

What do you want me to do, grow legs and rent an apartment?

When I mention Killer Tongue to people,

I often hasten to point out that it's not a porn movie.

Meanwhile, the rest of the comet lands in the desert.

When you get very close to the comet, it sends you

into throes of sexual ecstasy.

Unless you actually make the mistake, as the convict

sitting next to me did, of touching it, in which case you explode.

All out of the brilliant and remarkable mind

of Alberto Sciamma, a Spanish filmmaker who wrote and directed it.

We were actually filming on the spaghetti western set.

The towns that were built for fistful of dollars

and so forth, still standing, which was kind of exciting.

This was a point at which I still had hair.

But I'd reached that point where the egg in the nest

was very apparent in the chain gang quarters.

I had a little glass case with all my wigs in.

This was Alberto's idea. It was brilliant.

So you start with a very small hair piece

and then it grows as the ball spot gets bigger.

Anybody else wanna play ball?

For me it sits there in the middle of the '90s

as a point at which mainstream horror meets

the explosion of Spanish cinema.

The spirit of Almodóvar and all of that.

It is quite the maddest thing I've ever seen.

And everybody should rush to see it.

Not scared, are ya?

- Scream.

Scream really had everything going against it

when it came to Hollywood.

Hollywood thought that audiences were tired of the teen-slasher movie.

But combined with a script by Kevin Williamson

that was so deliciously meta and managed to adhere

to some of those slasher tropes while also turning them

on their head, it changed the game forever.

-I'm getting ready to watch a video. -Really? What?

Oh, just some scary movie.

-You like scary movies? -Uh-huh.

They were so lucky that Wes, who wanted to reinvent himself again,

said yes to directing that movie.

When we first read it, we didn't quite get it.

At first we were like, "Why is Wes doing this?"

Not quite getting the whole meta thing and how that was gonna play out.

-What's your favorite scary movie? -Halloween.

You know, the one with the guy in the white mask

who walks around and stalks babysitters?

Wes is the master. Kevin is the new phenomenon.

So he has this beautiful, amazing ingredients

and Wes is like, "I'm gonna show you how to cook it."

Kevin Williamson needed Wes to bring this incredible,

beautiful source material to life.

That original script was so true.

So perfectly on point.

It was like whispers from God.

Everything works. Makes sense.

Completely delineated each character and spoke

to people as if they were feeling it.

- You never told me your name.

Why do you want to know my name?

- 'Cause I want to know who I'm looking at.

The whole Drew Barrymore prologue.

The idea of having a celebrity of her stature open the movie like that.

And that was a kind of repurposing

of Alfred Hitchcock's casting of Janet Leigh in Psycho.

I think was culturally incredibly impactful.

-Listen, asshole! -No, you listen, you little bitch!

You hang up on me again, I'll gut you like a fish. Understand?

Wes he had just put together the first Drew stuff

and he was dead tired.

And it was literally shipped to Cannes.

He's like, "This is gonna make or break our production,

because they don't understand the movie."

Because they didn't know what they had.

The essence of who they cast, there's a wink of like,

"This is just a little off."

And that's what makes it different.

Casey Becker and Steve Orth were killed last night.

What? No way!

And we're not just talking killed.

We're talking splatter-movie killed.

The reporter which is Courteney. The ingénue which is Neve.

The sexy, mysterious, could be killer, which is Skeet.

His wild best friend, which is Matt.

Dewey, who's our millennial version of Barney Fife.

David was just playing him and he's an eccentric wonderful person.

You look awfully young to be a police officer.

I'm 25 years old.

'Cause of my boyish good looks, muscle mass has increased

my acceptance as a serious police officer.

My character Randy,

just him saying the rules of what was going on.

There are certain rules that one must abide by

in order to successfully survive a horror movie.

Number one, you can never have sex.

He took these things that were in movies

and he made them galvanized as the Commandments.

Number two, you can never drink or do drugs.

And number three, never say,

"I'll be right back." 'Cause you won't be back.

Everyone was super inclusive. Wes would arrange a dinner.

Courteney would arrange wine.

Neve would have like little get-togethers after long days of shoot in her room.

Dave would have parties.

Matt and Skeet would set up like, we would play sports. I mean, it was amazing.

- How come Jamie Lee Curtis is in all of these movies?

She's the scream queen.

With a set of lungs like that she should be.

Wes wasn't just shooting it, he knew exactly the edits.

He would say, "I'm gonna edit this here. I've got the music's thing there.

Okay. I've got the fear part here."

He would say this stuff and it was a puzzle to him.

-Damn little shits. -What'd you call me?

I had no preconceptions of horror movies.

In fact, Wes taught me a lot about how to approach scenes.

About how to maybe go quiet before something big is gonna happen.

It puts the audience more on edge.

He would encourage me to explore. That's really what he did.

He encouraged the creative aspect.

The Red Right Hand song, the Nick Cave song

was really formative for Wes Craven in the movie.

♪ Designed and directed by his red right hand ♪

That inspired me to also work outside just an orchestral framework.

Sidney's theme, I felt an affinity with the Sidney character.

I think Wes really appreciated that I was trying to go

for this more human approach

rather than just a kind of ticking-clock type of score.

One of the most, if not the most iconic kill is Rose.

Rose through the doggy door.

Commenting on it without commenting on it.

No, please don't kill me, Mr. Ghostface. I want to be in the sequel.

And dying in a unique way, that to me was a real tone setter.

Watching a movie about horror movies

and watching people get killed in a horror movie

and you're watching these people watch that happen.

It is almost like you're part of that group

in the living room with us.

That was just never done before.

-Ooh, ooh! -Yes, yes!

Skeet's behind me and I'm watching

Jamie Lee Curtis and I'm going, "Jamie, look behind you."

Jamie, look behind you. Look behind you.

So the fact that my name just happens to be Jamie, the actor.

I-- when I did that, I'll never forget it.

And Wes goes, he's like, "Easter egg."

He had no known that the gods, the universe,

the powers had aligned.

Behind you.

And that's the only time in the whole franchise

that Skeet put the costume on to kill someone.

The rest of the time, it's stunt guys.

The first time I'd heard that it was screening.

I want to say it was in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie, New York.

So they were playing for real people.

And apparently Wes said, we had an amazing screening.

Some people screamed. Some people laughed.

But they were completely engulfed in the movie.

And I said, "Holy shit. People are liking this."

We opened to 6 million.

Then the next week, we kept going up.

It's just the superest, rarest thing.

The trajectory is always down. And it started going nuts.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

What makes Scream, not just a horror movie.

Forget it. It's not just a movie.

It's a pop culture phenomenon that is only getting bigger by the day.

I knew it would leave a mark. I knew it would be interesting.

But I didn't-- I could not predict the veracity of what it is.

I mean, Ghostface is almost a spiritual being at this point.

And it's incredible.

And it's obviously super humbling to be a part of something like that.

I'll be right back!

Oh!

SCORE VS. SOUNDTRACK: THE MUSIC OF '90S HORROR

Soundtracks, of course, are so important to the films themselves.

But the '90s was perhaps the peak of the integration

with a pop culture soundtrack.

Bands that you know with the film.

The '80s into the '90s was a great time for music and movies.

And it was another way of promoting your film.

That's more like it.

♪ Well, sweet a little sista's high in hell cheatin' on a halo ♪

This was a period where the soundtrack album became massive.

With Pulp Fiction,

Tarantino had a huge influence on a lot of us.

And he had all these classic needle drops.

Uma Thurman dancing to Urge Overkill.

Playing a Neil Diamond riff in a Quentin Tarantino movie,

merging the old and the new together

in a way you didn't know you always wanted.

♪ You'll be a woman soon ♪

Well, the studios realized quickly after that

that this was a major marketing possibility.

Whether or not it was on MTV or radio.

♪ Deepest, bluest, my hat is like a shark's fin ♪

♪ Deepest, bluest, my hat is like a shark's fin ♪

The studios really wanted to take advantage

of popular music or a certain kind of music

on a soundtrack with a classic score and it worked.

We got a lot of great soundtracks from the '90s.

♪ She's a lot like you, the dangerous type ♪

The Craft, The Crow, Blade, like those are soundtracks

that I still listen to to this day.

♪ Dream the crow black dream ♪

Jawbreaker had Imperial Teen in it and it was spot on.

You cannot think of Jawbreaker without hearing that song in your head.

♪ She said yoo-hoo ♪

♪ Ah yoo-hoo, ah yoo-hoo ♪

I remember a lot of like '90s grunge music being in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

- Stop screaming and listen to I Know What You Did Last Summer,

the album, out now on Columbia CDs and cassettes.

A lot of the soundtracks of the era actually had a cover

or two of an older song as its big hook.

But then it was also an opportunity for these record labels to kind of sneak

lesser-known bands in on it.

As a result you had a readymade mixtape.

All of our soundtracks were loaded with new bands

and loaded with alternative bands, 'cause alternative was the thing.

It was about selling the movie, but it was also about

selling the soundtrack to the point where we actually

talk about the band Garbage in the movie.

-You like Garbage? -Oh yeah, Shirley Manson, she rocks.

Strangeland, my son Jesse who was 15 at the time

he was very involved in choosing the music for the movie,

'cause he was much more familiar with the newer bands.

A band like System of a Down, they were unknown.

The soundtrack was bigger at the time than the movie was.

It was a hell of a soundtrack.

It's time to expand your spiritual horizons.

My first movie, Shopping, was partly financed,

because we actually put together the soundtrack album

before we even put together the movie.

And we brought on bands like Jesus Jones, EMF, Orbital.

I loved Orbital.

They were part of this kind of young techno wave

that were coming out of Europe that the studio didn't quite get.

When I'd done Mortal Kombat, which was the movie I did before

Event Horizon, you know, I put an entire kind

of house techno soundtrack on that movie.

♪ Mortal Kombat ♪

Studio freaked out. They didn't like it at all.

So I had to really fight for that.

Ultimately, they were glad that we did go that direction,

because the soundtrack album went platinum.

I was pushing in that direction for Event Horizon.

The last track in the movie is The Prodigy.

They said, "No, you can't end the movie like that."

And then the track got released in America, became huge.

And then the studio were like, "Oh yeah, we like it.

We like that idea."

And of course, at that point, once the track had become huge,

it cost five times as much as we could have bought it

for a couple of weeks beforehand.

That was another thing that killed me.

Like the budgets for, you know, just one song being more

than the whole scoring budget.

♪ We don't need no education ♪

Music supervisors hired usually by the studio or someone.

Because to get songs in a movie, it's a lot of work.

The artists have to approach the label.

Sometimes they want to use, not the song in complete,

but they want to use parts.

Can they break it up? Can they get stems from it?

Meaning, can they use parts of the song without the vocal?

Or can they remix it?

Figuring out a license for that. Figuring out the budgets.

"How much can we spend on this?"

You know, it's not just straightforward

as, "Hey, can we use your song in the movie?"

Now, get focused! Or get the fuck off my team!

There are ways songs can do things that score can't.

Classical and rock, if you pick the right pieces,

can really work together really well.

- Think of The Crow original soundtrack with bands like Pantera and Filter.

And it was the kind of music I understood.

I could come in and say, "Look, I can write a score

where the intros and outros are the songs.

I can make it sound like it's all meant to be there."

The score album is all the other elements that aren't songs.

The soundtrack album of The Crow, which I also had a song at the end of,

sold 3 million records at some point.

And the score album had sold 1 million records, which was a shock.

And my lawyer said to me, "Well, obviously,

all those 1 million people bought yours by mistake.

They were looking for the other one."

"Fuck you."

It could be true, but I'm never going to admit it.

It was very hard to find these horror scores.

And so you'd have to really know where to look.

A score for something like Scream, you could find the soundtrack everywhere,

but you can't find that Marco Beltrami score anywhere.

Varèse Sarabande was always the sort of go-to label

if you wanted the-- particularly obscure films.

A lot of stuff sounds the same.

Like there was a lot of John Williams wannabe type of music.

Wes Craven, he helped me a lot with how I score.

The Scream movies were bigger, bombastic type of scores,

so it had to be a ride.

Wasn't just like one particular style, it was all over the map.

Wes was really tapped into the teen zeitgeist.

He would encourage me to explore.

Film is telling a story.

It is trying to propound certain emotions or surprise.

Especially in horror movies, a lot of red herrings.

I look for that core of humanity,

or who's going through the drama, who's trying

to find redemption or overcome whatever it is.

Legal troubles over copyright infringements

aren't slowing down Napster.

The song swapping company is now in the top 50 list

of most visited sites on the web.

Going into the 2000s when the file sharing thing

became a legal issue,

the tendency to use those soundtracks started to tail off.

The long-term outcome of that whole process has been

what they call, "the democratization

of music production", which is a fabulous thing

as far as creativity goes,

but it's the antithesis of fabulous, because all the--

the platforms just hoover up all the money.

I would hate to be starting out as an artist now.

I mean, the idea of even making a penny, it is very, very difficult.

Jesus, the music scene's gone to hell since I've been dead.

1997

Peter Hyams directed The Relic, which is about this ancient monster

that is terrorizing the Field Museum in Chicago.

Relic was based on a novel from 1995.

It's up to a detective and a biologist

to track down this creature and contain it as best they can.

The detective is played by Tom Sizemore,

and the biologist is played by Penelope Ann Miller,

and they do a great job.

-Where is this head? -It's over there by the sink.

Lieutenant D'Agosta.

-Oh my God! Oh! Oh! -Get her out of here!

I hadn't done anything like it,

so I-- I just was fascinated with the idea of it.

Oh my God. The Kothoga.

- Gale Anne Hurd, tremendously bright woman.

It was originally written for the Museum of Natural History.

A lot of pre-production had already been set,

then the museum said no. And it really broke my heart.

The museum in Chicago and-- and the fact that Chicago

is such a photogenic city.

I rationalized my way into it.

However, I wish I had shot it in New York.

Whatever this thing was, it ate those leaves

and is rapidly evolving into something reptilian.

The creature designed by Stan Winston is a marvel

of practical effects.

The design of that creature was pretty important.

I had worked with Stan, 'cause I had produced a film

called The Monster Squad.

I loved working with Stan Winston.

Brilliantly talented and has a bunch of uber talents around him.

We just went through sketch after sketch, different ideas.

It is a hybrid creature and I think one of the things

that Relic does really, really well is the conception

of that creature. It looks great.

It's the perfect creature to wreak havoc on a bunch

of oblivious party-goers at the museum.

- If you're doing a chase to kind of grab people

and have them nervous, their Adam's apple

bobbing up and down, you set the chase in a confined space.

The more frightening it is, the more nerve-wracking it is.

My favorite moment in that film is after people have been killed

and the museum has gone on lockdown.

It's like the guy is like bitching and moaning about

how he's not gonna get blamed for this.

-I'm not taking the fall-- -Dad.

For this fiasco, I can tell you that.

And then out of nowhere the Kothoga comes down,

grabs him, and like rips his head off.

When I get my hands on him…

And that jump scare, muah, I love it.

It's my favorite moment in the film.

We know this thing is part reptilian, probably ectothermic.

Maybe if we can change his temperature by 40 degrees,

we can freeze this son of bitch.

Opening day in LA, it was playing at the National Theatre.

It was pretty empty. I went, "Well, it failed."

I was inconsolable.

Then at 11:30 at that night, the phone rang

and it was Sherry Lansing and she said, "How does it feel

to have the number one picture in America?"

I don't want a way out. We've got to stop it!

I'll stay with you!

-Get inside! Get inside! -This is crazy!

I think people want to have an emotional ride in a movie

and that's why those kinds of movies do well.

I know who you are.

From the point where I saw Eraserhead for the first time

I watched every David Lynch film instantly when it came out.

Oh, mommy! Mommy!

They were totally fucked up, you would say, you know?

And that's amazing.

You can not underestimate someone like David Lynch,

because that's someone who really has a vision.

- Here I am.

I love that David Lynch has never felt the need

to confine himself to the boxes of simplifying any of his stories.

And your name. What the fuck is your name?

Something about Lost Highway and realizing that what you see

is never what it is and things are never as they appear.

Sure, that's an old trope, but David Lynch takes it to another level.

I like to remember things my own way.

-What do you mean by that?

-How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.

The thing about horror that makes horror work so well

is when you can't explain what's happening.

The unexplainable to me is the scariest thing in the world.

It's sort of about somebody who dissociates so much

they don't even really know who they are anymore.

Whether they killed somebody or whether they didn't kill them.

-Renee! -Sit down, killer!

Lynch himself became very interested if not obsessed

with the idea of somebody divorcing themselves

from the reality of an act they very likely committed.

He was thinking of O.J. Simpson.

This really was a fixation for Lynch during the development of the film.

The jury having found you guilty of murder in the first degree,

it is my order that you be put to death in the electric chair.

David Lynch is sitting home watching the O.J. trial

and watching a person who he believes to be guilty

and is recognizing that that person doesn't believe they're guilty.

That the cognitive dissonance has happened

to such a degree that O.J. believes he's innocent

and O.J.'s making promises to find the real killers

and that sort of schism fed directly

into Bill Pullman's character in Lost Highway.

Dick Laurent is dead, isn't he?

I didn't think you knew Dick.

-How do you know he's dead? -I don't.

That O.J. thing, it was everywhere anyway.

But if you were in Los Angeles, it was inescapable.

I've never talked about this on any interview before.

When we shot Tales from the Hood, one of O.J.'s daughters, Arnelle Simpson,

was our stunt double for Paula Jai Parker.

Every day, every now and then, we would have to stop,

'cause of the helicopters going over for the trial of a man accused

of being a batterer and a-- a murderer

while we're shooting David Alan Grier beating Arnelle,

'cause she's the stunt double.

It was bizarro.

She was just like the sweetest person

and she would hang out even when she wasn't shooting.

I think because it was one of the few places

you could escape that trial.

Where the fuck are we going, Alice?

We have to go to the desert, baby.

You can't get away from the fact that the white Bronco

is on a road and it's a lonely road,

and there's nobody around except that murderer

and his buddy in the car.

And then next thing you know you've got Lost Highway.

I'm willing to drive down the Lost Highway with uh, Dave Lynch.

I love Lost Highway.

It's a film that I look at over and over, and over again.

It's nightmarish.

- I love and I'm totally made uncomfortable

by the spooky feelings that a David Lynch moment

can create in me.

Like a man walking up to me and handing me his phone and saying…

I'm there right now.

What do you mean you're where?

At your house.

I mean, who thinks of that stuff?

Robert Blake gives kind of a beautiful strange,

scary nightmarish performance and Bill Pullman,

he's just absolutely, I would say, terrified

at the exchange that he and Robert Blake have.

This scene really stands out as an example of Lynch's power

to really unnerve its viewer.

Ironically, the great actor Robert Blake,

who we know from In Cold Blood, Electra Glide in Blue, Baretta,

was himself years later involved in another high-profile murder

of his uh, I guess baby mama. Kind of weird. Lynchian.

- What is it Al? What do you think?

I think there's no such thing as a bad coincidence.

- Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive.

Truly an incredible body of work.

And there's no other director who is like David Lynch.

That's for sure.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Premutos: The Fallen Angel.

Directed by Olaf Ittenbach.

It is a German movie.

All I can say it's layers of gore on gore, on gore.

Practical effect gore.

The '90s gave us all these low-budget German filmmakers

that were very much in this like exploitation gore space.

It is about a book that is found that releases a curse

that summons the dead.

But that's not why you watch it.

This is a showcase of every practical effect

that you can do in your home.

It literally stains the walls.

It stains the carpets.

It is highly offensive but really, really fun.

Premutos does go back and forth between different time periods

which is very ambitious for a no-budget film

done in someone's backyard.

The other kind of aspect of-- that I love about it

is that it makes use of snow.

It's this white surface and you can just put a lot of gore on it.

There's intestines. There's blood. There's guts.

There's knife through a head.

There's sword play.

And it's this great example of like you're not having

to clean up, because it's outside and it's water.

Things explode. Things gush.

Also an incredible amount of dick trauma in this movie.

Every dick gets kicked.

It gets surgically altered by a doctor.

There's so much dick trauma in this movie and I am so here for it.

This is a movie that celebrates just the gross and the squish.

It's a love letter to practical effects.

The Wax Mask is another example of late Italian horror

which I think is very worthy of watching.

It is basically a remake of House of Wax

which was a remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum,

the Gaston Leroux story.

It takes place in Paris where there's a guy

who runs a wax museum and it's not going to plan.

He gets disfigured and he goes on a murder spree

trying to find people to put in his wax works.

It stars Robert Hossein who was a filmmaker, a director

in his own right, and also a very prolific actor.

He actually directed plays at the Grand-Guignol Theatre in Paris.

So he really is the right guy for this role.

- And what exactly are you researching?

Perfection. I'm using techniques…

new to the artistic world.

Sergio Stivaletti, while he's no as Michele Soavi,

he still was also was on his way to being you know, a decent director.

But unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the industry.

I'm sure I recognize her.

Different hair coloring, but it's her.

What a strange coincidence.

Wax Mask started life as a Lucio Fulci film

with Dario Argento producing,

which was just a very tantalizing prospect for any horror fan of the era

that Lucio was finally going to have a budget.

Unfortunately, Fulci died.

So the project just was stuck in limbo.

And they had to find a replacement director,

'cause they'd already done the pre-production

with Stivaletti doing the effects.

It has a really pretty good steampunk look about it,

and a lot of good production value.

So it has all the elements to make something,

but you can't help but wonder what it would have been

had it been a Fulci movie.

- Stephen King's The Shining.

Outside of It and The Stand, which are kind of the juggernauts

of the King television miniseries explosion of the '90s,

you've got a bunch of others that are events of different degrees.

You've got The Tommyknockers, and The Langoliers,

and The Golden Years, and Storm of the Century.

Stephen King himself would take advantage

of the novel on television approach to correct in his mind

one of the biggest failures of adaptation in his career.

Here's Johnny!

There's no mystery about Stephen King's opinion

of Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining.

It was well known even at the time that he did not appreciate it.

And-- and I think it's because the book was so personal to King

and so autobiographical.

He wrote a draft or two for the Kubrick film

that Kubrick just chucked aside.

After the success of The Stand, ABC went to King and said,

"What would you like to do next?"

And he said, "You know, I'd really like to do

The Shining the way it was intended.

Hello Danny, I've been waiting for you.

When he wrote the book, he was a wet alcoholic.

When he wrote the miniseries, he was a dry alcoholic.

He hadn't drunk for years and he could see it

with even more clarity and from a different perspective.

It became really evident to me when I called Gary Sinise

before we started the casting process and Gary said to me,

"You know, I'd really be hesitant about stepping into the shoes of Jack Nicholson.

Suddenly, it came crashing down on me like a load of bricks

that this is not going to be an easy task.

Boo.

We didn't cast Steven Weber until three days

before shooting was to begin.

King said, "If we don't do it today,

I'm pulling the plug. That's it."

Fe-fi-fo-fum.

Uh, the giant has come to eat you up in your bed.

It was a great role and I had no kind of fears

that it would be in the shadow of Jack Nicholson

or that this whole project would be in the shadows

of the Kubrick film.

Stephen King and director Mick Garris

liked me enough to then pair me in a reading

with Rebecca De Mornay and we clicked

and had a chemistry that they seemed to like.

And I think what they seemed to like was that I had a degree

of normalcy about me.

That I didn't go in uh, grinning and arching my eyebrows

and being Jack, which had become so iconic.

Warner Brothers was sending us to Canada.

Everything was a financial decision.

And I said, I'm begging you, let us stop in Estes Park, Colorado

and go to the Stanley Hotel.

Stephen King was in the bar, closing night of the season,

looking into the mirrored wall and he saw the whole story

laid out in front of him there.

And so we shot where it takes place.

Aren't you the caretaker here, Wes?

Oh, I don't believe so, sir.

You've always been the caretaker.

It was a gigantic production which extended over months

and Stephen King was very available.

He was around all the time.

He actually did a cameo in a really fantastic scene

where he was the conductor of a ghost orchestra.

Wanna go upstairs? See the sights?

I was reading the book while we were shooting

and there was this little kind of couplet that I found.

"Wow, that's beautiful. It's poetic.

Uh, what does it mean?

Stephen King's downstairs. I'm going to ask him."

People with the shining see things like pictures in a book.

And sometimes book pictures can be scary.

So much of what happens to Jack Torrance

in terms of his being possessed by these evil spirits

is in fact, a very concise way of describing what happens to the addict.

The irresistible pull towards self-destruction, self-loathing.

Taking his family, who he loves so deeply, down with him.

There are ghosts here. You know there are.

And other things, too.

Courtland Mead was a joy. He was very precocious.

He took direction beautifully.

A perfect little Danny Torrance.

And working with Rebecca De Mornay was fantastic.

I think she had a really good grasp of Wendy Torrance.

And what she brought to it was a fuller humanity to this role.

-Who did this to you, huh? -Don't you touch him!

You so much as lay a finger on him again,

I will wait till you're asleep and I will kill you.

The monster aspect of things.

I loved wearing that makeup in certain sequences.

There you are, doc, been looking for ya.

I loved chasing Danny down this corridor, swinging a mallet.

Danny!

Weber, I think, deserves so many kudos playing the shit

out of the part and doing an amazing job.

There was so much more complexity, and humanity,

and pain that he brought to it.

Just one is no longer my vocabulary.

Got a lot of lost time to make up for and uh, it's been a dry century.

There was still a real hard line between cinema and television

and so we were still-- but we're just television.

So, well done, but it'll never be anything great.

But over the years, I've seen enthusiasm and support

for the miniseries version of The Shining growing by leaps and bounds.

And so that's very gratifying.

Great party, isn't it?

The reviews were great.

It was number 1, 2, and 3 in the ratings for the week.

There was a lot of gratification more on King's part

than on mine, I think.

Because he was the mover and shaker behind it

getting made his way.

To have him be able to smile and say, "We did it",

was one of the best feelings you could possibly imagine.

Stay close, darling. I'll be back.

God help us.

Event Horizon is not only one of Paul W. S. Anderson's best films,

it's also one of those movies that is criminally underrated.

I can remember us all just being like, "Holy fucking,

what did we just see?"

I'm waiting.

Ah!

Event Horizon is about the discovery of a ship,

the Event Horizon, that was long thought lost

by creating a black hole to get from one point in space to another.

- Jesus.

-Very impressive ship, Doctor. -Thank you.

There's something about not being able to get outside

of your environment that just adds to the tension

and the danger of everything.

- What the hell happened to his eyes?

-Explosive decompression. -Decompression doesn't do that.

I'd kind of grown up watching big American action movies

as well as the horror movies.

As a lifelong fan of Alien, this was an opportunity for me

to go out into space and try and terrify people.

And I thought Philip Eisner's concept of making

a haunted house movie in space was genius.

In Philip's original draft,

the spaceship wasn't so much haunted as it was

kind of overrun by these creatures from a different dimension.

And I wanted to kind of steer the movie away from that

and introduce the idea of hell.

- Be with me… forever.

Andrew Kevin Walker came in to do a specific draft

to move the movie into a more kind of hellish horror movie realm.

He'd just come off doing Seven and then Fish said,

"I don't want to say hell. I think it's too on the nose."

And the compromise we came up with was I got Fish

to say it one time.

So you kind of pick where you feel like it's gonna have the most impact.

And that's in the conversation with Jason Isaacs.

This ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe.

Who knows where it's been and what it's brought back with it.

From hell.

Working with Fishburne was fantastic.

I wasn't hugely experienced working with actors of his caliber.

And you know, he could have kind of taken over the set.

He could have been very intimidating.

He wasn't. He was very giving. He was very supportive.

And by the way, so was Sam Neill.

The crew is dead, Doctor. Your ship killed them.

-We came here to do a job. -We're aborting, Doctor.

I learnt a lot about actors on that movie.

They both became like godfathers to me in terms of kind

of teaching me an actor's craft.

-It shows you things. -What does?

The dark inside me.

It was an intense experience for the actors,

because we were shooting entirely on sets in a studio.

And it became very claustrophobic.

I remember talking to Joely Richardson about it

where she said, you know, "I'm just dreading coming

to work, going back into this same room

that's covered in blood with intestines hanging from the ceiling.

It's like it's getting to me."

And I thought that was good. It kind of put all the actors on edge.

Okay, baby bear. I got it.

I felt like the movie had to have some unique thought

behind the design of the sets.

Because the sets were the creature.

The spaceship is the adversary. That's what wants to kill you.

I wanted the images of the Event Horizon

to be beautiful, but also incredibly disturbing at the same time.

And you see that in the flashes of hell.

They have an almost painterly feel to them.

And that's very much the influence of Witkin, Bosch,

Bruegel, artists like that.

In any horror movie, it's a truism

that what people imagine is much worse than anything you can show them.

'Cause you never see where the Event Horizon goes

in anything other than flashes.

Liberate tutemet ex inferis.

We're leaving.

I've had people come up to me and say, "Oh, I saw your movie.

It was-- it was just so terrible."

And they tell me these things that they saw in the film

that I never shot, but they've imagined in those flashes of horror.

They're imagining what scares them

and they're kind of projecting that onto the movie that I made.

What happened to your eyes?

Where we're we going, we won't need eyes to see.

Titanic was supposed to have our release date

at the end of summer, but Titanic wasn't gonna be ready.

So suddenly Titanic got pushed to Christmas

and we were like, "You're in.

You're getting released on this date."

It's hard to say whether I was happy with the theatrical cut or not.

The theatrical cut was done very quickly

and I think we probably trimmed the movie a little bit too much

before putting it into theaters.

So could we have put more visions of hell in there? Perhaps.

But would that have been too much?

I think there's a power to kind of being more restrained.

But I'm very proud of the movie.

You know, I really stand behind it.

It's not like I feel like the movie was destroyed

by Paramount in any way.

I think cinema audiences, and especially American cinema audiences,

they don't like ambiguity. They react negatively about it.

I think that hurt us when we first released the movie.

But I think that ambiguity is what people talk about.

It's what people theorize about.

And I think that has given the movie life over time.

So I think the movie would not have become the kind of cult classic that it is

if we'd taken all the ambiguity out.

I would trade the longevity of Event Horizon

for another $10, $20 million at the box office

any day of the week.

They're fine. They're with us.

They're with us.

- Mimic.

Guillermo del Toro is another one who came up in the '90s.

Cronos was his feature debut, which made a splash

amongst the horror faithful.

That got him on the radar of Miramax, who hired him to do Mimic.

It's about giant cockroaches in the sewers of New York.

But in typical Guillermo fashion has given it

a kind of fairy tale sheen that elevates it beyond that.

The creature design, of course, is really unsettling,

because the reason it's called, "Mimic"

is 'cause the cockroaches have evolved to disguise themselves

to look like humans.

- These things can imitate us.

They can infiltrate us and breed a legion before anyone would even notice.

Del Toro is from Mexico, and he took a very American

sort of locale, which is the New York subway,

and he really exploited that horror baggage

in an effective way with the idea that a bug

could be standing in a crowd of commuters and-- and you wouldn't notice them.

Do you have the time? Sir, the time?

- It's a really effective bit of sleight of hand in those moments.

They're really unsettling.

I love being in dark underground spaces and you know, who isn't scared of bugs?

I'm from a family of coal miners,

so I think kind of going into dark underground spaces

is something that really speaks to me almost

on a kind of genetic level.

Mimic, I think, suffered from the presence

of the Weinsteins, the now infamous Brothers Weinstein,

who on-- I happen to know on at least one,

maybe several occasions, tried to fire Guillermo

from his own movie and made his life a living hell.

What the hell is going on around here?

Oh God!

In fact, Bob Weinstein famously showed up on set

and tried to fire Guillermo del Toro,

and star Mira Sorvino had to step in and say,

"If he goes, I go."

And in spite of that, I think he crafted

what is a very beautiful and evocative creature feature,

beautifully photographed, painterly.

Now if we could catch that male and kill him,

then the females won't be able to breed and the whole generation could die out.

The Weinsteins had this horrible way of working

where they would ghost cut the movies,

like Guillermo was there working with his editor and doing this,

but yet they would take the footage and they would ghost cut their own thing.

It seemed like they were browbeating him. It made things difficult for me as well.

Working with Guillermo del Toro was really a inspiring process for me.

He has a great flair for the visual. Imagination.

This whole creepiness of the bugs and all that

sort of came up with a musical language that was,

Guillermo used to say, "It gives me the butt willies to hear this music."

That was his shorthand.

When he wanted something like that, he'd give me the scene

and say, "I need you to do the butt willy music."

- Come here. Come here, come here.

When I finally saw the movie all put together

with the music and everything,

I thought it was a powerful experience.

- Mimic finally was rescued in a director's cut.

I'm told that's his preferred vision, so you know,

there's a happier ending for Mimic.

- Keep saying something like the dark angels

are coming to get her.

Chinese people come up with some pretty wild stuff.

It offers some of the promise of what Guillermo

would become as a filmmaker.

- You really feel like he's one of the icons of the genre,

if not a patron saint of the genre,

because he is so effusive and articulate about

why horror films are important and why creatures, not monsters,

as he would say, are important to us as a society.

Funny, funny shoes.

- Wishmaster. Careful what you wish for.

There were many, many new types of villains in the '90s, that's for sure.

Wishmaster's The Djinn, of course, is a very, very old myth.

It's a wonderful one that isn't a traditional monster.

Careful what you wish for.

Be careful what you wish for.

Because if you wish too far, it might come back to bite you.

- Hey buddy, you okay?

Wishmaster is about a malevolent genie who's unleashed in the present day.

We were trying to create a new horror icon.

You know, it was my second film, but I wanted to surround myself

with a team that would help, and actors, and as well as a creative team

that would give me a comfort level.

You did have your executives and the pressure

of the three or four or five producers involved.

And then, you know, bring in Wes Craven

to exec produce, 'cause I had a relationship with Wes

and that was very helpful and he was very supportive

and he was always there to go to.

-This is not something you wish to see. -Uh-huh.

- Neon Maniacs was my really first sort of outreach in horror

and my first realization, by the way, of what an art special effects makeup is.

The Djinn, I'm very proud of the fact that I got

to play both the human and the monster version of it.

Quite frankly, as a kid growing up, I'd have severe acne

and so I never considered myself attractive.

And so, now playing this presumably debonair, suave dude, I'm thinking,

"I don't know about that."

Does it bother you knowing that your beauty will fade?

That your looking glass will day by day tell you

a long and unhappy story?

The look in Demerest's eyes is Richard Ramirez.

There is nobody that I've looked at that scares me like he did.

I knew that was pure evil.

Ask for an end to change, an end to decay.

Say, "I wish to be beautiful forever."

I wish to be beautiful forever.

The voice came about, is it a British accent?

Is it a Middle Eastern accent?

For me, it was almost as if it had to be a gaseous burp

coming up out of the earth.

Spare me, child.

Behold my true face.

For energy, and because I could eat it quickly,

I was eating jelly beans.

Jelly beans are made with whey.

And I realized that if it coated my throat and I didn't clear it,

it would make the voice very gurgly.

Even more gurgly than this.

Make your wish.

- Robert is an amazing artist, so working with him

as a director, very specific, but would then get out of the way.

Knew, of course, what he wanted. Had done all the conceptual art.

I mean, he went to bed and dreamed about it and woke up

and had breakfast with it.

There was no question that he knew every single mile marker

on that long road.

- A court sorcerer is said to have imprisoned

an evil spirit within it.

A creature from the spaces between the worlds. A Djinn.

I stacked the cast with all these people that I had worked with before.

Once Robert Englund was brought onto the film, then it was like,

"Oh, well, why don't we get Kane Hodder and get Tony Todd and then we have like,

these three icons of horror that we can use as a marketing hook.

A lot of people call it like, "The Expendables of horror films".

You had Ted Raimi and Danny Hicks from Evil Dead 2,

Joe Pilato from Day of the Dead,

Angus Scrimm, his voiceover really sets the tone at the opening of the movie.

- In the time before time,

God breathed life into the universe.

I just wanted all my friends in the movie, you know?

God, how I'd love to host a party like that.

As you wish.

My big monster brothers, who were my mentors

for that film and were wonderful guides.

I'll never forget that.

The name is Valentine. Johnny Valentine.

You remember that when they ask how you lost your eye.

My favorite kill, approaching the guard, played by Kane Hodder.

I asked Robert Kurtzman, would it be okay to do this one right down the barrel?

I say, "I have to get in there", something like that. And he says…

Well, now you'd have to go through me and that is something I would love to see.

And so as I'm walking, I look right down the lens

and I smile like, we know what's coming.

Bookending the movie with these big action set pieces

was probably my favorite thing to do.

Free us, Wizard. Lift this curse. Help us.

I was very comfortable, of course, in the doing those sequences,

because they were effects-heavy sequences, too.

A true cult classic now.

In the hands of many other directors that story

might have fallen flat, but Bob really managed

to make it into something really fun.

- As the movie got older and more people discovered it

over the years, it became more beloved.

And of course, it spawned three sequels after that.

- I want to walk right through the bars, man.

-Walk right on out of the jail. -Done.

I'm always impressed when I go to a fan convention

how many people love the character

and they come up with Wishmaster-inspired things.

So I just love that people love it all these years later.

What a beautiful, beautiful monster they came up with.

Did I hear you say, "freeze"?

- I made this.

This is my version of the Wishmaster.

It is a 360-degree version. Took me 200 hours to sculpt.

This is 2 ounces of silver.

And it's quite beautiful if I say so myself.

Magic.

I can't tell you, a kid that grew up not being able

to see horror movies to now know that I guess

in some way or another it is in the pantheon of monsters,

monster movies. I couldn't be prouder.

Pleasure doing business with you.

- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

That's not a found footage film, but God bless America

did it feel like I was watching something

I shouldn't have been watching when I first saw it.

What I love about Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

is that it is written and directed by the screenwriter of the original.

He had written about these kids being carved up by this family

Twenty years earlier and the sympathies are all with those kids.

He comes back a middle-aged man and he fucking hates those kids.

Guys need sex, okay? You can get prostrate cancer.

You can't get cancer from not having sex.

Like you'd know. Never had a date in your life. You're so ugly.

They're terrible people.

You kind of are fully on the side of the family

when these teens get got as they say.

Heather!

We are gifted with a Texas Chainsaw movie

that has Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey in it.

Stop. You're scaring me.

You don't know shit about being scared, little girl. Not yet.

The first time you see Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw: The Next Generation,

and it's one of the most unsettling, strange moments

Kim didn't want to let go of.

That he's not just running towards you with a chainsaw.

That there's a lot going on in this character

that is very strange and unpredictable.

There's two versions of Leatherface in nine movies

that is shrill and shrieking,

and feels like something unknowable.

And it's the original and it's this one.

Stop! Stop!

- He's the angry, screaming teen when he's got that one face on

and then he gets dressed for dinner and he's a little more ladylike.

You sit the fuck down!

I like to refer to Leatherface in the they/them pronouns

because I believe they are in this discovery

of what their identity may be.

I thought it was really profound and powerful the way that

they presented Leatherface in that film.

And I think if you get too attached to wanting

your movie monsters to be exactly the way

that they were when you first fell in love with them,

then you're never going to appreciate their--

all these incredible manifestations of the way

these characters can evolve over time.

- I think Kim, it's part of a world that he's lived in

for so long, that he helped birth

and then he understands it really, really well.

Are we having a party or what? Here we go!

I'm sorry! Please, no!

Fire in the hole!

- What's scary is the family.

And Leatherface is only one facet of the family.

The idea that the tow truck driver

who's gonna pick up your car is going to murder you.

Boy's dead.

No, he's not. He just passed out.

- He's dead now.

Or that the nice real estate lady with the boob job is part of this family.

Phony three dollar bills. Changed my life, though.

It resonates more for me as I get older, I think,

that there are people who are kind of functioning members

of society who are really batshit.

There's something so wonderful and true to the spirit

of what Tobe Hooper created in the first film

and yet takes it now into the '90s.

There is this weird almost Wall Street

secret society culture of wealth that is somehow exploited

like the deep dark heart of American farmland

and you go, "Oh my God, this is a movie of right now."

Do you know how you always hear these stories about these people

who run everything, but nobody knows who they are?

Well, it's true.

It's kind of meta but nobody gives it credit for being meta.

This Illuminati character, with his pierced nipples and whatnot,

pulls up in the limo and he chastises them,

'cause he's the boss and to me the only thing that makes sense

is that that's an avatar for Kim Henkel.

I want these people to know the meaning of horror.

It played once in '95 under Return

and then it got released in '97 under the title, Next Generation.

Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger were just

starting their careers when they got cast in Texas Chainsaw: Next Generation.

By the time the film actually came out,

they wanted to distance themselves from it and it's a shame,

because it is a strange kind of experiment in what horror could be

and I think it's one of the most underrated films in the canon.

Welcome to my world.

- I Know What You Did Last Summer.

If I'm gonna be perfectly honest like I was like

a '90s ironic cool kid like I enjoyed I Know What You Did Last Summer,

but I smoked a Parliament afterwards and made fun of it.

To our last summer of immature adolescent decadence.

I think I was like a little too cool for school back then.

I think that I could appreciate it more.

I Know What You Did Last Summer has such an elegant set-up.

It's a bunch of kids that are having fun and driving a windy road

and they accidentally hit somebody.

Watch out!

They all panic and freak out and talk about what to do.

This is your future, Julie.

College. It's your scholarship.

The guy's already dead. If we go to the police, we're dead, too.

And they make the very unfortunate decision

to not say anything and they let it fester for a year.

We make a pact.

Right here and now, we take this to our grave.

- That is kind of where the story starts.

This is the post-Scream world, so now studios are like

very into teenagers. Very into teen horror.

They're seeing money signs everywhere.

It stars Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt,

Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe.

Jennifer Love Hewitt was already a big star on the small screen.

She goes from the small screen Party of Five

to the party of four killer teenagers in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

He's just out there and he's watching us and waiting.

What are you waiting for? Huh? What are you waiting for?

This was written by Kevin Williamson before he wrote Scream actually.

He had the script for I Know What You Did Last Summer.

That's why the script didn't sell.

Scream hit it big and then suddenly everybody

was knocking on Kevin Williamson's door. "What else you got?"

Lucky for us he said,

"Boom, I've got this little thing called, I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Behind you!

No!

This film was rushed into production following the success of Scream.

But the similarities end there.

Directed by Jim Gillespie, who didn't do a lot of horror,

the film was adapted from a 1973 novel

and the novelist purportedly was horrified

that they turned her story into a slasher movie,

but it worked so well.

You've got a really imposing figure in the killer

and he's using a fisherman's hook played by Muse Watson. Perfection.

What do you want?

We get a little bit of the Scooby-Doo element

in the sense that it's a whodunnit.

We're introduced to characters and storylines very early on.

We're planting seeds.

Hey! You forgot your cigarettes.

We're going this direction, this direction, this direction.

A lot of misdirection.

And typical of the era, I Know What You Did Last Summer

is jam-packed with amazing banger tracks from bands who were big at the time.

You've got Kula Shaker, Offspring, Korn, Soul Asylum,

a veritable who's who of the '90s alt-rock scene.

The film was such a hit that a sequel was perhaps inevitable

and indeed the very last stinger at the end of the film

sets it up perfectly.

For I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,

Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Muse Watson

return to their roles from the original.

And they're joined by newcomers Brandy, Mekhi Phifer,

and Matthew Settle.

Trey Callaway steps in and pens this script.

The movie like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is

so bankrupt of ideas that it can't even come up

with interesting clichés.

Wasn't that the karaoke scene where she's like singing karaoke

and then it says, "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

on the karaoke machine? Like that is iconic.

-Come on. -Hey.

- The Creeps.

One of the most bizarre films in the Full Moon canon

is a little movie called, "The Creeps".

It was directed by Charlie Band,

the great cinematographer Adolfo Bartoli shot it.

It's the story of a mad scientist

who wants to recreate all of the classic monsters

of the Universal horror films.

Something goes wrong along the way and he creates the monsters,

but they are all little diminutive monsters played by

Phil Fondacaro and a number of other actors.

You will be so kind as to explain all of this, my friend.

Phil Fondacaro was kind of like a part of the family

for a long, long time.

As far back, or probably farther back than John Buechler's film, Troll.

Welcome, Brother Elf.

I've always had this fascination with little people

and they've been woven in and out of my movies

and I thought, "You know, wouldn't it be cool to

take some of the classic monsters of literature…

Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yes.

This mad scientist type character, what he needs to do

is to steal the original manuscripts

of Shelley's Frankenstein and so forth and so on.

Freeze, book thief!

Puts these manuscripts in some sort of hocus-pocus contraption.

He's got these pods that are, you know, 7 feet tall

and that's where we are waiting as an audience for Frankenstein

to come back, and the werewolf to come back,

and the mummy to come back.

In just a few minutes,

I am going to bring four cultural archetypes to life.

The four figures most emblematic of the powers of d-- darkness.

And boom, boom, boom, he does it and all these doors open

and they all walk out, but they are 3-feet tall dwarves.

I am told almost everyone knows of me.

Though, perhaps you imagined me somewhat taller.

In addition to that, which was already challenging,

this is back in the 35mm days,

I thought, "Wow, we got to make this movie in 3D."

Now no one could care less at that time. 3D was dead again.

Back then you had to equip the screen.

And so it was not like, oh, you just put a different print in.

You had the screen, and the thing, and the lenses.

So I remember finishing the movie, and we tested it,

and it looked great, if you had the glasses.

But then there was so much resistance from the distributors to equipping movies.

Said, "You're-- no one is gonna be interested in this movie.

Plus, what the fuck movie is this about?

Like these little dwarves and Frankenstein."

But I am proud of the movie and other than those few people

at that one screening who saw it in 3D, no one on Earth has seen it in 3D.

And then I would have people ask me,

who didn't know that it was originally filmed as a 3D movie,

"How come this thing is poking at the screen?"

'Cause you know, I did tricks that are 3D tricks.

You better stay right where you are, little guy,

or I'm gonna brain you with this.

"Director is weird. He's like doing stuff that doesn't make any sense."

As small as this movie was in scope

and literally with as the-- the leads, it looks beautiful.

I think the 3D when people see it are gonna love it.

And the makeup effects, I think, are just fantastic.

So come on. You can't fault us for not being unique.

And we four, we nightmares shall walk the night again.

- You've always wanted to know what hell was like.

Now you will know.

Another fascinating King adaptation from the '90s is The Night Flyer.

It's one of those premises from a King short story

that you don't think is gonna work.

It's about a vampire who flies a Cessna

and he lands in different airports, and he kills people,

and then he takes off again.

It's funny. It's dark.

It's one of those things where you're like,

"Why hasn't this been explored before in the vampire canon?"

Oh, Jesus, save me.

Miguel Ferrer plays the lead as a tabloid reporter

who's chasing down the story of the Night Flier.

The movie's real good. He's great in it.

I said, move it along, buddy.

Get your hands off me, pal. I'm the fucking press.

There's a sequence that starts with one of the coolest,

weirdest, and funniest things I've ever seen,

where he's in a bathroom, and he's at the mirror,

and he hears someone come in,

but he's looking in the reflection and he can't see anybody.

And the vampire goes to a urinal and you just see

a phantom stream of bloody piss in the urinal,

'cause the vampire is taking a leak.

After that scene, there's a great conversation

between the vampire and the reporter.

- Listen closely, my inquisitive friend.

Do not follow me anymore or I will swallow you whole.

And then a nightmarish final sequence in the airport

that is terrifying, and dark, and really brutal.

You know what I had to do to get this, Richard?

I had to pull it out of me.

But ends on a perfect note that is completely dictated by

who that character is.

I think The Night Flier is a blast.

- Jack Frost.

Jack Frost, 1997.

Not to be confused with Jack Frost, 1998.

Charlie, it's me, Dad!

-I can explain everything! -Ah, get away from me! Ah!

Well, I can't explain the part about me being a snowman.

Concerns a serial killer who, in transit to death row,

is involved in a collision with a genetic research truck.

Looks like deep-fried Jack's off the menu.

And winds up turned into an abominable snowman.

Well, it ain't fuckin' Frosty!

Listen, I couldn't make this up.

-What the hell are you? -World's most pissed-off snow cone.

The result of which is a snowman wreaking havoc

in the holiday season with crazy kills

that all have to do with Christmas ephemera.

"Here's the windup and the pitch!"

Icicles, broken ornaments, name it, they just throw it at the camera.

This film was directed by Michael Cooney, who also went on to direct the sequel,

and it's entirely a labor of love.

Who's Jack Frost?

Jack Frost is a very bad man, honey, but now he's gone. Oof.

Michael Cooney actually intended this film

to be a big-budget blockbuster, but when the film landed,

famously, on the table of none other than Renny Harlin,

his partner at the time, Geena Davis, said, "No way."

I just saw something that doesn't belong in this world,

and it's out there killing my friends.

-Now tell me what it is! -Jack Frost.

I'm so sorry, Shannon Elizabeth.

Perhaps, she would like to strike this one from her filmography, but she did make

her big screen debut in a very MeToo questionable scene

involving Jack Frost in the shower.

The snowman actually ate up a lot of the budget.

It was created by Screaming Mad George and they had only one for the entire shoot

and had to make him as menacing as they could.

They worked it out.

Frostbite, next time we'll use mistletoe.

As the shoot progressed, of course,

this white costume just got dirtier and dirtier

as the film gets dirtier, come to think of it.

You are so fucking dead.

Just what I was thinking.

And by the end of it, the cast was so delighted

to be rid of it that they actually burned it.

Somebody remember to put out the cat.

It definitely had a shoestring budget that it stretched

as far as it would go, but I think the affection

for the material and the humor that permeates

throughout is really palpable

and why it remains a cult classic to this day.

-Hey, Jack! -What?

What's the difference between snowmen and snowwomen?

-I don't know. -No balls.

- What's your favorite scary movie?

So the success of Scream meant that a sequel

was pretty much inevitable, but how do you top Scream exactly?

Any good sequel is going to take the root film

and expand upon its world.

What Scream 2 did was it took the meta even further.

- Look out back.

Do you see your boyfriend anywhere?

That's pretty much a perfect sequel.

More blood, more gore. Carnage candy.

Your core audience just expects it.

I really thought Scream was a one-off.

I mean in a way it was perceived and then ended.

To me, it could have been a one-off and been perfect and done with it.

Not in my movie.

Dewey was dead.

Tested so well, that Wes shot him giving him

the thumbs-up just in case.

And so it's little things like that gave it life to go.

- Hello, Sidney.

Yes?

- What's your favorite scary movie?

Scream 2 starts off with Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith.

And you kind of knew that if they're in the opening,

they're gonna die.

Scream 2 knew it had to one-up itself,

so then it took great pleasure in breaking its own rules.

- The vibe on 2 was incredible.

The vibe on 1 was amazing, but I was scared, you know?

And-- but we were all just kind of like this little amoeba being born.

But 2 was like, "Wow, we have something in the can."

You know, David and Courteney were becoming an item.

And Neve and Matt were an item. But Matt was dead.

Skeet was dead. So then we had these newids.

Like I felt very, the cock of the walk.

I felt very comfortable. I mean, it was our world, man.

So we were-- took over this college

for a whole summer and had fun. We had parties. A lot of fun.

Portia de Rossi and myself, we were both auditioning

for the same role.

They turned that character into two people,

'cause they couldn't decide who they wanted.

This must be flat out hell for you.

I manage.

Sid, we have our eyes on you.

You hang in there and if there is anything we can do…

People wanted to be in the movie.

They were clamoring for it. And Stab was just wild.

Luke being Skeet and Heather being Drew.

It was meta on meta with meta and it was like this tiny community.

You know, not easy movie to shoot.

It was very hot in Atlanta. Huge cast. Lots of extras.

I think a lot of pressure for Scream 2, because Scream 1 performed so well.

Hello.

When we started Scream 2, we only had three quarters of a script.

So they didn't have an ending.

- I also heard that the script was leaked which I don't know

how that happened or who did it, but they were so careful.

We were on a need-to-know basis.

I don't think I got the script until I got to Atlanta.

It was uh, pretty locked down.

I think they made a fake one and leaked that

to like throw the scent off the real one.

Kevin Williamson was around a lot and the script changed often.

Multiple times in a day.

So no one really knew how the movie was gonna end.

Which was exciting though, because anything can happen.

You know, it's happening as we're shooting it almost.

Why don't you show your face, you fucking coward?

-My pleasure. -Derek!

I'm positive Kevin knew all along, but you know he tried

to take us this way, and this way, and this way.

We had a lot of meta, meta in Scream 2.

If Tori Spelling plays Sid and they cast Joe Blow Nobody to play me.

At least, you get David Schwimmer.

They made jokes about friends because of Courteney obviously.

When did she start smoking?

Ever since those nude pictures on the internet.

It was just my head. It was Jennifer Aniston's body.

We want that, because you're thinking it

when you're watching the movie anyway, so why not say it?

Don't ask don't tell.

I think there's some good stuff in there.

"Mrs. Voorhees, was a…"

…terrific serial killer

and there's always room for Candyman's daughter.

I love, "sequels suck".

Sequels suck.

I sign that all the time.

It's by definition alone, they're inferior films.

We're shooting it on a cafe in UCLA in the summer.

David has like an eighth of the lines compared to me

and yet he's so great in the scene

and he's just so engaged, and so funny.

I really learned a lot that day.

It's like you don't need to speak to be interesting.

Maybe you are a suspect.

Well if I'm a suspect, you're a suspect.

Do you have a point?

Okay. Let's move on.

I gotta tell you this. Spoiler alert.

I don't know. I die.

They didn't have the third act yet when we got there

and I was like, "Shit!"

But then I thought, "Hey man, this is the world we've chosen",

so-- and I had a huge part.

So I was like, "Fine.

And then I'll be done and I'll move on to my romantic comedies."

Roger L. Jackson. He is the voice of Ghostface.

He is everything that you fear.

What's wild about that day was I thought someone was gonna read me

the lines off-camera.

They didn't do that. Wes says, "I'm gonna call you."

And then when Wes calls me, he had Roger call me.

He had the actual character call.

They kinda had him fuck with me. Right?

He said all those lines and he goes, "I have your mother with me."

And I'm like, "My mom is there."

You'll look the surprise on my face and stuff.

That's because he's really saying this shit about my mom.

Wes played the beautiful game. And then we're done.

Everyone's clapping and laughing. And I was like, "Are you okay, mom?"

She's like, "I was right here. Roger's over here. I just met Roger."

And then I met Roger. Like I never had known him.

- Have you ever felt a knife cut through human flesh

and scrape the bone beneath?

It's him.

I thought it was a rite of passage quite frankly.

So I was like, "I'm gonna make it the goriest."

And so I'm like, "Dude, I want them to fucking feel something."

And Wes is like, "You wanna do it?"

And I was like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Alright. Load him up."

And they put so much blood on me and on my face.

He said I already got it, but I'll give you a gory one.

If Scream didn't have the benefit of being first,

Scream 2 is right there.

It works on every level and it does not let down.

We came out and we did huge. It was incredible.

Wes has the greatest house

and the house that lives next door to him is Pauly Shore's.

And I could cry but when Scream 2 opened,

Pauly put a huge banner in the driveway

and say, "Congratulations, the number one opening

horror movie history. You did it."

That was the sweetest thing for Wes. And Wes never forgot it.

And I just thought that was the classiest thing.

-How would you make it different? -I'd let the geek get the girl.

So at one of his dinners, he's like,

"I think I can get you in Scream 3."

I was like, "What?" He's like, "Yup, I got an idea."

And it's-- it's such a clever idea of how they did it.

And they brought me back via the video tape.

-Told you I'd make a movie someday. -Oh my God.

People come up to me all the time and tell me

how much they just love me that I'm in it. It had a lot of meaning.

If you're dealing with an unexpected backstory

and a preponderance of exposition, then the sequel rules do not apply.

I'll never forget, I go to Scream 4.

I'm not in it. I'm dead.

And I went and did the whole carpet and everything.

I was very happy to go. Bob Weinstein was there.

He goes, "You know, should've never fucking killed you."

And I said, "Really?" He goes, "Yeah.

It was a mistake. They love you."

I shook his hand and I went off. And I was like…

And I don't know. Maybe Harvey did it.

I have no idea.

To this day, the Scream universe gets along.

And it started with Wes.

Wes sprinkled all this beautiful pixie dust on us.

- Why are you even here, Randy?

You will be the leading man.

Fuck you!

Why are the Japanese making such dark, dark films?

Cure is a Japanese horror movie that is much more sophisticated

than its predecessors.

The film is spooky and creepy, and it is artfully made.

Cure has this amazing set-up where there is a police detective

who is investigating a series of brutal killings.

All of them committed using the same methodology.

But each of them has been committed by

a completely different person under different circumstances

and each time the killers have turned themselves in,

and confessed to their crimes.

The counterpart character in Cure is this loner named Mamiya

who is wandering the countryside asking existential questions.

And anybody fool enough to carry on a conversation with this guy

is gonna find their life upended and the people around them killed.

He's a master hypnotist and with a few little tricks

he's able to get you into a trance

and then you're gonna go and do his bidding.

You're gonna murder them and then you're gonna carve a big X

in their chest or on their neck,

and then the horror sets in of what you have done.

The detective character is played by actor Kōji Yakusho

who is one of Japan's greatest actors of his generation.

He is able to bring such a sense of opaqueness

to a character whose internal life is clearly in turmoil.

He's experiencing an emotional breakdown,

because he is dealing with the psychological deterioration

of his wife at home.

This unstable man is probably not the person

you want to bring into the orbit of a person who is capable

of turning any stable person into a killer.

Cure is a psychological thriller

about alienation that has the effect of making

the audience feel alienated in order to work

its sort of hypnotic magic on people.

Cure launched Kiyoshi Kurosawa into the top tier of directors.

He was fascinated with that notion that ordinary people can be killers.

Your neighbors can be killers.

Your family members can be killers. You could be a killer.

In many ways, the success of Cure,

like the success of Ring, helped establish this notion

of a more restrained version of horror,

one that's more psychological, asking the audience

to be a contributing participant in how the story is being told.

It's when you add it all up afterwards

as you're piecing it all together that maybe

it becomes even more terrifying in retrospect

as you begin to realize what it is you actually witnessed.

J-HORROR EXPLOSION THE WORLDWIDE IMPACT OF ASIAN FILMS

Filmmakers from the whole Asian culture

have such a unique point of view, and they go all out.

They go balls to the wall.

I think the fascination of J-horror for North American

and global audiences more generally all had to do

with the exhaustion of certain horror franchise conventions

that were coming out of Hollywood.

Audiences who were thirsting for something darker,

something innovative, in some cases,

something really extreme, could find it in J-horror films.

The term, "J-horror" is the one that typically gets

applied to the genre, but that's very reductionist,

because there are very similarly coded

and similarly themed films that emerged from other traditions

in other countries, South Korea, in Taiwan, Thailand, in India,

and ultimately, remakes in the United States.

The mood of these films is a kind of melancholia

that you didn't see in Hollywood horror films.

These films did not obey the tight linear causality

of Hollywood narrative cinema.

Less to explain the horror away,

and more to stay with the inexplicability

and to explore the darkness that's there.

The biggest difference between Western horror

and then Japanese horror in the '90s were at a conceptual level.

They didn't have bloodthirsty killers.

No Leatherface, no Ghostface.

There it was much more spiritual. It was an evil, spiritual curse.

Once you start the curse, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

One of the obvious recurring elements of J-horror films

is that Sadako-like figure, the ghostly girl with the long black hair.

That visual image.

Their monster aesthetic was slightly different.

They moved weird.

That feeling of, "I know what you are and I don't know what you are."

On some level, these supernatural specters are deeply human.

And I think that's part of the appeal to global audiences.

In J-horror, technology is definitely not your friend.

Whether it's a videocassette at home or a cell phone

in their pocket.

What if there was a malevolent being that existed

inside of these devices?

What if these devices themselves that you have in your house

right now can kill you?

The marriage of the supernatural with the technological

was really intriguing to me.

And all of those things feel alien, I think, to a western audience.

And for that reason are really unsettling to them.

There are things, you know, beyond our realm

that we don't understand.

A glimpse into that could, you know, bring madness.

I don't think that the Japanese approach their horror

in a humanistic way.

I think they have a much more Lovecraftian view of the cosmos,

which is a colder view.

A Shintoist or a Zen kind of philosophical perspective

on the universe where humans are just part of a larger puzzle,

and we are not the center of the universe.

Come into the spiral…

- At the turn of the millennium, Hollywood horror was poised

to turn a more profitable corner.

But to do that, they needed an infusion of new ideas.

And one of the places they looked was J-horror and Asian horror.

The remake of The Ring was incredibly successful.

The Grudge was incredibly successful.

So there was a sudden focus in Hollywood about,

"Well, what's gonna be the next Ring, the next Grudge?"

Suddenly, that horror audience becomes very hungry

for more of that, which leads to kind of a floodgate effect of J-horror happening.

There's no way you can talk about Hollywood remakes

of Asian horror without knowing the name Roy Lee.

In the late '90s, Japanese horror was still

relatively underground.

A young producer named, "Roy Lee", got his hands on a videocassette of Ring,

and he loved it so much, he flew to Japan.

He met with the producer of The Ring and said,

"I just want two weeks with this, and let me show you what I can do."

He got multiple offers.

DreamWorks ended up bidding on it and purchasing it for $2 million.

They can see the marketing potential in what a Western remake could be.

And Roy Lee is responsible single-handedly

for The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water,

Tale of Two Sisters out of Korea, Oldboy from Korea,

Infernal Affairs, which became The Departed.

I mean, there were all high-caliber films from a different country.

He had the foresight to see that these would play really well

in the United States.

I'm gonna keep going, till I can pull your head off

with my bare hands.

We couldn't get enough of it.

All of the sudden, we're importing every J-horror film we can get.

We are just digesting it and talking about it,

writing about it online.

- One of the ways that I discovered Asian horror

and J-horror, in particular, was through

the Tartan Extreme DVD series.

It was horror films from a handful of industries,

so it's really Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand.

It took you to an absolute edge of gruesomeness and darkness

and something really malignant and complex in the human psyche.

With labels like Tartan, people were seeing horror movies

the likes of which they had never seen before.

Very scintillating and exciting for the horror fan who thought

that they'd seen it all simply because they'd gone through

the entire catalogue of Blockbuster.

Hong Kong cinema, in particular, had Category III films

that appealed to a particular subset of moviegoers

that were really looking for this particularly gruesome,

edgy combination of sex and violence.

There were a great many Japanese horror films

that didn't necessarily launch franchises and--

and didn't get American remakes,

but which are fantastic stand-alone pictures.

You get something like Uzumaki, the Spiral or Parasite Eve

or Shikoku or Inugami. Some extraordinary films.

Dumplings, which was a really terrifying horror film

by Fruit Chan, also from Hong Kong.

Eat all the shrimp dumplings you can before you watch the film,

because you're not gonna be able to eat hakao

for a while afterwards.

There was also a concurrent tradition

of very similarly-styled horror films in South Korea.

Whispering Corridors.

Each of them involved ghost stories set at schools.

Memento Mori is a Korean horror film

that unfolds over the course of a single day.

The film is memorable and important

for its devastating critique of Korean social institutions

that are homophobic. It's genuinely creepy.

The haunting is deeply physical, invasive, and erotic.

Tale of Two Sisters is another fantastic South Korean

horror film from that era.

A Quiet Family would be sort of the horror version

of Fawlty Towers.

A fantastic combination of arch comedy

and workplace drama, plus serial killing.

And we really shouldn't ignore the role that anime plays in this

or the-- the subset within that of horror anime.

Things like Akira, the Ring, Battle Royale.

These were in different media, and different genres,

and appealing to different audiences, but they were all their own rabbit holes.

And you find your way to one and you start to find

your way to the others.

And so many people in the 1990s were finding their way

to Japanese popular culture and recognizing how much

there was there to reward that interest.

1998

- Deep Rising.

Deep Rising is one of those joyous things that just came out of nowhere.

Stephen Sommers, who would go on to be a huge director

for several years, doing big adventure horror adaptations.

Probably just a pod of whales.

Moving at 31 knots, sir? I-- I don't think so.

-Where is it coming from? -A 160 meters directly beneath us

and rising very quickly.

Deep Rising is about a group of mercenaries

who come across a ghost ship,

a derelict ship with nobody on it, real rich, real expensive,

only to find out why everyone is gone.

Everyone is dead, and then the reason

why everyone is dead is that some deep, deep,

deep sea creature has come up and basically killed everyone.

Kind of a mashup of action, and some horror elements,

and some comedy, and absolutely a creature feature.

When I first got the script, it was called, "Tentacles".

There were definitely several light-hearted moments mixed in

with the action and the horror.

I don't mean to sound like a pussy, but this shit

is starting to freak me out, man.

And then I found out later how much Stephen Sommers

really loves Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

I was excited that there was that sort of spirit.

Now what?

-Not you! -Get off of that!

We were in Vancouver for about four and a half months.

Steve is very much like his movies, extremely energetic, quick-thinking.

He's very fun to work with. I mean, he's a real crowd-pleaser.

Like a fine wine, I'm aging gracefully. Thank you.

You look more like a keg of beer to me.

It was so great working with Treat Williams.

We liked that there was a little comic bit right before

the creature arrives to sort of maybe throw people off a little.

What you got there?

-Peanut. -Peanut?

The actors that were in that film, we really got along.

It was really great. Famke Janssen.

I think she broke my nose.

Yeah, give me a chance I'll break the rest of your face.

Not that anyone would notice.

-Djimon Hounsou. -Money, money, money, money.

-Anthony Heald. -The Ottoia are very crafty.

Catch their victims with spiny tentacles and then crush them between massive jaws.

-And then they eat you, right? -No. They drink you alive.

Una Damon, who played Leila, she was great.

We got along really well.

She was really nice, but very, you know, business.

She was nobody's fool. In fact, I was a little intimidated.

And I said, "That's perfect.

Joey would be intimidated of his girlfriend."

Hold still, you big dummy.

I'm sorry. It stings.

Wes Studi, I loved and hung around with Wes maybe

more than anybody on that.

They're catching up. We gotta slow 'em down.

The only way to slow 'em down is to feed 'em.

All I got is a wet stick of gum and a breath mint.

I didn't get to be around Rob Bottin a whole lot,

but I really admired his work.

Like I was really excited that he was involved with this.

Jesus Christ.

We were in water a lot.

We did have wetsuits uh, 'cause we were in there for hours,

underneath our costumes.

So I mean, it was fun, but it was damp and cold definitely.

What the hell is that?

The Girl From Ipanema.

♪ Pa, pararapa, paraparapa ♪

They actually had me revise that, where I can't get the song out of my head.

I mean, I never thought there would be a part two

to that line, but there was.

I can't get that song out of my head.

Deep Rising was supposed to come out in the fall of '97,

and then it got moved to '98.

No one's gonna even try to attempt

to go up against Titanic at the box office.

And they were both on water. It was a big boat.

I remember one of the producers was saying something

to Treat and I about how he, in a way, wished

it was still titled, "Tentacles", because that's what it was.

You got what you paid for.

Finnegan! Faster! Faster!

So I think Deep Rising, even though I liked the title,

I think it was a little obscure.

So it did have a little trouble, I think, finding its audience.

Years later, I think that movie, Deep Rising,

was able to settle in more with fans.

I remember seeing the Blu-ray

where they did a really nice cover for the movie.

I think that hit the nail on the head.

It had the monster and the ship, and it just looked like a ball.

You know, like a real blast.

Something like that type of marketing.

Maybe that would have been a little more accurate

to what the movie was.

This is turning out to be one hell of a day.

Ringu felt like it came from another planet,

just in terms of how the horror was dealt with.

The atmosphere of it was so specific to Japanese culture.

It had a kind of aura of dread

that I hadn't really seen in an American film.

Easily the best haunted tape movie ever to come out ever.

It like gets under your skin, it's definitely a slow burn,

but the visuals of it I think really stick to people.

Hideo Nakata's Ringu is about a female television journalist

investigating an urban legend about a cursed videotape.

So you watch the videocassette and then within moments

you'll get a phone call and it'll say, seven days

and then you die.

She moves from being a very skeptical media professional

to somebody who is abjectly terrified.

When you heard that there was a videotape that you watch

and it can kill you, you want to know how.

It didn't show you exactly how these characters died.

It would show you the aftermath and it looked horrifying.

They challenge the audience to say, "What the fuck happened to this woman?"

The audience is fiending to actually see

what the footage looks like and then they show it to you.

While you're watching it, "Wait a minute,

am I actually going to watch something that is going

to curse me as well?"

And in a very meta way, it scared people on a level

that they weren't expecting.

- That's what all horror films want to evoke.

They want to blur the distinction between

fictional screen terror and your non-fictional real life.

Sadako was still alive!

She tried to climb out.

- This girl who's other, she doesn't fit in

and she's been thrown into this well to die.

She's been rejected by the world, by her family, by everyone.

Sadako!

Sadako is a victim.

This absolute parental rejection that is communicated

by the act of infanticide killing your own child.

The cursed videotape contains images that no camera ever filmed,

because they are the imprint of the ghost's own traumatized psyche.

There's an ethical quandary that exists in the Ring,

where if you were to watch this videocassette,

you would get cursed.

But if you were to show the videocassette to somebody else,

they would get cursed and you would survive.

So it is this system that is created in this movie

that kind of challenges each of the characters to see

how far they would go.

It incentivizes its own reproduction by turning people

against one another.

The film ends with Sadako crawling out of the TV

into the real world

and it is one of the great bravura moments of horror cinema.

What a brilliant idea to have her come through the screen.

Disturbing, really disturbing. It scared the shit out of us.

Something that you can point to and say, “That is what Japanese horror is."

Ring was written by a novelist, Koji Suzuki,

who was telling this story of a disrupted family.

The trilogy of books, Ring, Spiral, and Loop,

essentially tell the same thematic story.

When the producers of the Ring were making that film,

they went ahead and had a production team make

Spiral into a companion film such that the first movie

and its sequel would be released as a double feature.

Spiral was directed by a man named, "George Iida" or "Jôji Iida".

He actually had previously worked on a television adaptation of the Ring

that preceded Hideo Nakata's film.

It largely deals with a different cast

and a wholly different genre, so it didn't feel like a sequel.

And audiences weren't satisfied with it.

If you are a completist, I would definitely implore you

to watch Ring Spiral after watching Ring.

Because it is an interesting exploration

on what the curse is and how it could have come to be.

At the time, Ring did gangbusters and Spiral didn't.

The producers decided, "Let's get Hideo Nakata back in the studio

and let's make something that looks like the Ring,

and it sounds like the Ring, and it feels like the Ring."

So the Ring 2 is a fantastic sequence of these horror set pieces,

each one more extraordinary than the last.

It was a maturation of the curse,

and it was things that what you saw in the first film

weren't limited to anymore.

And it wasn't just a videocassette that can kill you.

It was technology.

That rage grew so much that her ire turned against society.

There's no reasoning with this kind of a ghost

and that's terrifying.

It's almost impossible to overstate the blockbuster explosion of the Ring.

You still have images and ideas reverberating through

modern horror films by western directors that clearly were influenced,

so the effect continues to ripple outward.

Disembodied directed by William Kersten.

This is a movie about a girl who checks into a roach motel

and then keeps her brain in a little jar on the dresser.

And then she goes out at night and starts killing people…

…with the help of little creatures that sprout from her face.

And these little creatures are stop motion clay-animated beasties

and they look a lot like vaginas.

I think a good touchpoint for this film is that

it is very Lynchian, it's very surreal, and nonsensical at times.

And it has a little bit of Cronenberg with a little body horror thrown in.

This movie really sets up this fantastic little world

where all this stuff unfolds.

It has one of the most disgusting bathroom scenes

where she's like sitting in this fetid bathtub

and there's like little creatures that crawl around.

The characters are really rough and they look dirty.

Two teenage actors who are really selling it.

There's this sunny sort of prostitute

and this like goth girl with a brain in a jar.

And the combination of the two is really beautiful

to see on screen.

You and me are a lot alike. I could tell the first time I saw you.

-You could? -Yeah.

Both stuck in a sewer, but we got big plans for the future.

I think Disembodied is a great example

of micro-budgeting filmmaking that's pulling out, you know,

all the stops with their own stop motion, and set design,

and real amateur acting.

Your friend may actually be the result of an obscene merger

of human and extraterrestrial DNA.

But it really results in this movie

that has its own little world with its own little rules.

It makes sense on its own logical timeline.

Wow.

- Disturbing Behavior.

I can distill the plot of Disturbing Behavior

in perhaps two words. Stepford and wives.

- I was just going to give you coffee.

I thought we were friends. I thought we were friends.

- There's a reason The Stepford Wives are a classic

and it actually applies very beautifully to teenagers.

What are teenagers, but you know, a force of nature

coming up against conformity.

Blue ribbons. Community group.

-Good kids. Have bake sales. -Blue robots.

James Marsden who plays the new kid in school.

He quickly realizes that something is amiss

with all the popular kids in the school.

-What the fuck? -The troops shall set you free.

And so he kind of aligns with the misfits of the school

played by Nick Stahl and Katie Holmes playing against type.

-This is Rachel Cook's Ridge trash. -Bite me.

She's a good girl in Dawson's Creek

but she's a naughty girl in Disturbing behavior,

'cause she's got a nose ring.

Gavin thinks some sinister force is taking over

-the Cradle Bay meatheads. -No, you know what it is.

It's like, "Oh, that girl from Dawson's Creek

and the kid from The Man Without a Face

and it's The Stepford Wives with teenagers. I'm there.

-They're hypnotized. -What?

Okay. Maybe not hypnotized.

Brainwashed. Lobotomized. Programmed.

The atmosphere of the town that it takes place in.

Teenage alienation, of course.

It just captures a mood and a vibe that I-- I think is

so redolent of '90s horror.

The movie is such a taut, tight, well-paced science fiction,

horror, action thriller that fires on all cylinders.

-Jesus Christ. -Wrong. Bad.

Wrong. Bad. Wrong. Bad. Bad.

James Marsden is crushing it in this movie.

You've got William Sadler and you've got Bruce Greenwood.

Two guys who are amazing character actors.

- Every time one of these kids gets a hard-on,

they go out and beat somebody with it.

Cut a craniotomy flap, I'll get elbow deep, see what happens.

Dr. Caldicott.

They find out that he's done the surgery to his own daughter. And he goes…

She wasn't that bright to begin with.

And it's like, "Oh my God, he's horrible."

Straight A's and a leather jacket and every now and then you rape and kill.

Cure cancer, you gotta kill a few white mice.

I think one of the most special things about this film

that lives rent-free in my mind was when the jock looks at her

and his hormones have this like throbbing,

sweaty hormono-vision when he's looking at her.

I think that is the teenage experience incarnate.

Mark Snow did the music score.

It's very X-Files adjacent.

May I have this dance, Steven?

Where's Rachel?

She's gone to an institute of higher learning.

If Disturbing Behavior feels a little bit different

from many of the slasher teen horror films of its ilk,

that's because director David Nutter had cut his teeth in X-Files episodes,

which kind of lends everything

a very spooky, supernatural, unique feel to it.

And I'm not just talking about the blue filter.

But as much as we loved that uniqueness, the studios did not.

And they actually wound up cutting about 30 minutes from it,

hoping for something more adjacent to Scream

and everything else that came before.

It famously has a completely rewritten ending,

because test audiences didn't connect with it.

Nobody really knew what to make of it. Is it a horror movie? What is it?

The marketing at the time, everybody was trying

to make a movie Scream.

And when it wasn't Scream, people walked out grumbling about it.

And so it wasn't able to be taken on its own.

And when you take Disturbing Behavior on its own,

it's really great.

Welcome to Cradle Bay High, Stevie Boy.

Welcome to my nightmare.

- Halloween H2O.

As a director, the sooner I embraced the business of Hollywood,

the better off I am.

And the reason they make horror films is because

some of them make a lot of money.

And they're cheap.

And it isn't because of the art, it's because of the commerce.

Coming in hot in 1998,

Halloween kind of saw an opportunity to hit the reset button

with a little bit of the meta that Scream had made

into the industry standard at the time.

Jimmy!

It's a Halloween sequel that's really aware of Scream.

It's got that Kevin Williamson, Dawson's Creek

kind of hotness to it with Michelle Williams and Josh Hartnett.

What's the plan?

Romantic dinner. Candlelight. Soft music.

Animal sex.

You need a hormone suppressant.

Kevin Williamson had been tapped to write a treatment

that this script was based upon.

The working title of this film

was, "Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode".

- Michael!

Michael!

And then you get a movie that's unnaturally short,

because the writers that were brought in were told,

"Just expand this brilliant treatment by Kevin Williamson

and don't change a thing."

And they're just kind of stretching it out in any way they can

without adding anything that messes it up.

I think it's like 85 minutes. It's like super short.

Regardless of the Screamification of the film,

it's good to see Jamie Lee Curtis back.

Jamie Lee Curtis in the time between Halloween and H2O

had become a very celebrated actress.

She was an A-lister. And the fact that she was coming back

to do a Halloween movie was like huge news to horror fans.

And that raised this to a level of expectation

that this franchise probably hadn't had in decades.

Michael Myers is dead 20 years.

Don't you think he would have shown up by now?

They were able to get her back with the promise

of reuniting with John Carpenter.

Alas, he wasn't able to strike a deal

to his satisfaction and so he doesn't return.

But Jamie did anyway. And God bless her for it.

No musical sleeping bags. No booze.

-Aww. -No drugs. No kidding.

She's running a boarding school and that's where we get our cast

of disposable teenagers for Michael Myers to slice and dice.

- It wasn't just hype. She delivered.

It was a new wrinkle on that character.

She wasn't the innocent final girl.

She was a survivor who was dealing with stuff

and she was an alcoholic as a result of it.

And it was really a kind of a deep portrayal

that maybe people weren't expecting.

But I think which really added a lot of gravitas to that movie.

What happened to the sister? She died, right?

No. She faked her death.

And now she's the headmistress of a very posh secluded

private school in Northern California.

- Steve Miner directing, ignoring everything

that happened after Halloween II

and really kind of pulling out some skills.

He did a serviceable job on Friday the 13th, 2 and 3

and I thought he did a pretty good job on Halloween H2O.

Oh, please.

The production was a little bit troubled and they were trying to land on

what the look was for the Shape mask

and so it changes about two or three times in that movie.

I think one of them is CGI.

Hi.

Making a replica is the hardest thing there is.

And I think we just see that in all the Halloween masks.

God knows they've been trying for how many movies now.

- Annie!

By the time they got to Halloween H2O, the mask just wasn't happening.

They weren't able to get it right.

Will!

Don Post Studios, which was in Burbank,

we made the original mask which was William Shatner, you know?

I sculpted a uh, Captain Kirk mask.

One day, John Carpenter and his crew showed up

and wanted me to paint one white and spray paint the hair black.

And a few months later we saw Halloween and you know,

as they say, the rest is history.

- Halloween H2O, that was a tough project.

It was a replacement score of fine composer John Ottman.

For whatever reason, they decided it didn't work

and so they wanted me to replace maybe like 60% of it.

Use the original material, but make it a little bit more

larger than life.

Oh! Oh my God, oh!

They gave me like a week and a half or two weeks,

something crazy to write, you know, over half the score.

I didn't enjoy it at all.

-Mom! -Oh my God!

Oh! Oh my God!

Well, the thing about H2O is I really wasn't involved at all with it.

Jamie Lee wanted me to direct it.

There just wasn't money in it.

It was the Weinsteins and they were rough trade.

So I said, "No, thank you."

I tried to write something for them, but it didn't work out, so.

Anyway, enough said.

They have their just desserts. We all get our just desserts in the end.

Well hey, it's Halloween.

I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare.

- Blade.

Howard the Duck might have been the first Marvel adaptation,

but Blade takes the cake.

This movie is so goth.

- It's Blade. It's the daywalker.

You can't talk about Blade without talking about

that club scene set to New Order's Confusion.

A guy is walking into a club

and it's this very cool, very sexy vibe.

Blood comes down from the sprinklers

and you realize everybody in this club is a vampire.

What's wrong, baby?

An amazing, incredible introduction of a badass character.

And it's one of those introductions where you know

who that character is immediately.

So fucking cool.

You can only really know perfect casting in hindsight,

but Wesley Snipes as Blade makes absolute sense.

There's worse things out tonight than vampires.

-Like what? -Like me.

He leaned into that role so much and he knew what the character was.

Crosses and running water don't do dicks, so forget what you've seen in the movies.

You use a stake, silver or sunlight.

He's a really fascinating anti-hero, 'cause he needs blood as well.

He is a half-human, half-vampire. They call him, the "Daywalker",

because he's able to walk out in daylight

and he's slaying vampires left, right, and center.

You better wake up.

The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping.

There is another world beneath it. The real world.

So in the movie we have him coming up against

a whole coven of vampires with designs

on world domination and he just busts them up.

Going around L.A. killing hipster vampires.

Yeah.

Wesley Snipes had an incredible supporting cast.

You had N'Bushe Wright as Karen, the doctor

and also his love interest.

You have a lot of love for him, don't you?

We have a good arrangement.

He makes the weapons. I use 'em.

Kris Kristofferson is kind of his “Q” and his mentor.

Still heavy.

You're so big.

And Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost, the villain in the role.

We should be ruling the human, not running around

making back alley treaties with them.

For fuck's sake, these people are our food.

And also Donal Logue as one of the henchmen

who like stole every scene he was in.

You can slice him, you can dice him, but the Quinn man just keeps on coming.

There's a sub-genre of superhero horror that was birthed with Blade.

He was the epitome of cool.

He had dark, form-fitting clothes.

He had a samurai sword. And he wore sunglasses at night.

It doesn't get cooler than that.

- I believe it was Blade that honestly kicked off

the superhero surgence that we are still living through today.

Because Blade was the first real superhero movie

that showed it could be done in a realistic

and grounded, believable way.

And also make money.

Hey Blade! Let's do this.

- August, much like January, was considered a dumping ground

for movies that the studio didn't care about.

And like Blade proved that a movie released in August

could make money.

So Blade's release expanded the summer movie season

to go from May and July, from May to August.

The movie was gangbusters.

It was a huge hit, spawning a sequel,

helmed by Guillermo del Toro, and then a third one as well,

wrapping up a nice trilogy.

Blade is a great franchise.

The first movie, Steve Norrington, a friend of mine, did a great, great job.

And then really, Guillermo kind of elevated it with Blade II.

He was the James Cameron to Ridley Scott.

You know, he kind of took something and made something

slightly different with it, which I thought was great.

Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill.

We are the key.

The cube, is us.

Cube is about six strangers who wake up in a maze

of identical rooms that are all cubes.

Some rooms are safe, and some rooms have booby traps,

and they have to work together to find a way to escape.

There's a way in here, so there's gotta be a way out.

We can avoid the traps using the boot.

We just have to stay calm and work together as a team.

I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if you made a film

that took place entirely in hell?"

And then I thought, "What is the 21st century version of hell?

What's our contemporary version?"

And I thought, "It would be a geometric hell.

It would be a Bauhaus hell.

It would be modern architecture. It would be mathematical."

Of course, coded Cartesian coordinates.

The numbers tell us where we are inside the cube.

- The writing of it, which I did with my lifelong friend André Bijelic,

I just sort of stumbled on this very archetypal concept

and for that reason it resonated.

The initial draft that I wrote entirely on my own

was much more absurdist and fantastical.

There was moss on the walls, and there was a kind of Minotaur,

although not really, in the maze, and it just had a lot of stuff.

I usually find in writing it's about,

after that first draft, it's about pulling things away.

- Only the government could build something this ugly.

-Oh, it ain't government. -Then what is it?

-I don't know. -Aliens.

These people should arrive in the cube with nothing

but the clothes on their back.

There's nothing there to help them, and the ticking clock of the movie is

they're gonna starve or die of dehydration.

Heat, stress, physical exertion as the body

eventually begins to break down its own tissue.

Cube, like many horror films,

I think it's dealing with something very primal.

It is tweaking a nerve that felt a bit raw at that moment

in the mid-'90s.

It's like an existential nerve.

It was like a sense of like, "Well, what are we doing here?

What is our future?"

- I mean, nobody wants to see the big picture.

Life's too complicated. Let's face it.

The reason we're here is that it's out of control.

- The set itself was one and a half cubes.

So when desired, we could have a cube that was six walls

plus a cube that was three walls.

So you could carry the characters from one room to another.

You always had a view into another room.

And we could pull out one wall from the six-wall cube,

which is generally how we shot the film.

But the problem with that was that only gave me

a 180-degree view.

It shows the magic of cinema that it feels like

a fully-enclosed set.

Merde.

I'm sure I'd be the first person to die in the cube.

I wouldn't last a minute.

My favorite death in Cube is the first one,

played by the ubiquitous Julian Richings,

who gets literally cubed by a wire mesh.

We met this amazing makeup effects company called, "Caligari",

and they built a silicone replica, which was basically a building block set.

You just stacked it all together,

and on the very last day, the very last shot,

which came after 30 consecutive hours of shooting,

we shot Julian being cubed.

And we got it in one take. Thank God.

Life imitated art on the Cube, because being in the cube

was a kind of psychological experiment.

Because the cube itself was lit by literally thousands

of 100 watt bulbs outside of the plexiglass walls.

So, in a very short order, it became an oven.

And then, add to that, the colors of the walls

had an impact on people psychologically.

And there's no question that when we were in the red room,

that's when people kind of went crazy.

But I think in a positive way, it kind of bled into the performances.

Like there was a real tension on the set.

Put us out of your misery, so we can get on with getting out of here.

-Oh, you're not getting out of here. -Yes, we are!

There is no way out of here!

We never really had enough money or time to do the movie,

as is often the case.

So, it was a super intense hard process that nearly killed me.

In fact, literally so, because at one point,

the set almost collapsed on top of me.

You would think shooting in a box would be really easy,

but it's not. It's horrible.

There is a purpose.

We are the purpose. The cube is us.

That movie was made at a time

when the independent film market was very robust.

The video market, which is really where in North America, Cube found its audience.

I think if Cube were made now, unless we were really lucky,

it wouldn't have that kind of life that films could have at that time.

It has survived.

Like, it's a kind of film that you could watch now

and maybe not know when it was made.

I'm touched and flattered that there are sequels to Cube

and a remake, but I never wanted to have anything to do with the sequels,

'cause it was kind of only one story to tell in the Cube that I could see.

I'd have to calculate the number of factors in each set.

-Figure it out. -I can't!

I'm not dying in a fucking rat maze!

It's about how we are all dropped into this world

without being given any kind of formula or math

as to how to live our lives.

And we're here with other people with whom we choose

to make allies or enemies.

Kind of defines the road that we take.

I think on some level that's really what the movie is about.

You've got to save yourselves from yourselves.

That's the real challenge.

Someone out there is taking all these urban legends

and making them reality.

- Urban Legend.

Scream really did pave the way for other horror movies

that were a little bit different.

We've all heard these urban legends, I think.

I mean, everyone I know has heard them,

especially the Pop Rocks and the Coca-Cola,

Flashing your lights.

I don't know how before internet it circulated, but it did.

It was, you know,

someone's friend's brother's uncle's sister's son.

This really happened to them.

Urban Legend is about these college kids who are getting killed off one by one.

And the hook is people are being killed with Urban Legends.

A call's coming from inside the house.

Could it be an urban legend?

- Jamie Blanks, the director of Urban Legend.

Talk about someone else who shares an affinity for horror movies.

This guy knows everything about horror movies.

You would never know that Jamie Blanks was a first-time director,

because he really knew what he was doing.

Working with him, you would just watch him

and it was like watching a kid in a candy shop.

He was like giddy. Every day. Giddy.

- The fact that Jamie cast Brad Dourif and Robert Englund

was a clear nod to the horror community.

Someone's in the back seat!

- When we had Robert Englund on the set, we were both starstruck.

I had him sign my Fangoria Magazine.

The babysitter and the man upstairs

is what we call, "an urban legend".

The cast of Urban Legend is impressive

and I think it says a lot about what was going on at that time,

because every actor wanted to do a horror movie.

It felt like we were just at camp.

Rebecca Gayheart, the face of Noxzema. Right?

She was beautiful inside out.

And Brenda's the girl in that Noxzema commercial.

-What if there is a lunatic on campus? -Fine with me.

I'm hitting the halfpipe at Killington this weekend.

When I read the script for Urban Legend,

I immediately was like, "I want to play Brenda Bates.

I have to play Brenda."

Is this what you do with your free time, Damon?

Just hang out in the dark by yourself

waiting to scare people like a total freak?

Initially, they wanted it to be shot in the winter.

This dark gray college campus and that did not work out

for the shooting schedule for the movie.

So, you know, we all had to pivot and it was hot out.

It was summertime in Toronto.

When I think about Scream 2, going from that set

to Urban Legend, I just had more to do.

So there was a lot more work. So I had to focus more.

You don't waste any time, do you, Natalie?

-Brenda! -Here. It's light.

The choice for the killer to wear the parka,

I believe it was a throwback to the poster of The Thing,

which I think is smart.

- They gave us a parka for our gift.

They gave the whole crew and cast. I still have mine.

I'm the only one who has my Urban Legend parka.

There were a lot of stuff cut that I was bummed about.

Like there was a sex scene. Why do they always cut my sex scene?

Tara Reid and I had a sex scene.

We're going at it and Hootie, my dog, comes over

and has a finger in its mouth.

"Jamie, whose finger was that?" Maybe that's why it got cut. I don't know.

One of the kills in one of the Urban Legends

that I did not like and I did not approve of

was the dog in the microwave. I hated that so much.

Goddamn. Fucking sick motherfucker!

As an actor, when you read the script,

you're like, "I'm still alive. I'm still alive.

Ah, shit. They got me. But at least I lasted.

I think there's only 15 pages left.

Alright. That's good. That's good."

I got the Pop Rocks and Drano and that was hard to shoot,

'cause I was tied up to a turlet,

as we call it in Indiana, and they just put that funnel down my mouth

and they're pouring all this stuff.

You're like, "Ah!" And you're moving your body.

Your whole body hurts for a week after these scenes.

I still have a Polaroid picture of me dead, lying on the ground.

It was a great death.

I think the killer in the back seat

is probably the scariest and I think we've all checked.

We've all thought about it.

I still check sometimes.

Spoiler alert to those of you who don't know,

Brenda Bates is indeed the killer.

Got ya.

And there's very few female serial killers at all in movies, period.

Is this the kidney? Or is that the liver?

I was always such a dope in anatomy.

I wanted the audience to understand

why she was so hurt that she sort of became mentally ill

and went to this place.

Oh my God.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!

- As a cast, we saw a rough cut.

So, at the premiere, it felt like the first time

watching the movie.

Of course, I wanted to disappear.

It's horrible as an actress watching movies

with other people, if I'm in it.

If I'm in the movie, I prefer watching by myself.

I have already tried therapy!

Obviously, it did me no good, Natalie.

And I must say, I am kind of enjoying all this.

The only thing I was worried about as an actor is not getting fired.

It was my first big role.

I was not just in the movie, but I was into the movie.

There were some great scares and I just was really proud

that it was such a good-looking movie and it did what it was supposed to do.

- Don't you want to be an urban legend?

All your friends are now.

The fans of Urban Legend, they love Brenda. And I love that.

So it's really fun if someone ever comes up

and mentions it to me.

We have a good laugh about it.

We are still talking about it. They are doing a remake.

There's been an Urban Legend 2.

I like the legacy. I like that it lives on.

My kids are teenagers.

I have taken 15 years off from acting.

I've done tiny cameos, but otherwise I haven't worked in a very long time.

I think I would definitely return to the horror genre.

I want to get my hands back into all mediums.

So if this is an urban legend, at what point do we get to the twist?

Want to play ball, Scarecrow.

- Strangeland.

Horror has always played around with the idea

of what's real and what's not.

There were tons of stories of people,

they didn't even call it catfishing back then,

but everybody was worried about their young daughter,

people going into a chat room,

and the bad things that could happen to you,

because you don't know who's on the other side.

You're going on a blind date with a screen name?

- Where have you been?

Someday we'll meet, marry, and have cybersex with the man

of our dreams online.

Strangeland was completely intended to be a cautionary tale.

And what would you do if your child was kidnapped,

if your child was being tortured?

The original Strangeland was called, "Helltown",

and it was just a slasher movie.

Captain Howdy came from a couple of Twisted Sister songs,

and I sent it to my friend Tom Savini,

who had done special effects on a Twisted Sister video

called, "Be Chrool to Your Scuel".

♪ Be cool to your school ♪

♪ 'Cause you may never get another ♪

And Tom called me and said, "It sucks."

And I took a eight-hour train ride from Long Island

to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

to sit at the knee of Tom Savini, a man who knows horror.

And he explained how mundane what I was doing,

how derivative what I was doing, and why it was not scary.

And I started thinking about horror, thinking about what scared me.

When you're bound and helpless, that's terrifying.

And what's scarier than dying?

Suffering. Being tortured, and not dying.

- Sure, it is a touchy operation, and God forbid,

you hit the cavernosum. Blood squirts everywhere.

I owe Tom Savini for pushing me to go further,

go deeper, think more.

Inspiration for Strangeland was Seven, was Silence of the Lambs.

Movies grounded in reality. It could happen.

I got the idea. I said, "You know, wow, this AOL thing,

these chat rooms, you could really do some damage with that."

And I experimented and I said,

"You know, I'm going to create a personality that's a teenager,

lives in the next town", and I went to the chat room, and I said,

"Let me see if I can get some of these young girls to agree

to come over to my house."

And mind you, I'm in my 40s at the time.

Sure enough, I said, "Hey, wanna come to a party?"

And this young girl goes, "Where? When?"

And I said, "Oh shit!"

And I remember literally yanking the plug out of the wall,

'cause I was like, "Holy crap, it worked!"

Where's my daughter, Hendricks?

Genevieve's with me.

I'm taking especially good care of her.

By the way, the name, "Captain Howdy", it comes from The Exorcist.

You really don't want me to play, huh?

No, I do. Captain Howdy said no.

I was tired of watching Chucky and Leprechaun.

I didn't want people liking the villain.

I wanted people to be terrified of the villain.

Here he comes.

I started to discover the modern primitive movement,

the body modification movement.

In the mid-'90s, it was not as widely as acceptable.

It was still sort of a Dark Corners kind of thing.

And incorporated that into my character.

He spews the rhetoric, but he doesn't believe a word of it.

He uses it like it's an excuse for everything he does.

But he just wants to hurt people.

This pain is an important part of our bonding.

Physical horror that binds us even tighter.

- Carleton Hendricks, his alter ego, is a completely different person.

Bright windows in this life of ours,

lit by the shining souls of men.

You know, he's mentally unstable, obviously.

But he actually needs to be medicated.

I haven't been afraid of anything in my whole life.

Do you know why? Because I wish I was dead.

- Special effects legend Michael Burnett,

he did that stuff and the piercings and all that. Took 12 hours.

So I would get there at midnight.

We'd finish at noon the next day.

Then we'd shoot until midnight the next day.

There were times where I was doing rewrites

in full Captain Howdy regalia.

Sitting there at the typewriter.

Fortunately, I had youth, and enthusiasm,

and also just this joy of having something I had created

being brought to life.

What a rush!

Credit to Linda Cardellini, a brilliant young actress

who was unknown at that time.

She's a chatterbox.

The toughest thing for Linda was when she had the prosthetic on

and couldn't talk for a couple hours.

When they would open it up, she's like, "Thank God!"

-You. -Want to play ball, Scarecrow?

Robert Englund, when he read the script

and said he would be a victim to my villain,

Freddy Krueger was gonna allow himself to be tortured

and tormented by my bad guy.

When he's in the cradle, his eyes sewn shut,

his mouth sewn shut, and he just fed the fires of fear.

Fed the fires of fear! Ooh, write that down.

Somebody write that down!

You don't like me very much, do you, Jackson?

I understand.

The MPAA was mortified by Strangeland.

They were approving every slasher film in the world

without thinking about it twice.

In most of the movie, I didn't show the actual torture itself.

I showed the reactions.

Strangeland came out and it just laid there.

It wasn't embraced.

People were thrown by it, if anything.

First you dream, and then you die.

I really thought that as ready as I was as a horror fan

for something new and fresh,

people were going to be all over this thing.

And it was like, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."

And it took a little more time before the Saws, and the Hostels,

and the other, you know, torture genre movies started coming out.

And people started embracing it.

But it changed the game for some young creators out there,

like James Wan and like Eli Roth

who were like myself, saying, "What can we do that's different?

How can we change this up?"

You know, Daddy, so Genevieve screamed.

I've had many, many, many people tell me

they had their children watch that to scare them away,

to make them aware of the possibilities of the internet.

So much flesh, so little time.

Phantasm franchise, it has had its ups and downs,

but as long as the Tall Man is there,

as long as those silver spheres are wreaking havoc, I'm there.

So it begins.

This weird mishmash of horror and sci-fi,

what makes the Phantasm films so good is that

they feel gritty and independent.

They don't need a massive budget.

All you need is that guy, and the voice, and the balls.

You have to have the balls if you're gonna have a Phantasm movie.

You wanna get it on, Reggie.

Phantasm Oblivion, or Phantasm IV, it's an origin story, really.

Kind of. Phantasm style.

So we're gonna go back a little bit in time through the magic of space gates

and we're gonna see the Tall Man during the Civil War.

We're gonna see that he was a Civil War doctor.

It all went bad from there. Lesson? War is bad.

Filmmaking is a challenge. It's a bit like going to war a little bit.

It's a battle every day. There's many, many moving parts.

And to hold all those parts together is definitely a challenge.

It can be thrilling, and it's super fun, and it can be rewarding.

You call up your local Civil War reenactors and like,

"Hey man, let's make a movie." And they say, "Where do we show up?"

- Where do you think you're going, boy?

There is no escape from me.

It's nice to see Angus getting an opportunity

to play not quite such a scowl.

Have we met?

I don't believe so.

Have you traveled far?

Don Coscarelli and I, of course, have been making movies together

since 1975 roughly.

Phantasm Oblivion came around and I wasn't particularly motivated.

So I said, "Well, let me produce the movie and that'll give me some gumption."

I've been kind of running away from my own acting career

my whole life since I started so young.

And for that reason, I never, never recommend

that kids become professional actors.

I think it's a mistake, frankly.

Oblivion comes along and so now I'm producing the film with Don

and he's a good teacher and we worked pretty well together, I think.

Coscarelli, he saved all that original negative from Phantasm.

It's unique in that he's able to take these old unused pieces

of the original Phantasm and edit them into the new story

in Oblivion, which you could say is a cost-saving measure.

But also, since it's the same actors,

it's a pretty cool side-by-side display of what can be done.

In the original Phantasm,

there was a whole two or three nights, at least,

spent in Agoura, California, shooting this hanging tree scene.

Why a 13-year-old is working at 4:00 in the morning,

I don't know, but you know, that's a story for another day.

And then none of that footage ends up in the film.

Cut me down, boy!

Coscarelli's able to save that footage, bring it back, put it into Oblivion,

tie it into the hanging scene in the desert,

where adult Mike is now hanging himself, which is pretty sad

when you think about it. But it's a nice tie-in.

And you know, Don is smart that way.

"So you got some old footage, can you make it work?

Can you save a few bucks?

Can you tie it into something that's happening now?"

And it all works pretty nicely together.

Boy!

I remember when Oblivion first came out, fans, at least,

were pretty blown away by the so-called found footage.

Watching movies is just so different than actually making them.

Oftentimes, when we look at a film that we have worked on,

you know, you see the things that went wrong that day

or you remember, you know, the bad lunch.

Or that, "Oh, that's when the movie almost crashed and died.

I remember that. That was great. That was fantastic."

You remember the battles and the challenging aspects

of just filmmaking generally, which is not an easy task.

I think the budget was about 800,000 bucks for that movie,

so with micro-budgets like that, you know, small errors,

small mistakes, small mishaps get big very quickly.

He's coming for me. He's gonna rip open my skull,

and there's nothing I can do about it.

So, by the time you're looking at that film and it's completed,

and the post is done, you're seeing--

you're watching a first rough cut, let's say,

you're so relieved to not have to be actually making the movie

that it all seems great.

'Cause you really wouldn't probably want to go over and do it again.

This won't hurt a bit.

Well, maybe just a little bit.

The outlier the franchise of Phantasm.

We all love the franchise. I personally grew up in it.

It's certainly gratifying that it has had legs all these years later.

We certainly did not know that was gonna happen.

I've been waiting for you a very long time.

- Bride of Chucky. - ♪ It's nice day for white wedding ♪

Films that explore the darkly humorous

with the hyper-violent gory, they're very important films to me.

So when a film like Bride of Chucky comes along,

"Oh, this is right up my alley."

Because it's dirty, the sense of humor is raunchy,

it's so funny.

-Chucky? He's so '80s. -No he's not.

-He isn’t even scary. -Yes, he is.

What you looking at punk? Looking at me?

Bride of Chucky evolved the story.

Don Mancini kind of decided to go full tilt crazy with this.

And there was no limitations.

Ain't the size that counts, asshole.

It's what you do with it.

Bride of Chucky,

we came back six years after Child's Play 3.

The horror landscape has been changed.

Largely by Kevin Williamson and his meta self-conscious spirit.

How you been?

-Okay. You? -Peachy.

Actually to tell you the truth, I've been kinda out of it.

David Kirschner who was the producer on all of the Chucky movies

always saw the comedic potential in Chucky.

We created new characters.

The character of Tiffany, the bride of Chucky.

Charles Lee Ray's paramour back in life.

You son of a bitch! What did you do to me?

And then we sent her on these two new teenagers

played by Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile.

It was a whole new ball game.

You know my neighbor Tiffany?

She's paying me $500 to take a couple of dolls

to a friend of hers in Jersey.

I knew from the get-go that we had to get Jennifer Tilly.

That she was the one person who could really

knock that out of the park.

The studio didn't want to pay for her so David Kirschner and I

pooled together our own money to get her.

And we have never regretted that.

Barbie, eat your heart out.

- Tiffany is her own woman. Plastic or otherwise.

Gives Chucky a run for his money.

God's sake, Chucky, drag yourself into the '90s.

Stabbings went out with Bundy and Dahmer.

You look like Martha Stewart with that thing.

I love the fact that even a homicidal maniacal

reincarnated serial killer as a doll needs a little lovin', too.

Tiffany, will you be my bride?

Oh, Chucky. Yes.

How fun is this movie? We get a doll on doll sex scene.

Kind of illustrates the vibe of this movie and where the franchise, whoo, veers off

and goes in a completely different direction beginning with Bride.

-Have I got a rubber? -Yeah.

-Tiff. -What?

- Look at me. I'm all rubber.

Ronnie Yu was suggested to us by my agent

at the time at Gersh.

Because of the camp and the comedy,

we knew that its visual presentation needed to be stylized.

There was some pushback from the studio about that.

I think it was reinvigorating for the Chucky franchise.

Bride of Chucky, I could take quite a different

point of view some strange little voices, you know, "Ooh, ooh."

That sort of weird stuff.

Whatever was in the bag we'll see how that works.

It's certainly the one that I hear most people

enjoy the most out of the franchise.

Life sure is full of surprises.

- It's always quite fun to write, you know, to set up a scare

or the red herring, where everybody thinks

it's about to be a scare, but actually it isn't.

It comes about two seconds later.

I love that about the genre.

The "Franken-Chucky look" as we called it.

I think I just wanted to give Chucky damage

to his face in different ways.

I think it's fun to give him a new look for every era.

I spend an unholy amount of time thinking about Chucky.

So I have all kinds of concepts for characters, and kills,

and situations that are just filed away.

There is, I think, an implied humor

when that kind of grandiose violence is committed

by this little doll.

He just like, instigates these kind of Rube Goldberg situations.

Now!

Why does that look so familiar?

He and Tiffany in that movie have a kind of competition going on.

You know, like, "How can we one-up ourselves?"

Now that's the work of a true homicidal genius.

Not bad for an amateur.

The whole experience of Bride of Chucky was great.

It was very positive.

It was one of those movies where everything went right.

I sort of came into my own as a writer with that script.

- I wonder if all the plumbing works.

Well, I don't know about you,

but I'm starting to feel like Pinocchio here.

It was great working with Jennifer Tilly for the first time.

I didn't know it at the time

that she would become one of my best friends

and one of my biggest working colleagues still to this day.

And I think that the studio unlike with Child's Play 3,

you know, they were very behind the movie,

and I think they did a great job marketing it and selling it.

It was a swell experience.

Well, at least you haven't forgotten how to show a girl a good time.

- From the master of terror comes a new breed of evil.

John Carpenter's Vampires.

Perhaps, the last kick-ass John Carpenter movie

that just does not get enough love these days.

I'm not giving a thumbs up.

I'll concede that it could be considered in some circles as a guilty pleasure.

Oh, he's getting close

-to agreeing with me. -Yeah, but uh…

What would happen if you really find a nest of vampires?

John Carpenter's Vampires is set in the New Mexican desert.

How's it look?

Like another New Mexican shithole.

Perfect spot for a nest.

The master vampire, Valek, has come up out of the earth

with his minions and is ruling the town of Santiago.

James Woods leads a group of vampire hunters

who are every bit as tough as the vampires.

The good guy gang versus the bad guy gang.

It was like an old western.

Vampires I thought was an interesting idea.

I adapted it.

I was in my western Peckinpah Robert Aldrich mood

when I made that.

Felt like New Mexico really made that western edge come out for us.

It was a great one of those creeping around the corners

and boo kind of deals.

Now fire!

Well, they were rats in my movie. They were hiding in the dark.

And then you bring 'em out in the light.

-There! -Stake her!

Montoya, we got a fish! Go!

It's kind of my favorite thing in the movie was

where we drag out the dummies and the stunt guys

and they would ignite in flames screaming and everything.

Enjoy the barbecue, baby.

So we had a lot of crossover with stunts and pyro.

I got to do some of the unusual casting with James Woods as an action hero.

He longed to do that.

He was a challenging actor for a guy, but I got along with him real well.

You can't ever tell James Woods what to do.

He's gonna do what he does. But you can kind of corral him.

He did some scenes that were just completely improv,

but they were so wonderful.

He's going to start receiving his thoughts, seeing what he sees.

Exactly.

So we can find him and shove a stake right up his ass.

I'm really happy with the result and it was worth every second of it.

You never told me they could do that. I didn't know they could do that.

I felt like we really scored on the casting.

Thomas Ian Griffith had all the sensuality and sexiness

you want in a master vampire.

I really loved the really sexy scene between Thomas Ian Griffith and Sheryl Lee

when it's like really a seduction scene when he goes after her.

Doesn't it feel beautiful?

Something you'll never forget.

Sheryl Lee is an awesome individual. I loved her.

It depends on the actor whether or not I struggle in naked scenes.

I take their guide, because I'm just appreciative

that they do it.

I was happy that Sheryl did it for me.

She said, "Is it necessary?" I said, "Yes", and she was right with it.

- A master vampire has a telepathic link with his victims.

You're gonna help us find them.

You had these rowdy vampire slayers who are partying

with a bunch of hookers in a motel.

We give you the salaciousness.

Tell the lady what we do for a living.

Kill vampires. Hunt 'em down. Kick the shit out of 'em.

The massacre at the motel was fun largely,

because Mark Boone Jr. got completely freaked out

by his double that KNB had made that got split in half.

You know, where he would look over at it and just kind of go, "Whoa."

We did this really cool dummy that's there for a moment

and then it just kind of peels into two sections.

- He was just like, "Damn."

And that was actually the scene that was being shot

when we got into the super-soaker fight full of blood all over the set.

Those were all spirited actors.

That's about as far as I can go with that one.

Everybody has a good time. These are old rock and rollers, man.

It's hard to keep up with them when you're a young guy

like I was at the time.

Man, can they party. Whew. Lord.

Okay, boys. Time to mop it up.

- Mother! Oh God! Mother!

Gus Van Sant makes Good Will Hunting, which is a fantastically great movie.

Wins Oscars. Everybody's happy.

He's the toast of the town.

Next thing you know, "What do you want to do next, Gus?"

And so he decides to make a shot-for-shot,

cut-for-cut remake of Psycho of all movies.

Why remake Psycho, Gus?

- I won't have you bringing strange young girls in for supper

in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds.

- Shut up!

When you take a part of something and you use it a little differently,

it's still a creative choice that is different

from the thing you're stealing it from.

I understand that it was kind of an art project,

but I just think it's so hard to get movies made.

So if you have that golden ticket to do anything,

do not waste it on remaking a masterpiece.

- It's not as if she were a maniac or a raving thing.

She just goes a little mad sometimes.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

In 1960, when they made Psycho, the original Psycho,

if you take that dialogue exactly the way it was,

it doesn't work in modern actors' voices.

It just sounds funny, sounds stilted, fake.

Taking the original script and redoing it,

it just didn't work for me.

Do you have a vacancy?

Oh, we have 12 in fact. 12 cabins. 12 vacancies.

It does have a great cast. The performances are good.

Everybody's doing a great job. These are all super pro people.

They know what to do.

'Cause I've been to so many motels, my eyes are blurry with the neon.

But you know, this is the first one that looks like

it's hiding from the world.

Almost a shot-for-shot remake.

A lot of people are very dismissive of it.

I find it very interesting as an experiment,

and so I'm glad that it exists.

Every experiment has some value.

That Gus Van Sant did this experiment on Universal's dime is kind of awesome.

I fully respect that grift.

-Anyone at home? -There's someone sitting up in the window.

Oh, that's my mother.

She's an-- an in-- invalid.

For some reason, horror films are probably the most remade films of any genre.

The good remakes are very innovative.

They work, because they in no way imitate the original.

- Norman Bates no longer exists.

He only half existed to begin with.

Now, the other half has taken over.

Looking at the Psycho remake now,

it feels like a kind of satirical commentary on remake culture.

And I think it has value.

If the Psycho remake came at the end of the remake cycle of the 2000s,

it would be a brilliant commentary on that cycle.

But it's first.

So, in a weird way, in '98, we didn't know what to do with it.

Don't you go out? W-- with friends?

Uh, a boy's best friend's his mother.

I strongly support the remaking of movies that have good premises,

but were not fully realized the first time.

The ones that had promise, but what they always do

is remake the films that they did get right the first time.

You can show this to film students and say,

"This is what they said they were going to do.

They said they were gonna do a shot for shot remake

and each shot will be the same length and this and that,

but everything else they're going to try to change."

So it's garishly colorful where the original wasn't.

The costumes are all different.

Anything that doesn't adhere to the thing they said

they were going to do, they go wildly

in another direction just to see how that would play.

Norman Bates is peeping through the peephole at Anne Heche

and he's now masturbating.

I'm pretty sure that's not in the Hitchcock's version.

Why did they break the rule for that? I don't know.

I think they were sitting around the campfire and you know,

"I know what we'll do next. This is gonna be great."

I remember actively wondering and thinking

if they were going to really pull the rug out from under the audience

and when they get to the big scene, the shower scene,

that it would take a turn.

Literally like something like Marion would kill Norman or something.

And I remember thinking, "I hope they fucking do that."

When, of course, they didn't.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake is a good way

to learn why the original is so good.

Watching it after watching the remake,

it kind of wakes up your brain to the choices

that are happening in the original.

There are some films that should just be left alone,

because they exist within the space and time that they were created.

That's the way I look at it.

And in some cases, they were just created by masters

that should be fucking left alone.

Mrs. Bates.

I really think that that was a cautionary tale

for anyone who has tremendous success

and can do whatever they want to do and waste it.

And I'm sorry, Gus Van Sant, 'cause I think he's a very, very gifted filmmaker

but I think that was a-- on every possible level,

a complete failure and thank God, it failed,

because if it hadn't, we would have had to have sat through

a shot by shot remake of every successful horror film

starting with The Exorcist.

- Why she wouldn't even harm a fly.

- The Faculty.

The Faculty is another thunderclap of the '90s

in the teen-slasher cycle.

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Robert Rodriguez,

it deals in a high school milieu with a lot of the conventional

high-schooler tropes.

You've got the outsider,

and the nerd, and the jock and the druggie.

But they all come together when the school

is becoming overrun by an alien life form

that's just infecting everybody and turning them

into tentacle creatures.

No fucking way.

A fantastic film, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers

and also a John Hughes high-school flick.

It was all of the hot teen actors.

Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall.

So it was kind of like the '90s Brat Pack horror movie.

- And that was something we kind of all felt

in high school, I think.

That most of your teachers were aliens.

At least, I did.

Good morning, Mrs. Olsen. You look very, very pretty today.

The metaphor going on in The Faculty, I think,

is really clever.

They say a lot about high school conformity.

I really love how the plot involves these kids

stepping out of their comfort zone.

Man, the only person in this school who's an alien is you, man.

Fuck you, Zeke.

This film also had a tremendous tie-in with Tommy Hilfiger,

where they were appearing in these fashion ads.

It was a real pop culture phenomenon.

Tommy Jeans make a scene!

The Faculty for me was like a movie

where I could apply all of my horror knowledge.

I knew what the movie was doing

and I felt like superior to my friends in that, like,

"This is Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And hey, that scene is like a direct homage

to the test scene in John Carpenter's The Thing."

Easy, boy.

- What about you, Zeke?

How do we know you're not one of those fucking things?

For me, that was like, "Alright, we can all pull

from the horror movies that influenced us",

which I continue to do today.

There's nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.

-We're everywhere. -I'll fucking shoot her.

It's about the suspense, and for me, it's about the lead-up.

I'm more into like creature films, like The Faculty,

are over just straight-up gore films.

Robert's an interesting guy. I really liked him a lot.

I had a studio in Santa Monica, and he would come by,

and he'd listen to stuff. He loved everything.

And then when we were scoring, he's sitting on the back,

noodling on his guitar.

I didn't do any Spanish guitar type stuff at all for that score.

Any of that-- those choices were all made by him after the score.

- Oh, come on!

♪ We don't need no thought control ♪

In The Faculty, they did covers of a lot of songs.

Alice Cooper, for instance, a sign of the times.

- Creed, Soul Asylum, and more.

The Faculty, in stores now.

The soundtrack is banging

and the special effects are absolutely incredible.

We did what was kind of the last big animatronic monster, I believe.

Run!

- Big computer-controlled slave system puppeteered rigs

that were hydraulic,

and it took a lot of work and cost a lot of money.

And I thought it blended seamlessly with the CG.

Every movie had to have everything CGI,

and that was it on any of the big monsters.

It's hard to watch The Faculty

after you've seen The Puppet Masters in theaters a few years before,

so it's Scream-Puppet Masters?

I always wanted to do that.

Later on, as you grow older and you're not you know,

a 20-something dorkish video store clerk, you go,

"That's actually a really cool mix-up. Like that was actually pretty rad."

Report to the principal's office.

LEFT-HANGING: UNMADE '90S HORROR PROJECTS

I have a permanent office in development hell.

That's where I live.

It's really come to a point where horror films

almost, by definition, have to be low-budget.

Because there is a dedicated audience for horror film,

but it's not a four-quadrant audience.

Your grandmother, your little sister, may not want to see a horror film.

And so, that's why development hell exists,

especially for people like me.

Because we're trying to do things that are not for everybody.

And we're trying to convince the money people

that they're for more people than maybe they think they are.

I don't see anything less than a miracle.

One of the things that prepares you for writing horror

is experiencing the horror of Hollywood.

You know, David Puttnam once said, "You haven't really been to Hollywood

unless you've curled up in a ball crying in a hotel room.

Creature from the Black Lagoon was one that we were developing

for Universal right around the time they were shooting Jurassic Park.

At the time, it was felt that genre pictures

only made money if they were made for $15 million or less.

I think the greatest thing with Universal classic monsters is

they're not the monster.

They're the victim.

You can always tell who isn't a horror fan

by whether they try and make the monster the monster

instead of the victim

and that we're the monster for going after 'em.

This is hand-painted and done by Rick Baker.

It's beautiful.

This is what the creature would have looked like.

I brought this in to show Tom Pollock,

president of Universal, along with the budget

and he had already read the script and it was coming in

at about $25 or $30 million, because it was an underwater show.

Also, the materials to make a suit could survive for a length of time

and hold up and do all the things.

Building sets underwater and shooting a creature underwater.

So, Tom Pollock, he thought it was great

and he said, "This is just too expensive."

And he goes, "Right now I've got this $80 million

fucking lizard picture.

It's gonna bankrupt the studio."

And that, of course, was Jurassic Park.

It's why the creature didn't get made at that time.

Then, of course, we all know that Jurassic

went on to be this gigantic hit and I sent Tom a "congratulations

on your fucking lizard picture" note.

I was gonna do a remake of The Gate That I worked on for a while.

'Cause I loved the original so much, I was gonna do 3D.

Andras Hamori, who produced the original Gate, brought it to me.

He was actually a fan of mine and he particularly liked

my Ben 10 movies, which were very kid Jeopardy movies.

I wanted to make kind of like Saving Private Ryan with kids

and sort of that visceral experience

of being kind of abandoned by your parents over a weekend.

Just complete warfare that takes place between these kids

and these minions.

Minions were gonna be a combination of CG and animatronic, and stop motion.

And then Stranger Things happened.

Now I just feel like the audiences have seen this.

You know, they've seen sort of kids in the supernatural

in that way, and it just felt pointless

or like a knock-off and I didn't want to do a knock-off

so I just said, "That's done."

Apparently, uh, Roger Avery and Tarantino were both

big Phantasm fans and had hung out with Coscarelli a little bit

before they were huge and famous.

Next thing you know they win an Oscar for Pulp Fiction

and Roger Avery kind of like, "I'm going to Disneyland."

He says something along the lines of, "I'm gonna write a Phantasm movie."

And then he does and he writes Phantasm 1999

which is a cool script, you know of course, he wrote it.

Does not come to fruition.

Years it takes to find out that this movie is just not gonna get made

and Bruce Campbell I guess was gonna possibly be in it

and it was a whole different direction for Phantasm,

but at the end of the day, it didn't happen

and then we make Phantasm Oblivion instead.

Ice cream man, it's all in his head.

It might be true also that there are elements

from that Avery script that made it into Phantasm: Ravager,

post-apocalyptic world gone mad, more of a military element

going on there, so yeah, those-- those things could be lifted.

Wake the Dead was brought to me by the director

of Tuck Everlasting, that I worked with,

based on a graphic novel and it is a contemporary telling

of Frankenstein with the teenage genre in it.

That it's the teenage college medical students experimenting

and it's a wonderful, wonderful graphic novel

and it's a wonderful retelling of Frankenstein myth today.

Where you turn your best friend into the creature

and they get killed in a car wreck.

We've come so close so many times

and I still don't know why Wake the Dead is so popular

in the graphic novel world, why we can't get it done.

We've gone independent, we've had money put up,

we're-- we're gonna go to Australia, we're gonna go to New Zealand

and I think maybe someday we'll get a shot.

We didn't get it done and uh, what an expensive film

and I think we'll keep trying.

The quandary of any writer in Hollywood,

they see you as have a specific wheelhouse

and so mine was kind of childhood horror thing.

I sold a project to TriStar, called, "Miss Malicious".

A psychological horror story about a teenage girl's imaginary friend.

There's some thematic overlap with Chucky.

Thanks for coming after me.

What are friends for?

I also-- I sold to Warner Brothers a project called, "P.E.T.S".

This concept of robot dogs that look and behave

completely real, but of course, they run amok and start killing people.

I sold that and wrote that, and it didn't get made.

There was a lot of money in this business in the '90s.

It's very different nowadays.

That doesn't happen, but those were the salad days

where you could just like think up an idea for a movie

on your way to a meeting and people would say,

"You're hired, let's do it."

As opposed to now when you can have someone make a whole franchise film,

complete it and have it decimated as a tax write-off

which is a very new kind of nightmare.

My power has nothing to do with money.

Power is what holds things together!

The road to Hollywood is littered with disappointments

but you carry on, you carry on hoping the next one.

You know, good things come out of pain and suffering,

and my time in development hell has led to good things

and you know, occasionally something slips out into the world.

Something that perhaps shouldn't.

Something that by all rights shouldn't exist

and when that happens, it's the greatest feeling in the world,

because it's a miracle.

1999

No!

A tugboat crew in a storm, they lose their tow.

They're not gonna survive.

Captain, the engine room is taking on water.

Well then, pump it out, mister. You're the bloody engineer.

And they are lucky enough to come into the eye of the storm.

They come across a vessel which is a Russian ship,

but once on board, they find that a life form

of electrical nature is transmitted down onto the ship and took over the computers,

and then little machines started killing everyone.

I was friends with Jim Cameron before I ever worked with him.

It was Terminator 2: 3D which Jim said,

"Why don't you be a co-director?" 'Cause he was writing Titanic.

And that was a really big deal for Universal Studio.

They were very happy with the work to the point

where they're gonna offer you a film to direct.

I was given a script called, "Virus" and a graphic novel, Virus.

Gale Anne Hurd, who you know, is the producer of this film.

And it was a script by Chuck Pfarrer.

Chuck contacted uh, Mike Richardson at Dark Horse Comics.

They turned that script into a graphic novel.

It was actually a hit in the world of comics

and film geeks loved this thing.

Within two days of that meeting, Jim said, "We're gonna dive to Titanic.

Tell no one, not the studio, especially not Gale yet.

We're gonna dive and try to get some shots

for the opening of the film to prove that we can do this movie."

So for the next 30 days I lived on a Russian ship.

600 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia.

It was pretty wild.

And then finally Jim came to me and said, "Well, hey,

you're gonna have to make a decision.

Are you going to do Virus or Titanic?"

It's fitted for scientific purposes.

Their biggest, 42 labs, 5 machine shops, outfitted with advanced robotics.

Then we got a sat phone, satellite call from Gale, who basically said,

"Are you gonna do this fucking film or what?"

I said, "Yes."

Drawing on my own background in design, storyboarding, illustrations.

All these people, we all worked in a room, handing off drawings to each other.

It was a good experience in the beginning. I was having fun.

Jamie Lee Curtis, she brought a lot of energy to the set

and she would always tell everybody to like,

"Get it, let's go, get on your marks", you know,

"Get ready, we-- we gotta go."

You're no longer in charge!

- Donald Sutherland, as the captain, was sort of acting the part.

He'd push people, push the actors.

One of my men is missing. And I want some answers.

And no more of this Twilight Zone stuff.

Billy Baldwin, he went out of his way constantly to do it right.

He wanted to do another one. "Can I do another one?" I'd let him go.

What the hell is that?

It had sort of international cast.

They all tried their best. It was fantastic.

What is this thing that's inside the computer, huh?

It's a life form. Unlike anything we know.

Everything is practical in Virus.

Even our miniature ship in the storm, it's 50-feet long.

Then we had a full-size ship in the James River Fleet called,

the Hoyt S. Vandenberg. It's a satellite tracking ship.

For a dollar, we bought the ship and refurbished it.

We painted one side and that's how we-- we dealt with filming.

By the way, we really dropped an anchor through the ship.

And we had stunt people like dive out of the way.

They kept telling me there's not a big budget

to do everything digital or CG.

So I approached the whole film, all the creature work, all the robotics,

Steve Johnson made all these little actual

animatronic creatures, puppeted or radio-controlled.

It was really kind of cool.

So the bulk of the film became practical robotics,

for real, that worked.

Phil Tippett's company, Phil, who I'd worked with previously

at ILM and other projects, agreed to do it.

And they basically did an animated 3D version

of Goliath that worked quite well.

And I was quite pleased that you couldn't quite tell

the difference in the final output of the film.

Checkmate.

I wanted to hire another visual effects supervisor

and they said, "No, you know, we're hiring you

to be the director and the visual effects supervisor.

That's two separate jobs."

Although I was doing it, it-- it makes it so much harder.

Jesus Christ.

You don't recognize me. What's wrong?

So I called my friend, Jim Cameron, who was in Mexico shooting Titanic.

And I'd ask him how his day went.

We would sort of compare notes and he'd give me some advice

on how to deal with whatever, you know, problems I might be having.

English.

-Do you speak English? -Fuck you.

The first cut of the movie was 2 hours and 15 minutes.

It's now just under 90.

We previewed the film at Universal CityWalk.

Audience liked it.

Steve.

- We had toys. There was a updated graphic novel.

Even a video game, I think.

And they were delivered to my office for approval.

The actors had to approve theirs.

They all got an action figure.

They were like monster action figures.

It was a big movie.

Oh, closer.

In the end, they delayed the release of the film by a month,

which took it out of the summer.

Released in the winter, we knew it was like

it would hurt the film, which is too bad.

- You are virus.

- The Rage: Carrie 2.

I have a very interesting, long-standing interest in the Carrie series,

because I think the book is so good.

And I love the original film.

There was a period of time where people couldn't get arrested

for making a Stephen King movie.

And this was in that era.

Somebody said, "What if we took Stephen King and Scream-ed it up a bit?"

I was fascinated with the cover of the VCR box.

Just seeing Sissy Spacek in the blood, in the dress, that iconic image.

Carrie 2, I don't think I expected that it would be

the same classic as a sequel, but I felt a big responsibility.

I had also never acted on camera professionally at all.

So I wanted to bring as much reality as I could,

as much of my experience.

I don't know that I believe in it.

-Believe in what? -Love.

Then you've got bigger problems than passing this class.

This movie went through a lot of changes.

The original director was Bob Mandel.

And it was called, "The Curse".

It was less of a sequel and I would say maybe even more

of a '90s reboot.

And then MGM put the movie on the shelf.

They stopped production and they said,

"Kids don't want to watch horror movies anymore."

And then a few months later, Scream came out.

And obviously, they changed their minds about kids wanting

to watch horror movies.

We even quote Scream in the movie.

-Hello. -What's your favorite scary movie?

They wanted it a little more tongue in cheek.

They changed huge plot points and then two weeks into shooting

fired everybody on the movie.

And then Katt Shea came aboard and took the helm.

I'm a big Poison Ivy fan and I thought she brought

a great perspective.

It must be nice just not having to be like everybody else.

Sometimes I really wish I could just be one of the shiny happy people.

It's a movie about a young woman whose mother struggles

with mental illness and she's afraid that

that will be passed on to her genetically.

Which was the struggle of our screenwriter Rafael Moreau.

So I think this movie is really powerful,

because it comes from such a personal place.

What are you saying I have?

- I'm saying you're not crazy and it's not the devil.

It's a trait, Rachel, you've inherited.

This is pre-MeToo and the movie was really visionary for its time,

because it's about a young woman taking revenge,

because she's in this environment

where men are looking to score on women for points.

How many points do I get if I do that chick over there?

That fat one? Six.

No, bro, I did her last week

and you only gave me five and she's not fat.

Based on a real '90s phenomenon of a group of jocks called,

the "Spur Posse" who are basically recording

sleeping with women as a point system and did commit statutory rape.

That kind of what we would call, "toxic masculinity",

although we had no term for it back then.

After that half-ass block I just wanted to check

to see if maybe you had a tampon string hanging between your legs.

I think it's also about the fronts that we put on.

I think all horror movies are about the monster within us

and being afraid of people getting to know who we really are.

Jason London's character and my character were very similar,

because they both had to put up these tough exteriors to survive

Make your own path.

-Think so? -Word.

I actually provided all the slang that was in the movie,

including swank, dope, and word.

I just said, "Look, can we have the teenagers saying

what actual teenagers say?"

Swank.

I prefer La Rage: Carrie Deux. The Rage colon Carrie 2. It all works.

Night of the prom, 73 people died, few us survived,

but we never talked about that night.

Amy Irving was so, so cool to me and really took me under her wing.

She told me stories about the original.

Just how wild it was.

I mean, it was pretty wild on our set,

but in the '70s, I mean, forget about it.

I want you to see how many points Jesse got for you.

Everyone knows at the end of Carrie, there's gonna be a big payoff body count.

And then, carnage.

Carnage with spear guns.

Carnage with CDs.

Carnage with shattering glass.

By the way, that glass was real. We did not have CGI.

They really did explode a two-story window of candy glass on me.

And I had a scar from it for a little while,

'cause candy glass can still cut you a little bit.

It was absolutely insane, but I didn't know any better.

And I was just so excited to get my big break.

The entire thing was shot indoors in this stadium

that was about to be demolished.

So we were filming around the clock, because we were gonna lose the location.

Burning a house down inside.

The director was wearing a gas mask the entire time.

It was wild.

It was really, really wild.

After I did Carrie, there was a lot of interest in me

doing a lot of other horror movies.

I was a theater actor first and foremost.

So instead of using the heat that I got out of the movie

to do more horror movies, I went and I did Broadway.

And then I ended up doing a lot of TV as well.

I would do a horror movie now.

I think the horror genre is more serious now

and the scripts are better.

Like I love a camp horror movie, don't get me wrong.

I want to jump back in.

Did you lose something there, bud?

- Idle Hands.

Idle Hands is rad.

Idle Hands is the story of this loser stoner,

perhaps one of the most pathetic men in horror history.

It's under the bed!

Ow!

Played brilliantly by Devon Sawa.

Don't you think you should have some ambition?

Like a goal?

I mean, my dream life would be to lie around all day in bed

and watch TV while some hot broad delivers me food and shit.

He's so likable, but he's such a big loser

that a demon is able to possess his hand and cause his hand

to do horrible, horrible things.

-…A beer? -No, thanks.

-You sure, 'cause…

The movie really is a collection of horror tropes.

- Everything's gonna be cool, man.

Everything's gonna be…

But it's elevating all those tropes together

into this great mashup horror comedy.

- They were killed by ants?

Please don't be stupid. Do you have like an evil aunt?

Making references to horror films in your horror film.

That was something that we had become accustomed to.

Oh, look at me! Look at me! I'm Leatherface!

You've got the teen-driven comedy,

but the teens aren't the good-looking, slick, popular kids

like in a Kevin Williamson movie.

These are the loser kids that they make fun of.

Halloween thing in the gym.

-You guys going? -Hell no.

Can you see us dressing up in some stupid-ass costumes?

Grooving to Hanson and Jewel.

What do we look like, total losers, man?

You've got Seth Green, you've got Elden Henson,

and they are these best friends to this guy,

who aren't really best friends to this guy.

That's the hilarious part about their thing.

They're best friends with each other.

They don't really like him, but they keep him around.

And then they're stuck with him for all eternity, ostensibly,

when they are brought back from the dead.

Don't take this the wrong way, Anton, but you look really queer doing that.

"Idle hands are the devil's playpen", so I'm thinking,

you know, keep my hands occupied, right?

They are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this movie,

kind of wandering around to just kind of point out

and go, "You know, that's kind of fucked up that you killed that guy."

Vivica A. Fox, of course, driving around in a Winnebago,

tracking down a demon, just smoking hot, being awesome.

"I'm giving you all the information you need."

I come from a long line of Druidic priestesses sworn

to fight a certain evil force that possesses

the laziest fuckup it can find.

And you're also introducing Jessica Alba to audiences

for the first time, and America is falling madly in love.

Aren't you a little old for ding-dong ditch?

Sorry about your bush.

In such a way that they were so in love

that after the test screening, they literally reshot a new ending,

so they could take her clothes off.

Help me!

Being also very '90s, you've got The Offspring showing up.

They're on the radio all the time.

They not only show up on the soundtrack of this,

they're playing a Ramones song, like they're in rock and roll high school.

♪ 20, 20, 24 hours to go, I wanna be sedated ♪

I was aware of who was on the rock and roll soundtrack

before I started to write my score,

so I dipped into my industrial past, I suppose,

with a bit more trash involved,

so there-- there's quite a punky feel about it,

rather than strictly sort of doom-laden.

See, now you're taking Anton-time.

There weren't many good horror comedies hitting at the time,

and Idle Hands was one of those movies that was just a cult film from the get-go.

The studio just didn't get behind it.

Could have done a whole lot better than it did.

- Columbine happened, and all of a sudden, teenagers

and violence in a high school, that was real.

That was scary. That was on everyone's mind.

And they canceled the premiere for Idle Hands,

kind of pulled back on some of the advertising.

Of course, that would fade away very quickly

as people come to their senses and go,

"Oh yeah, these two kids doing this horrific thing has nothing to do with,

you know, a kid with a possessed hand."

I cut off my hand, and it's gonna kill you all!

-Get off the stage! -Yeah!

Despite bombing, it came out on video, and we all watched it

and fell in love with it, and it was an instant cult hit

with at-home stoners and cinephiles.

What the fuck are you doing, man? That's my dad! Come on!

CPR, man! I saw it on Baywatch!

The original Mummies, you know, were just classic, and as--

as a kid, it's just creepy as hell.

Slow-moving mummy, you know, you're kinda used to that,

so like this one comes out.

It was like the perfect mix of classic horror and Indiana Jones adventure.

Such a fun movie.

I think I saw it like two or three times in the movie theater, actually.

Who the hell are these guys?

-Priests. -Alright, then.

Steve Sommers has been very generous with me

when it comes to work.

Well, if it ain't my little buddy Beni.

I think I'll kill you.

-Think of my children! -You don't have any.

-Someday I might. -Shut up!

Stephen's pitch for that time and for the studio seemed

to be the right one that they wanted.

I had worked with Brendan Fraser on a movie called, "Gods and Monsters".

He was a perfect match for Stephen Sommers as a leading man.

There's something out there.

Something underneath that sand.

Brendan knows how to touch on all the different parts that you need.

The adventure, the action, the romantic, definitely comic,

he's so good at.

Rachel Weisz and John Hannah.

Besides being excellent actors, John and Rachel,

and Brendan too, they're all very likeable people.

On screen and in person, they're all charming in their own way.

- Never did like camels.

'Cause they smell, they bite, they spit. Disgusting.

I think they're adorable.

Arnold Vosloo, he's a very serious actor.

He really cares about what he's doing.

- Imhotep! Imhotep!

[speaks Ancient Egyptian]

Beni is a weasel, just backstabbing, just the worst.

The challenge is to somehow, still in a way, you might root

for Beni at certain points.

But then you come to your senses and go, "No."

The Prince must finish the job. And consummates the curse.

It was just to save my own skin and kiss up to Imhotep.

Oh my God. What an amazing boss to have.

Imhotep. The best! So that's Beni's thinking.

I love the whole sand-wall trick.

It was beautiful. This bastard.

Steve Sommers, I think, gave us the direction

when they yell at each other.

Brendan Fraser and myself. That you know, "They're high schoolers.

They're two guys that love getting under each other's skin, you know?

You can sound like two 10-year-olds yelling at each other,

which I love that direction."

It looks to me like I got all the horses!

Looks to me like you're on the wrong side of the river!

You don't believe, if you've never been on one, how high up the camel is.

And they're not as smooth as a horse. And they're not as smart as a horse.

That was another terrifying day for me.

And Steve Sommers said to me, "Breaking news, I didn't cast you

for your camel riding.”

So long, Beni!

Luckily, we did the Morocco section first,

and then we went to London for the second half of the film.

Because, as you can tell by looking at me,

I wasn't someone born in the desert.

Everybody got sick from food or ice.

Arnold Vosloo lost about 10 pounds after he got sick.

I was so sick, I don't know what it was,

but I was seeing like you know, three arms or four arms on myself.

I mean, I was like out of it completely for days.

-Go!

- One of the crew members got bit by a scorpion.

They had to be helicoptered out of there. They had to go to a hospital.

So you can imagine how well I slept that night.

It was a hard shoot. Physically hard.

Once we got back to London though, it was great.

I love the design of that mummy.

Because it looks like an EC Comic book come to life from the '50s.

We are in serious trouble.

There were a couple of times I remember having to ask

what this will look like later,

when they finish the CGI or the matte work or whatever.

The scene where I meet Imhotep and I'm walking backwards

and I'm pulling out the religious things.

I did it first with Arnold

who had some special effects tape on, whatever he had, some sort of suit.

And then they got rid of Arnold and I had to do it by myself.

-[speaks Hebrew] -[speaks Ancient Egyptian]

That's even harder than the big sand wave,

because you can look pretty much anywhere in it.

You're gonna be looking at it. This you had to really look.

Towards the end when I'm trying to scramble out of there,

the art department just spray-painted that ceiling that was falling on me.

I'm holding a torch. The flame hit it.

It went up my arm.

It burnt off my eyebrow, and my eyelashes, and my hair on that arm.

It happened like that. Like you're Wile E. Coyote.

And I remember Brendan Fraser saying, "Are you alright? Are you alright?"

I said, "What happened?" And they were extremely apologetic.

And then of course, later I saw Brendan turn around laughing his ass off.

Oh yeah. This just keeps getting better and better.

I remember going to the premiere of The Mummy and I'm like,

"Oh my gosh. I'm in that."

So that was sort of mind-blowing.

I really enjoyed watching it.

The Mummy opened up first and then I didn't know what would happen

if it would just get completely squashed by The Phantom Menace.

And to our great surprise it just sort of stayed around.

The Mummy just kept hanging in there.

It led to a couple of sequels. A prequel, The Scorpion King.

A rollercoaster ride.

Not-- not in the world would I ever thought before the movie opened.

"Oh, there's gonna be a ride at Universal." It's great.

Goodbye, Beni.

Sometimes Hollywood's formula for success is copying

something else that was successful. You know, Jaws.

I can go slow ahead. Come on down and chomp some of this shit.

Jaws is one of the movies that made me want to make movies.

I've seen that movie like easily 200 times in my life.

I love Jaws. I love movies about sharks.

I'll watch any movie about a shark.

Until of course, you know we get to Sharknado.

And it becomes something entirely different.

I'll watch Sharknado. All of 'em I have.

I saw Deep Blue Sea, because there were sharks.

Deep Blue Sea is the story of a research facility

that is developing a drug to combat Alzheimer's

based on a hormone that exists in the brain of the mako shark.

To harvest enough levels of this hormone,

they have increased the size of the brains of the mako sharks.

And as a side effect, those sharks have gotten real smart.

Tell me I didn't see that.

They recognized that gun.

There's a storm. The facility floods.

Go, go!

And the sharks have a plan.

They aren't just breaking down doors for the sheer joy of it, are they?

-They're after us. -It's pretty damn obvious.

We don't know what they're doing yet.

This movie is a blast.

It's directed by Renny Harlin, who at the time

had kind of ridden the wave of the Hollywood system

and had huge success in big-studio movies and huge,

very public failures in big-studio movies.

And now comes to do this shark movie that is just a riot.

The cast is spectacular.

And you've got Saffron Burrows, and Thomas Jane,

and Samuel L. Jackson, and Michael Rapaport, and LL Cool J,

and Stellan Skarsgård battling both practical effect sharks and CG sharks.

As they try to survive.

Bring your feathery ass here, come on. Oh!

And it all kind of hinges on scenes that should be ridiculous.

None of this should work. It all works.

You ate my bird.

It has death scenes that are famous for subverting expectations.

There is that moment when Samuel L. Jackson,

who we think is the protagonist at this point when you're seeing the film,

is giving his hero's speech.

- We're not going to fight anymore.

We're going to pull together

and we're gonna find a way to get out of here.

And I remember sitting in the theater being like,

"Oh my God!"

First, we're gonna seal off this…

I was really with the movie at that point, 'cause it also meant anybody could die

if they literally just killed off

who you thought was gonna be the protagonist.

And it's Samuel L. Jackson.

You have to give it to Renny Harlin.

He had to have known exactly what he was doing.

And he played the audience perfectly with that.

The movie has no business being as great as it is.

It is riotously entertaining.

Like, I've probably watched Deep Blue Sea 10 times

and I like it more every time I see it.

Look, I hate to interrupt this moment of burgeoning intimacy,

but can we get the fuck out of here?

I'm gonna die out here.

The Blair Witch Project purports to be a collection of footage

from three kind of young student filmmakers

who went missing in the woods Burkittsville, Maryland

while researching the legend of the Blair Witch.

Yeah, it's a story my grandmother used to tell us all.

A terrible thing. Just tore the whole community up.

And their footage has been found and cut together.

That found footage, which were words that had

not collided that way before this movie.

- You had an encounter with the Blair Witch?

Yes, that is um, a really kind of scary story.

It really felt like something that had been found.

And that made it so much more scary.

-Holy shit. -That's fucking creepy.

I thought it was a true story. I was terrified.

And I'm also sitting there in disbelief thinking

this documentary appears to have captured proof of the paranormal.

I mean-- I mean, I bought this thing hook, line, and sinker.

-It sounds like footsteps. -I know, that's a fucking person.

- It's all around us. That is fucking weird.

- Dan Myrick and I were in film school together in the early '90s.

And we started talking about what kinds of things scared us as kids.

And we went out and rented a bunch of VHSs.

Rented these pseudo documentaries.

One called, "Legend of Boggy Creek".

And we got some VHSs of a show called, "In Search Of…",

which we really loved in the '70s with Leonard Nimoy narrating.

And we loved the idea that these things gave us this feeling

of just creepiness that other movies didn't give us.

And we came up with the basic idea

of these filmmakers, this documentary team.

And our original idea was like the documentary

was gonna take place in the '70s

and we were gonna find the footage in the '90s.

Every time we thought about it, we're like,

"Man, this is the perfect low-budget movie." You know?

We don't have to light it. We don't have to like have stars.

We don't even have to have music. The sound can be crappy.

So the plan to do low budget, kind of do it ourselves was--

that was the thing all along.

If you've known where we were going, we wouldn't be hiking like--

- We're in the middle of the fucking woods.

-How could you pos-- - Some of it is off-trail hiking.

And we went through about a thousand people.

And Joshua Leonard was the first one we cast.

Then Heather Donahue.

She just brought an intensity that we didn't see with anybody else.

Really taking me to a very uncomfortable place

there in the audition space.

And then Mike Williams brought like a different flavor

than Heather and Josh.

We just thought that these three people like

complemented each other really well.

I don't know why I have to have every conversation on video, man.

-Tape some animals. - 'Cause we're making a documentary.

Not about us getting lost. We're making a documentary about a witch.

We got so lucky with this casting.

I think it was really courageous of them to go into the woods

with people in charge that they didn't know.

Especially, Heather. You know, a bunch of guys.

It could have easily turned into a snuff film.

But they trusted us and we trusted them.

You know, we handed them the cameras to shoot our movie.

This experiment that luckily worked out for us.

- Whatever it is is gonna come back. We know that.

-We don't know that for a fact. -Well, it came three nights in a row

and it's getting worse every night.

We kept the actors like out of the loop as much as possible.

We never showed them the script.

They knew something bad was gonna happen each night, you know?

But they had no idea when it was gonna happen

or what was gonna happen.

- Oh my God! What the fuck is that?

What the fuck is that?

The bundle of sticks scene. Not knowing is creepier.

And it's obviously something bad.

Her reaction is what sells it.

The ending of the movie was something that we came up with

just a few days before we shot it.

We were like, "They go into the cellar and then something creepy happens."

Come on! I hear him downstairs!

-No! -Come on!

Not everybody was gonna get it, but we knew that like the people

that were paying attention to the beginning

when they see that, it's gonna freak them out.

"And was it real?" And this and that.

I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them.

Artisan bought the movie and they started test screenings

and they were like, "Hey, uh, we want you to reshoot the endings.

Maybe give us a couple alternates."

The alternate endings were all just variations on Mike.

He's on a-- like a stick figure crucifix.

I think there was one where like his shirt is opened

and he's all bloody chested.

We were just hoping that they would let us go

with our original ending and luckily, they did.

They really did let us release our director's cut

which was an amazing thing for first-time filmmakers.

- You're gonna write us a happy ending, Heather?

I think at Sundance somebody copied the tape

and that was the one that spread all over Hollywood.

And pretty much everybody in the business that I've met

is like, "Oh, I-- I saw that two months before it came out", and this and that.

A bootleg of our movie actually helped you know, the hype.

Something that for most movies is a detriment ended up being

something that helped us in the end.

Please help us!

The marketing was kind of bittersweet for us,

because they told us that, "Oh, we're gonna market it

as if it was real.

You know, and we're gonna let the actors not do interviews

for about two or three weeks."

And we figured that they knew what they were doing.

I remember when the movie opened in New York, there's a big line,

I'm across the street with Mike Williams

and he's like, "Man, I, you know, I spent all my life

you know, being-- wanting to be an actor and be successful

and there's literally like a line around the block

to see my movie and I can't go over there."

But then later on, they definitely got their spotlight,

but I think for them, it was very frustrating

for the first two weeks or three weeks not being able to like be seen.

And also they were getting a lot of like you know,

people contacting their families and saying, "Oh my God,

you know, I can't believe, you know, Josh is dead or Heather's dead."

Looking back on it, we would have changed a few things,

you know, just to-- to make things a little more sane now.

When you're not home today, when I'm not home today,

people are gonna start noticing like my dad--

my girlfriend's definitely gonna notice that I'm not back.

The movie was so shaky.

If we had known that the movie was gonna be in the theaters,

we would have found some way to stabilize the video.

Looking back on it, I think, you know having like a Blair Witch Project

barf bag with the stick man collector's item,

I think that would have been something cool to have.

- There's a fucking witch and she keeps leaving shit

outside your door.

There's no one here to help you.

She left little trinkets, you fucking took one of 'em.

We somehow tapped into something that you know,

inspired a lot of people.

There's so many great found footage movies

that come after us you know, Paranormal Activity and Rec,

and the Europa Report, Host.

What?

The parodies were, you know, so much fun.

Saturday Night Live and the idea that like you know,

Scooby-Doo is involved with the Blair Witch

was just blew my mind and I still love it.

- Somebody's been in our backpacks.

Oh! Scooby-Doo!

The aftermath of Blair Witch was you know,

there's a lot of pressure coming off of like

this really successful movie.

This little movie that you made for like you know 25,000 bucks.

We all kind of went through this phase of like having

a crazy amount of attention

and then having no attention at all, you know?

Almost having to start all from scratch again.

The good definitely outweighed the bad.

Being part of The Blair Witch Project was such a blessing.

And then now, there's still so much fandom

and there's so much excitement about this movie.

We lit the flame, you know?

I never thought I would be you know, talking about

one of my movies being this influential.

It became something that I never imagined it would become.

I am so, so sorry…

for everything that has happened.

Please make them leave.

I'm working on it.

All you need to say is, "I see dead people",

and everybody knows exactly what you're talking about.

I see dead people.

The Sixth Sense came out of nowhere and it blew everyone away.

Here's this quiet supernatural film starring Bruce Willis, mind you.

Nobody expected the impact it would have on pop culture and cinema.

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan who was then completely unknown.

Bruce Willis plays a child psychologist who has a client

claiming he can speak to the dead.

He investigates this claim and kind of has to come to grips

with supernatural elements competing with his medical background

then a spoiler of an ending that is 40 years old.

The cast is rounded out by Toni Collette who plays the boy's mother.

Cole, you're scaring me.

They scare me too sometimes.

-They? -Ghosts.

And of course, Haley Joel Osment who became a sensation overnight.

- You shouldn't look at people, it makes them feel bad.

--How did you-- -Stop looking at me!

-Who had-- -Stuttering Stanley!

Stuttering Stanley!

The performances in that film were top notch.

A single mom. A little boy. An average situation.

Something a lot of people can relate to.

I'm tired in my body. I'm tired in my mind.

I'm tired in my heart.

You know, I don't know if you noticed, but our little family isn't doing so good.

It's terrifying for the little boy

and what he's going through, but as the moviegoer

and seeing Bruce Willis' journey.

We think about it as we get older.

We're thinking about our mortality.

What's really on the other side?

You ever feel the prickly things on the back of your neck?

That's them.

In one fell swoop M. Night Shyamalan with The Sixth Sense

changed the course of horror,

because up until that point meta films and horror films

that were commenting on themselves,

and that were deeply ironic and postmodern were

in some ways undermining what makes horror so potent.

At our core, we all know we're gonna die

and I think every horror film on some level taps into that

basic existential issue and with The Sixth Sense,

we returned to that core fear.

The brilliance of that screenplay and that film was

you never see Bruce truly interacting

with anyone other than Haley, because Haley's the only person

that can see these dead people which you don't realize at the top.

Cole has scratches on his arm.

I think they might be fingernail cuts, defensive cuts maybe, I don't know. I…

I still get the chills.

That feeling I got in the theater

when he found out that he was dead.

It was chilling.

I see people…

they don't know they're dead.

To withhold so much information and truth from the audience

and then turn it all around at the very, very end,

you know, no one had really had the bravery to do that

as a filmmaker or as a studio to kind of stand behind

that kind of storytelling.

A clever, clever, clever film and it's such a cool,

"Oh my God!", at the end.

I think M. Night has tried to chase that.

It's a blessing, but it's also kind of a curse.

People are expecting it.

So now they're, "You know, you know what he likes to do.

He likes to trick you."

Well, good luck, 'cause now we're all paying attention.

-Mama. -Dinner is not ready.

You can't hurt me anymore!

It had been a long time since there was a word-of-mouth movie

that made you feel like you were part of the secret.

That like, once you saw it, now you're complicit.

Like now it's your job to get somebody else to see it,

but not tell them. Don't ruin it.

Let that person have the experience you had,

which is kind of a secret sauce in terms of marketing a movie.

If you can make an audience member go become your foot soldier,

you've done something really special in that case.

Hey, come on.

I'll show you where my dad keeps his gun. Come on.

My blockbuster had 200 copies of it.

It was such a big cultural phenomenon

that the video store chain used it as their big thing of like,

"See the movie before someone spoils the twist."

It doesn't even hurt anymore.

That movie is all about death. The whole film. Every frame of it.

And it has this beautiful somber and yet deeply emotional tone to it.

Really made horror films serious again.

Made them about something. Not just about themselves.

I think I can go now.

I want you to shut it.

The ghost story has never died. And never will die.

And there have always been people who bring something new,

and fresh, and exciting into it.

Stir of Echoes was based on a novel by Richard Matheson.

It's David Koepp, the writer director also wrote Jurassic Park screenplay.

Starring Kevin Bacon.

What was it then? An hallucination?

Yeah. Yeah. A bunch of 'em. It's hard to explain.

It's like all these thoughts just kept coming.

Richard Matheson. One of the great genre writers.

He wrote the classic Twilight Zone episode,

one of the greatest ones ever, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

Is credited with possibly creating

post-apocalyptic literature with I Am Legend.

And he wrote this great story that would then be ripped off

for decades by other horror writers called, "Stir of Echoes".

What the hell was that?

It's a story of a guy who starts experiencing things in his house

and his kid starts seeing a spirit around the house.

Does it hurt to be dead?

- The question is, "Is the kid psychologically broken?

Is there something going on?"

And the investigation into this spirit in a house.

- It's a terrific and surprising ghost story

about a young woman who was murdered whose body was never found

and so her soul was never set free.

It has elements of an EC Comic story, but it is so much deeper than that.

It's chipping away at what's bothering you

and getting in your head and you don't know what it is,

and it's something horrific.

Why are you digging?

Question, Maggie, as you can plainly see I am very busy trying to answer.

The question is where?

It's blue collar. It's realistic.

It's mysterious. And it's heartbreaking.

Samantha is my oldest daughter.

-She ran away about six months ago. -No, she didn't run away.

She was kidnapped or something and the little boy said he saw her.

It stirs that in-between world.

So I was so terrified watching it.

-Look at the screen. -Okay.

- I love movies that make you hurt and this is a movie

that makes you hurt in a very emotional sense.

This is the most important thing that's ever happened to me

in my whole life, in my whole stupid life.

The irony of Stir of Echoes being a great film,

coming out around the exact same time as Sixth Sense

and being a blip.

It just didn't connect until years later

when people could put those two movies together,

watch them back to back, compare and contrast,

and see that they were two very different movies

drawing from the same inspiration.

But what a good film it is and so underrated.

Limbo, directed by Tina Krause.

Tina Krause is known for being in WAVE movies.

WAVE, W-A-V-E, it's an acronym.

These are movies that are basically a send-away video production.

You make a script and you send it to this production company

and they'll make it for you.

Almost always there's some element of fetish.

There's almost always nudity and girls getting undressed.

And for some reason, a lot of girls drowning in quicksand.

Tina Krause appears in a little WAVE movie called,

"Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge".

Where women are shrinking each other and then get eaten.

Stop! Oh God, no!

- It's easy to excuse her as somebody who's just like,

you know, doing these silly little movies in New Jersey,

but she's actually a great filmmaker.

And Limbo is a great example of something

that she did on her own. It's shot on video.

It's about a woman's descent into madness and being in limbo.

Time means nothing anymore.

We're all gonna rot here.

You can't stop it!

It feels like a Nine Inch Nails video shot in an abandoned warehouse in New Jersey.

It's this fever dream of hers that she is working through on camera.

See what you've done? Now see it through my eyes!

This is a passion project for her.

She had submitted to a bunch of festivals and had gotten rejected.

And somebody said, like,

"Why don't you change the name on the movie, so it's not yours?"

And so she did, and then it got in.

So she was dealing with a lot of like, sexism.

A lot of people who didn't take her seriously.

Get off of me!

-Baby. Come on, baby. -Don't touch me. Disgusting!

I love this movie.

It is experimental in a way that I think a lot of people

don't give it credit for.

And Tina Krause is an incredible person.

She is a spitfire. She is punk reincarnated.

Doing this all on her own.

She's getting to fight with like, people who are, you know,

coming into the production, who shouldn't be there.

She takes everything seriously and she loves doing what she does.

She should be taken seriously as a filmmaker.

Feeling a little queasy?

Oh, Audition's a whole another thing. Yo.

Takashi Miike is a filmmaker who is tremendously prolific.

To call him prolific is an understatement.

He would make up to five films a year.

Many of them in a horror space or a horror adjacent.

- Audition is probably one of his best-known

and appreciated movies.

This quiet and intense movie, Audition, I think changed a lot.

The whole idea of casting a girlfriend

comes from the Japanese hierarchy system.

It starts out like a romantic comedy

and then it just turns dark as dark can be.

Just pitch black.

The nicest of the two guys ends up having

the worst experience you could possibly have.

- Not only was she a female villain, she also was very fragile.

You wouldn't know what she was capable of.

It has this one moment where the whole movie turns.

The guy is trying to call the girl

and the phone is ringing, the phone is ringing.

And there's this canvas bag and all of a sudden, it just moves.

You just go, "Whoa!"

It's a brilliant, brilliant, absolutely brilliant moment of horror.

It is a slow burn.

But for that reason, the tension ratchets up to a level

that when it finally comes, it's a totally wild, cathartic experience.

The torture she's giving this main actor is so painful and effective,

because you can imagine what it feels like

when someone sticks a needle, you know, in your belly.

It was rough. It was really rough.

Oh, lord.

This character takes amazing glee in her actions.

Using piano wire like you've never seen it used before.

It's horrifying and kind of hilarious at the same time.

"Kiri kiri kiri."

- Why are the Japanese people so afraid of women?

There must be some revolution going on.

Some feministic subplot, you know?

I think in the sort of post-MeToo era, Audition is extremely relevant.

Like, that film has become only more potent

in our current era and I think blew people's minds at the time,

because there just wasn't anything like it in America.

Audition sits in a very interesting place

within discussions of whether or not it's feminist

and whether or not it's misogynist.

And I think the fact that it doesn't fall very neatly

into one bucket or the other is among its many charms.

You… are beautiful.

Love me and nobody else.

We really come to sympathize with the protagonist

that he is truly trying to find true love.

He's a good guy. He treats her well.

But at the same time, Asami is the monster that she is,

because of sexism, because of patriarchy, because of misogyny,

because of a lifetime of objectification and abuse.

So it kind of rides that line.

It kind of feels like uh, disgruntled actors got together

and decided to make a movie about the nightmares of auditioning.

And it's not far off, you know? It's really not.

It's punishment for the casting couch. That's what Audition is.

"You know, you're gonna mess with actors

and just manipulate them, so you can have sex with them?

Well, then we're gonna cut your freaking feet off."

It was so impressive that that's why I hired Takeshi Miike

to do one of the Masters of Horror episodes,

which was every bit as harrowing, in fact, to the point

where Showtime wouldn't even air it when it was made.

The first horror film that kind of crossed the desk, you know,

if you will, it was The First Power.

And there was a lot that made me very, very excited about that.

Not only was this horror, but they were asking me

to be the lead back in the day, and even to a certain extent now,

you know, Hollywood almost has to justify an ethnic person being a role.

And it's one of the few in my filmography

that I would 100% go back to and say, "Let's do a sequel to this."

Tess, there's nothing out there.

Like Hitchcock's Birds, Bats is about bats.

It's about nature gone awry and our inability

to defend ourselves against it.

Bats is a wonderful throwback to the creature features of the '50s,

but builds on that, I think, a little bit.

Here we have a requisite, you know, mad scientist who,

for whatever reason, you know, starts uh,

genetically mutating bats, and you know, I mean,

what could go wrong?

Bob Gunton brought amazing gravitas to it.

You've somehow increased their natural intelligence.

And their ability to work together.

Why would you do that?

Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do.

Dina Meyer comes on, and she brings a lot of genre cred,

you know, after Starship Troopers and whatnot.

And she's, you know, action-film ready.

Leon, who does not have a full name.

By the way, you know, try calling the hotel

and asking for Leon.

And the you know, receptionist says, "Leon who?"

"I don't know. I think it's just Leon."

Clip their wings?

Would you shoot their damn heads off? And don't miss.

These are real, ordinary people thrown into extraordinary,

sometimes even supernatural situations.

The characters have to be grounded, or you don't buy the premise.

I tell you, I'm not gonna let 'em blow my town

off the face of the earth without a fight.

People got their homes here.

It's my job to make sure they got something to come back to.

The budget of Bats was like $5 to $6 million, you know?

I mean, it-- it-- it was not big.

Louis Morneau, and I have to credit George Mooradian, the DP,

I really, really think they elevated that film.

They pumped up the color. They pumped up the action.

The cinematography was fantastic.

They really upped the game,

and I watched them do that on a daily basis.

Bats has a big scope, you know?

So big skies, lots of black things flying around.

And I actually created a sound out of bat wings,

made it electronic, and tried to make a swarm,

and things like that.

I was a great lover of Penderecki, so I thought,

"Well, I'll try and mix bat wings with Penderecki, and see what happens."

- Filmed it in Utah.

You know, it's-- it's set in a small Texas town,

but okay, let's go to Utah.

What in heaven's name is going on here?

Well, as far as we can tell, we think this was done

by some sort of…

-bats. -One bat.

Only one real bat in the entire making of the film Bats,

and that was the little cute guy in the beginning.

The rest of them, it was puppetry, the big ones, and CGI.

Because it was so much night shooting, we were on splits.

Literally, you know, from the beginning of the schedule.

So, I mean, you're living like a vampire.

You know, you go to work at noon,

you don't get off till, you know, midnight or 1:00 or something.

And so, it was a bit of a fever dream.

No!

We shot in a real silver mine. I mean, it was ridiculous.

We were like a mile below the surface.

Highly claustrophobic. I mean, you know, it took us 10 minutes

in a blackened elevator to get to the bottom.

I mean, that's a little freaky.

The town was Magna, Utah.

I'm in the middle of Main Street Magna,

and Louis gives me this gun with like, 13 rounds in it. Blanks.

"Listen, just-- just shoot and wherever you shoot,

don't worry, you won't miss. I'll make sure you hit a bat."

Sure enough, "Action."

Roll under the pickup. You know?

And you know, like, 500 people, "Whoa!"

Standing ovation.

And I felt like, you know, Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi

wrestling the big, giant octopus.

It's like, "Wow.

I'm a grown-ass man, and this is what I do for a living."

You know?

You gotta commit to the bit.

Stay calm!

And yes, they-- they're playing Nosferatu in the town cinema.

I don't know of a little, small town in Texas

that would ever play Nosferatu.

You know, most people go, "What, what is that?

Is that-- it that a Mexican dish?

I'd like some Nosferatu with some chilaquiles."

It knew what it was supposed to be.

And Bats achieved everything I think that it set out to achieve.

So much so that it got a sequel that they didn't call me for.

But that went straight to video.

This film was released in theaters

and actually, you know, it did fairly well.

I think it opened up in the top five

and made its money back very, very quickly.

Decades later, Bats has a lot of fans out there,

because they really, really enjoyed the film.

And to me, that's a testament to the filmmakers

and what we were trying to do, if it stands the test of time.

And people continue to discover it, and they continue to enjoy it.

Are you kidding me? I am not up to my chest in bat shit!

House on Haunted Hill is about a group of people

who are invited to a party at this mansion,

which actually turns out to be a former mental institution.

And they wind up getting locked in and they have to survive the night.

And if they do survive, they can get a $1 million each.

We get paid this money when?

The second the sun hits tomorrow morning.

Assuming you've stayed the entire night and that you're still alive, of course.

Of course, we know what's gonna happen.

Gil Adler, I had worked with him on Freddy's Nightmares.

Later on, he became a producer on Tales from the Crypt.

And so I did an episode called, "Only Skin Deep",

which God bless him, Bob Zemeckis flipped out over.

Then Joel Silver, and Bob Zemeckis, and Gil

asked me if I could develop House on Haunted Hill,

'cause they had gotten the rights to the William Castle catalog of films.

- Met with his daughter, Terry Castle,

who couldn't have been nicer, and she loved the idea

that we wanted to take some of those movies

and remake them as Tales from the Crypt movies.

Bill had done a number of Tales from the Crypt,

and he's a very underrated director, in my opinion.

This new company, Dark Castle.

It just felt like, okay, this was a new and different arena,

and we'll call it something different.

And on that mercenary note, dear friends, let the games begin.

The first script was a disaster.

That was Dick Beebe, who was a lovely guy,

but he had a little problem with the tubes.

I think he wrote the first draft like the night before.

I said, "Let's go watch the original, write down everything we love about it."

And the only thing that came up that we were disappointed in

was the fact that there were no real ghosts in the movie.

So I said, "Let's put real ghosts in this time."

I really wanted to make a movie that was like gothic, and dark,

and just like dripping with atmosphere and stuff.

I wanted Geoffrey Rush to play the lead.

When I met Geoffrey, I said,

"Why do you want to be in a horror film?"

And he said, "Well, I'm tired of playing men in tights.

I want to be an action hero."

And I said, "I'm your guy."

You think I'd invite that bunch of social rejects?

Sure know, it wasn't me. And if you say it wasn't you,

then who the hell did, Evelyn? Ghosts?

We wanted the characters to be, at least pay attention

to what was going on, you know, in the society at the time.

The doctor who's a little sleazy, a fallen athlete,

a newscaster who was trying to be rich and famous.

Nothing has changed really.

In fact, it was maybe portending of things to come.

If I can just get something bizarre enough on tape,

I think I can parlay it into getting myself

some sort of a wackiest home videos gig.

The biggest challenge on this, on House on Haunted Hill was surviving it.

That's the truth.

There was just a lot of personalities involved that were difficult.

And it made it a very challenging shoot.

Most of the effects were done by KNB,

which is Nicotero and his crew.

What do you think, Dr. Vannacutt?

In Ghost Story, there was this face that Dick Smith did

that had just a mouth and teeth and it was like a screaming head.

Bill loved that image so much that he made a deal

for the rights to it.

And then we had to recreate that.

Just something cool that we got to redo a Dick Smith creation.

The film at the time got criticized for too much CG

and there wasn't, there was only two shots.

The sort of ghost plasma goes up the stairs.

Where are you going? You have to stay for my show.

The only other CG is just where I think the rope

at the end is burning and for whatever reason,

they decided to do that as a CG shot.

The rest of it's all in camera. All the effects that you see.

Now it's so common that uh, you know, people think that

they're seeing CG when they're not.

Pritchett was right. The house is alive.

There are some product placements which I thought were very clunky.

The Blockbuster thing, which by the way was a visual effect.

If you watch it, it's wobbling as it's going.

I guess when you bought your ticket, you got a scratcher thing.

It was just a gimmick and I think they were trying

to come up with something kind of like William Castle would have done.

- Play the House on Haunted Hill game.

See the movie and you could win a $100,000.

"Maybe you'll win a $1 million.

Or maybe you'll just get a free video rental at Blockbuster."

- Including Blockbuster movie rentals.

We never really gave away a $1 million nor did we have it.

I don't know if that's even legal.

How is she pulling this off?

When I saw the film cut together I thought, "This is going to work."

And then we ran it for the studio. They really got behind it.

And then we were able to get some of the things,

like I wanted uh, Marilyn Manson's Sweet Dreams.

They sort of balked at the price you know, until they saw the film

and said, "Yes, let's put it in there."

So everyone was on board at that point.

♪ Everybody is looking for something ♪

Seeing it with an audience, they were jumping out of their seat

and having a great time.

I remember one girl left in the middle of the movie.

I said, "You didn't like the movie?"

She said, "No, it's too scary." I said, "Yes!"

Sure is a funky old house, ain't it?

You could take half a dozen directors

and give them Sleepy Hollow as a short story

and say, "What would you do with this?"

They'd all do something different. Ridley Scott would make a different film.

Stanley Kubrick would make a different film.

Chris Nolan would make a different one.

And that's the beauty of what we love about filmmaking.

Sleepy Hollow, of course, is probably inspired

by the original Walt Disney film.

Because Tim Burton originally worked at Walt Disney.

But he creates something very, very different out of it.

Sleepy Hollow largely follows the old legend

that we've all come to know and love.

Only this film casts Ichabod Crane as a detective

sent from the big city to investigate a rash of decapitations

in the sleepy town of Sleepy Hollow.

I am Constable Ichabod Crane.

Sent to you from New York to investigate murder in Sleepy Hollow.

- I thought this detective angle worked well.

It's a really amazing-looking movie.

Tim Burton described the movie as a cross

between a Merchant Ivory movie and a Hammer movie

which I thought was great.

- He really took the concept of a Hammer movie

and put all the production value into it.

Cool to see him kind of play on that large canvas in a horror space.

- Tim Burton who was coming off the troubled production

of Superman Lives was only too happy to pick up the mantle

on Sleepy Hollow and turn it into the goth nightmare

that he's known for.

What is it?

The entire idea of this film was conceived by Kevin Yagher

and so he collaborated with Seven's screenwriter,

Andrew Kevin Walker.

Kevin Yagher actually intended this to be a low-budget showcase

of some special effects stuff, but once you get Tim Burton in the mix,

it becomes something else entirely.

- Johnny Depp is Tim Burton's alter ego.

He can't resist pulling him in really.

Villainy wears many masks.

None so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

Depp and Burton had agreed on a descriptor.

They called him, "Ichabod Crane girl detective".

So he's there to investigate and he's there to solve the crime,

but he's very prissy and easily frightened,

and has to sort of rise to the challenge.

It's a very Burton choice.

It was an interesting spin on the whole thing.

It is what we call, "Optics". It is truth.

But truth is not always appearance.

One of the most enduring things about Sleepy Hollow is

the headless horseman played by Christopher Walken.

He looks amazing.

It's so memorable when he holds up the flaming pumpkin. It's great.

Christopher Walken is memorable in that role.

Frightening and sort of insane.

It's a really brave choice to put Christopher Walken

in a movie and not give him any lines.

You look better without a head.

- He's played by Christopher Walken

when his face is shown, but when it's not, that's The Phantom Menace star, Ray Park.

Everything is fantastical and mystical.

You've got a beautiful incredible score by Danny Elfman.

It's a scary fairy tale come to life.

Sleepy Hollow did perform very well at the box office

in spite of the fact that it opened opposite

the new James Bond movie at the time,

The World Is Not Enough and that's saying a lot.

- Is he dead?

That's the problem. He was dead to begin with.

When movies do well, they often get a sequel,

but I'm glad this one was a one-off.

- Prepare for the end of days.

Arnold versus the Devil on the eve of the millennium.

Who doesn't want to see that match up?

I had been working with Jim Cameron for most of a year.

We became pretty close.

I came to Jim and I said,

"I'm gonna do this movie with Arnold Kopelson."

It was a sequel, prequel, quadriquel, whatever it was, of The Omen.

And Jim said, "You're not doing that."

I said, "Oh?" He said, "No, you're doing this other film.

It's called, 'End of Days.' It's with Arnold."

And I said, "Well, why am I doing it?"

And Jim's quote was, "I want to protect my franchise."

Get down or I'll put you down.

A thousand years has ended.

You don't know what you've done.

I'm not sure that Marcus Nispel dropped out of the movie

or Arnold was not happy.

It was not in good shape.

There had been a lot of time which is money spent.

I think Arnold was deeply frustrated.

You wish entrance?

Yes.

You have much hatred and vengeance in your heart.

- He had had a heart issue and he had a serious operation,

and so he hadn't worked in two years.

Who the fuck are you?

Oh, I think you know who I am.

You just don't want to believe it.

Listen, anybody who thinks that Arnold Schwarzenegger

is just a big bunch of muscles is in for a very, very rude awakening.

You don't want to see me upset.

Oh, you want to fuck with me?

You're a fucking choir boy compared to me!

A choir boy!

He's very bright. He's always prepared.

You kind of have to be on your game

if you're gonna make a picture with Arnold.

He is a movie star.

He was used to getting his way and in many instances,

he got his way and in some instances, he didn't.

-What happened? -We had a difference of opinion.

I thought that my wife and daughter should live

and he felt otherwise.

I wanted to make him as human and as sympathetic as possible

and Arnold was game.

-He was great. -No!

The beginning of the film, I had done his close-up.

Arnold said, "Wait a minute, I have an announcement to make.

This is the best close-up of me that I've ever had taken."

It was so nice of Arnold to do-- to have done that.

It was so supportive.

A thousand years you have waited for my return

and with your last breath I shall bear witness to the end of days.

Gabriel Byrne was just a lovely man. I adored him.

And I loved talking to him.

I couldn't convince her to come here.

Yuck. Then I shall have to go to her.

Kevin Pollak was manically funny.

He'd be off doing Columbo and he could make

one eye go like that.

-Ah, fuck! -You're bleeding.

Of course, I'm bleeding, you fucking shot me.

-I just needed to find out. -Well, you found out, okay?

Robin Tunney was already cast in the movie.

She's really a good actress.

How do you know my name?

He's gonna fuck you. Can you see him?

Who are you? How do you know my name?

This very imposing figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the set.

Nobody wanted to appear unprepared.

Nobody wanted to blow takes,

because they couldn't remember their lines.

So everybody knew what they were supposed to do and they did it.

If you read the Bible, you can't miss it. Faith.

Between your faith and my GLOCK 9mm, I take my GLOCK.

You know, there was some pretty big set pieces.

There was one with the subway train and there was a fight.

That New Year's Eve was as cold as anything I remember.

We never got warm.

Camera assistant was taken away by ambulance,

'cause he had hypothermia.

I remember shooting two endings.

Because I had this idea that he should die,

which, among other things, would humanize him.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is an industry.

Best movie to make is a movie with him in it, because he's in it.

So the Prince of Darkness wants to conquer the earth,

but he has to wait until an hour before midnight of New Year's Eve.

This is Eastern time?

The film is as good as I could have made it.

When you do a film, you want people to see it.

Box office success certainly at that time

was a direct indicator as to whether there are a lot of eyeballs on the movie.

To me, it wasn't money. It was you wanted people to see it.

I can do this all day long.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Back in the olden days, if we wanted to watch movies,

we had to go to a store

and they would have them in these little boxes

and you would IRL like go and see what kind of movies

you wanted to rent.

- This is DVD.

The late '90s, early 2000s was the height of the DVD boom

and it never got better for studios.

I loved all the extras you used to get on DVD.

I loved the director's commentary.

I loved the director's cut, the deleted scenes.

You know, as a film enthusiast I think all of that stuff

is really exciting and I kind of miss it, because

although, you know, when you buy an exclusive on Apple,

you get a few bits and pieces, it's nowhere near the depth

that you used to have.

People bought a lot of copies of VHS Event Horizon,

and then when DVD came along, they threw out their VHSs

and they bought it on DVD.

Then they bought it on 4K.

You know, we really benefited from the DVD revolution.

♪ Blockbuster Video, wow, what a difference ♪

A lot of people get nostalgic about Blockbuster,

myself included on-- in certain elements,

but Blockbuster has this really unique position

of being both hero and villain.

If you lived somewhere where maybe you didn't have

a ton of mom and pop stores giving you access to things,

giant corporation Blockbuster comes in,

and now maybe you have more access to movies

that you didn't have before.

But in areas where you did have those mom and pop shops,

they can't compete with the Blockbuster.

So slowly mom and pop shops are getting elbowed out,

which is a bummer.

As we become adults, those are the businesses

that I love to support, right?

The small businesses.

The mom and pop independents, because they're the ones

bringing you cool shit that you haven't seen before.

They're playing by their own rules

versus the gigantic corporations that are like,

"These are our rules and this is how it's gonna be."

So it's kind of a double-edged sword with Blockbuster.

I don't necessarily see a future for the return of the video store.

It is a relic of the past.

But, having said that, the actual physical ownership

of your own video store, that is something that you can do now

with buying up special editions from boutique labels like

Severin, like Vinegar Syndrome, like Blue Underground,

like Mondo Macabro.

There's many of us doing it.

But uh, but that's probably where you'll get the wild

and more interesting side of cinema.

Heya!

- When VOD came along, and now streaming, it killed the DVD market.

So that safety net went away.

Part of the reason Hollywood just makes big franchise movies

is because that's the safest way for them to make their money back.

The pandemic broke people out of the habit of going to movies.

And so, I think the studios, they're starting to realize

that they need to start that habit up again.

They need the theatrical component to survive.

So my hope is that, yeah, we do kind of swing back

to where things used to be, to a model that actually worked

rather than this current model which doesn't,

and I'm speaking purely in business terms, isn't really working.

But then of course, like on the horizon also is AI

and the chaos that that is going to bring with it.

But I have a weirdly optimistic view of the near future.

I think things are gonna get better.

What cinemas had to do is, of course,

offer more comfortable environments to entice people in.

It is still a unique thing that when you watch a film in the cinema

with a group of people, you have that collective experience.

And if it's a horror, everyone's feeling the fright at the same time.

There's nothing like it.

I don't believe movies are the premier medium anymore.

I think we live in a kind of dysphoric time,

where people's attention goes to a lot of different things.

Film has its place, but I don't think

it's the apex predator that it used to be, sadly.

Maybe it will be again one day, but at the moment, not really.

There's the same excitement there was in the '90s

as there is in every decade and the burnout.

- I think that the end of the '90s, like the end of the '80s, was rebellion.

There was a kind of aversion to this sort of

mainstream entertainment, both in film and music,

that had gotten so big, and so glossy, and so soulless.

I would say that the films that really were seminal

in the sort of horror-thriller genre

at the back end of the '90s were 100% a rebuttal against

the exploding gloss of the '90s.

I do think there was a splitting of the horror genre

at the end of the '90s.

Down one path, it goes down the route of mainstream adventure stories,

larger-than-life monster flicks for the mass audience.

And there's this other little slightly overgrown path

which leads you through Blair Witch Project,

independent cinema, off-the-wall directors,

directors creating their things that the studios wouldn't understand.

And I really think into the 21st century,

those two paths have been maintained more or less.

- Hello!

Blair Witch 100% connected with the public

and their appetite for something more grounded,

more in line with who they were.

The famous shot from Blair Witch is the girl with the tear,

like super close-up in a camera.

That could have been shot with your shitty handycam in your backyard.

That's your life, your experience.

It's not Tom Cruise with a giant wig, and fake nails,

and a huge garish set.

And I think folks were ready.

- Meta became too meta, I guess you could say.

What did you get? You got some Scary Movie.

-What's up? -What's up?

Boom. "Alright, well, let's go to the complete antithesis of that.

And make a Saw."

Rob Zombie movies. Hostel.

And it went really dark.

- I do think the pendulum swung far.

Maybe a little too dark for my taste.

But I think teenage movies specifically are always

gonna be important.

We are definitely back making remakes of all the movies

from back in the day, back in the '90s, because that's what the kids want.

They're really into Scream again.

I have two daughters, teenage daughters.

I get a little street cred, because of Jawbreaker

and Urban Legend. And Scream.

But they're watching all those movies again.

And they're remaking all those movies again.

They're not gonna stop making those movies.

Maybe they'll never stop.

We might get a Scream 15,

which I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Listen, if Kevin's directing and Kevin's writing,

he knows what he's doing.

Maybe it was lightning in a bottle.

I'm so happy that I got to be a part of that '90s golden era,

that golden age, because I think it was special.

IN SEARCH OF DARKNESS 1995 - 1999

JOURNEY BACK INTO ICONIC '90S HORROR