Original subtitles

They get better and better with age.

Hot off the success of his Psycho 2 screenplay.

Tom Holland wrote and directed Fright Night and took everyone by surprise.

It left the great movie monsters behind and I wrote Fright Night in reaction to that and

also because I had grown up loving the Hammer AIP vampire films.

I love Christopher Lee.

It stars William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Stephen Geoffreys and Roddy McDowall opposite

Chris Sarandon.

What you do is to have a gonzo horror fan look out the window and see his next-door

neighbor a vampire chomping down on somebody.

And then of course, if he's a horror movie fan running around saying vampire, vampire

next door.

Nobody's going to believe him.

You can't make the villain all bad.

You have to add the ambivalence where there are saving graces to the villain to make him

a three-dimensional character.

He's been given eternal life but he always loses the one he loves.

Roddy McDowall kills it as Peter Vincent who's a B-movie horror host named after Peter Cushing

and Vincent Price and he's forced to take on the real deal.

It was a cool movie that actually had a sense of history as well.

It had everything you wanted.

There was great gore, there were hints of nostalgia with McDowell and that kind of hit

towards the Hammer movies.

I had the best effects crew extant in Hollywood at that moment and Fright Night is full of

in-camera effects.

There's that final scene where Charlie and Peter Vincent confront Jerry Dandrige in the

basement and Amy gets in the way.

And she says Charlie you told me that you'd save me.

And then she comes back to him and when she came back to him, I realized there was a huge

scare that was there.

I went to Steve Johnson and I said Steve give her a shark's mouth that will scare the hell

out of every kid.

Then it ends up being the definitive image on the one street and has become cosplay.

Yes.

Who knew?

The Return of the Living Dead I think is such a great horror comedy because it never stops

being horrifying but it's so gut-bustingly funny.

I remember a very significant moment of watching The Return of the Living Dead when they brain

the thing and it doesn't work because then everything you think you know is out the window.

And it's one of the first maybe meta zombie movies that's playing with those expectations

where they take a moment to explain all the rules that they learn from watching

Night of the Living Dead.

I'd thought you said if we destroyed the brain it'd die?

It worked in the movie. Well, it ain't working now Frank.

You mean the movie lied?

And then when those rules don't apply to the situation you're in, it suddenly becomes...

very anything could happen.

They weren't the mindless flesh eaters.

They were fast, they were smart, they were not what you were expecting.

They're killing the paramedics; They're killing the cops.

And one of them gets on the CB radio and is like �Send more cops."

And it's just hilarious because you've never seen that in a zombie movie before.

The Tarman scene,

I remember looking at it and thinking I had no idea how they did it because something

so specific is happening with the anatomy of that thing.

It's just one of those accidentally iconic moments of horror with the design,

with the actor, with the way he was carrying himself.

It's an indelible image of '80s horror.

That woman corpse that they cut in half, it was made by a friend of mine Tony Gardner

who has done Chucky for the last few movies.

They tie her down and have this conversation with her. They say, "Why do you want brains?"

And she says...

"It makes the pain go away."

That to me is one of the most horrifying concepts

I've ever heard in a horror movie and so hilarious at the same time.

I find that movie fascinating.

What can I say about Howling 2?

I can say that Christopher Lee apologized to me for being in it.

I can say that to whatever Phillippe Mora was thinking, I don't think it probably got on film.

It does have however Sybil Danning's dropping her dress 72 times during the end credits

which you know, that counts for something.

The problem with Howling 2 is that it just doesn't make any sense.

Particularly in that it completely blows the ending of Howling 1 in which the newscaster

turns into a werewolf in front of the entire TV audience and then in Howling 2 nobody saw it.

It's like it must have been the lowest rated newscast in history.

And it was shot in Transylvania or someplace like that. Ferdy Mayne is in it.

I mean there are things about it that are interesting but it just doesn't make any sense at all.

When Stephen King focuses in on small-town stories that's what I love as a fan.

Well, Silver Bullet was done by Dan Attias who was one of my assistant directors.

It's a werewolf picture.

Another one of those movies '80s movies with a kid hero.

Yeah, it's a pretty affecting movie because a lot of these movies much like I Was a Teenage

Werewolf are parables about adolescence and Silver Bullet it fits into that category I think much

more so than like something like The Howling or An American Werewolf.

The Coreys were kind of everything in the

Silver Bullet was my first-time seeing Corey Haim in anything and I just fell in love with that kid.

And I thought there was something very special about him in that movie.

And of course, Gary Busey, he knows Uncle Red with all his little Uncle Red-isms, you know?

And it made me scared of the dark again because there's something out there.

Everett McGill as Reverend Lowe it's such a great performance.

And it's interesting to me that in that movie he didn't even have to be the guy in the werewolf

costume but he did it because he was so method.

I had no idea that Re-Animator would become a cult classic.

We needed to find a way to separate our film from so many of the others because everyone

was making horror films then.

Basically, Lovecraft doing his version of Frankenstein it's about someone who has a

dream that's a very positive thing that turns awful.

It's sort of like be careful what you wish for.

The idea of bringing the dead back to life is something we all wish that we could do.

I like movies where the heads talk and The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

I just think there's something about that that's real horror to me.

Herbert West, he's so full of himself.

And yet we can't help but like him because he's so enthusiastic and he always makes a

choice you didn't guess it.

I think the unsung power of Stuart is his storytelling ability.

Stuart's gloriously outrageous, he just goes for it.

It's big and it's brave.

So, we had to invent a female character for Re-Animator and we invented the dean's

daughter Megan Halsey that Barbara Crampton plays in the film.

And of course, the scene that got all the attention is the scene in which we sometimes

call it the head gives head scene.

We knew that no one was going to do a scene like this.

It was a funny thing that they were doing, this visual pun.

And I thought I can't turn this down because of this moment on screen that I'm going to

have to do.

If I knew then what I know now I don't know if I would have been able to go through with

what I went through on Re-Animator.

It was quite exploitive.

It was really groundbreaking in a way.

That scene is still shocking and taboo.

The fortunate thing is it stopped before it really gets bad.

It just goes right up to the edge there.

There wouldn't be Re-Animator without that damsel in distress like that.

We wouldn't be talking about it.

Stuart Gordon's maybe signature achievement in horror is the ironic tone, the over-the-top

pleasure of the horror.

The fun of it.

He brought kind of an experience to Re-Animator that showed that a cheap horror movie

can be really good.

I honestly thought no one will ever see this bloody thing.

What did I know?

Ash played by Bruce Campbell.

He was one of the first actors who become famous in horror for playing a hero rather than a villain.

Horror stars from the 30s on down through to Vincent Price and Christopher Lee etc...

were tended to be known for playing the monsters, the villains.

The male horror stars were known for being the antagonists and Bruce Campbell's a little

different.

He was the Bruce Willis of horror.

He was just that every man who was like stuck in a situation that was way out of his league.

He just said screw it, I'm not going to die.

He was known for being the guy fighting back against the evil so that made him kind of

unique in horror history.

Every boy in the world must have wanted to be Kurt Russell in The Thing.

He battles an alien creature in sub-zero temperatures.

He's still badass all the way through even after everything he's been through.

Tom Holland's Fright Night.

I always wanted to be like kind of a mix between Charlie Brewster and Evil Ed

where I wanted to be the super horror nerdy kid but I also wanted the girlfriend.

In Phantasm 2,

Reggie Bannister is a likable, relatable character because he's basically playing himself.

He talks that way off set, "Hey, dude, man how is it going?"

He's the same way.

I think that's why people like him.

Tom Atkins is awesome.

He's always like a reliable presence.

You see him turn up and a lot of Carpenter stuff and then Romero borrows him for Creepshow

and then he's in Night of the Creeps as the cop.

He's great.

'Mo' Rutherford from The Stuff.

He is awesome.

On first glance you're like this guy's kind of a scumbag and he plays himself a little

like aloof but then as the movie goes on you really fall in love with him because you see

where he's coming from.

A lot of people will misunderstand him and think

that he's the doofus but really, he's outsmarting everyone.

He's such a good character.

So, when I think of '80s specifically and heroes, I think of movies like The Monster Squad and

The Lost Boys.

These are movies that I could relate to as a kid.

It's these cool kids that I wanted as my friends.

I wanted that tree-house.

I wanted that club.

Like I really wanted to have a Monster Club and ride around on my bike and try to actually

take out monsters if I could find them.

In Lost Boys you've got the Frog Brothers.

They hung out at this comic shop and they were vampire killers.

I was like man, this is me. I've got my bike.

After this movie I'm going to go ride around with my friends and try to recreate these things.

In the '80s the central character certainly Friday the 13th and Nightmare, and Halloween,

you started to see really strong women who start out to be victims possibly but at some

point, it turns.

They find a way to win the day.

Some guy doesn't come in and save them.

Yeah, it was not a time for kick-ass guys.

It was a time for kick-ass gals.

And it wasn't about women running away from fear.

It was about women confronting it.

The '80s was a great decade for women and I think people just sort of misconstrued what

horror was trying to say about female characters.

So many people who look at the genre outside they think it's just about victimizing women

and I think they think it's about basically living out these like lurid fantasies of violence

against women.

But for me as a kid growing up watching '80s horror it was about watching women persevere.

Horror has a love-hate relationship with women.

They glorify it but at the same time completely objectifying and slashing the girl in the nightgown.

So, there's something going on there.

I don't know what it is. What is it?

I love Jamie Lee Curtis in the original Halloween.

You think she's just a babysitter... Oh, no.

She has a quality of both being tender and strong at the same time and that's a very

attractive combination.

How she became iconic I think is that when she survives, she's there to protect the young

ones that she's in charge of and she survives trying to save other people too.

She was very vulnerable but still strong enough to fight back.

She was a fighter and so that was also something to aspire to. But I can sort of hook in to

the idea of like oh, yeah, I'm a fighter too and I can stand up for myself and I can take care

of myself and I can be brave.

So, there's a lot of that in there that I think is really cool for women and for everyone.

The beauty of being a woman in horror is you're an action figure.

You're running, you're jumping, you're playing, you're proactive, you're taking command of

plot situations and scenes that women in ordinary movies don't get to do.

For as much as people like to look down on say the Friday 13th movies when you really

look at it, Friday 2 was about Ginny and it was about Amy Steel being smarter than every

other person at that camp.

And she knew how to get into Jason's head.

She knew how to defeat the monster so to speak.

Barbara Crampton, the queen of low-budget horror throughout the '80s.

She just came across as someone that's like really strong.

She goes from a traditional girlfriend role in Re-Animator to the de-facto protagonist

of From Beyond. She becomes the seeker of that story which is a pretty cool transition.

Pretty emblematic of what Barbara has done with that legacy since which is pretty cool to see.

Somebody like Nancy Thompson who basically open arms at the end of Nightmare on Elm Street

is like come get me Freddy, let's do this.

And it was really Heather Langenkamp's movie.

She was an amazing force in that movie and that performance is really strong and one

of the best renditions of the final girl ever.

She creates all these traps and she plans out how she's going to trap the killer.

It's like some fucked up Home Alone style horror nightmare.

So, she decides to lay the booby traps around her house using an army manual called Booby

Traps and Anti-Personel Devices.

There's something so childlike about it that I love it.

It's effective.

And you see that now in conventions people dressing up as Nancy and drawing power from her.

There's like a real serious threat of women who have survived PTSD and have survived sexual

trauma and have gravitated to these heroes.

It makes perfect sense. It's amazing.

If you look at something like Hellraiser with Kirsty, her whole family life is just

one big Shakespearean mess between Julia and her Uncle Frank and her father.

But in the end it's her resilience that ends up sending the Cenobites back.

Are you going to be the type that does the wrong thing and makes the wrong decision

or are you going to buckle down and think it through and be a leader?

And I think those are our heroes and our heroines and that's who you remember.

You remember the final person or the final girl or the final hero or the heroine.

That's the leader that made a struggle, came through, but these are all just iconic

hero stories anyway.

This is just our new literature.

The '80s were about the people surviving the monster and somehow or another that got twisted

around where the monsters the star and the people were incidental.

And that's what the term final girl reared its head and it makes me sound like I'm

100 years old but I said in my day we call that the star of the movie.

It's almost like we had to qualify making these women the protagonist of the movie by

saying well, we're adhering to this formula and she's the final girl and she's a scream queen.

But really what you've got is a genre full of women protagonists which is pretty cool.

So much so that when it's a guy like Jesse in Elm Street 2 or Charlie

in Fright Night, it's almost an aberration.

Scream Queen, Final Girl, it's just fan shorthand.

It doesn't really mean anything to me.

My gender is specific.

I am a woman.

I love living my life as a woman.

I love living my life in horror films as a woman because the decisions and the instincts

and the actions I take are predicated on my gender

I don't act like a guy and I don't want to.

The fact that I'm physical, that I'm sexual, that I'm an intellectual, that I'm spiritual,

all of those things are grounded in the fact that I'm a woman so I don't necessarily want

equality of public perception or public acceptance.

When I think about the term final girl I wince because it's still differentiating between

a final boy and a final girl.

We're going to be judged about how we fought the monster and not because of the gender

that we were when we fought him.

Wes Craven was brave maybe to have a girl be his lead but I don't think anybody would

give him any credit for it today.

Equal opportunity ass-kicking is what I'm all for.

The openness of what gender means now is so wonderful.

It is how fluid it is and how people don't want to be identified by gender.

I'm so curious how this will play out in film and the horror genre.

I look forward to seeing more transgender more LGBTQ figures in horror and what they

will bring that will really bring an entirely new dimension to horror movies.

That's what's going to be exciting.

I want to see that.

Well, we're going to shoot at the Beverly Center and I went oh, this is going to be a

class act.

Chopping Mall is a movie with these robots in a mall that are security bots.

The building gets struck by lightning and it changes their algorithm and so they go

on a murderous rampage and there's a bunch of teenagers that are in the mall.

They've broken into the one store and they're all staying in there so they can drink and

have sex and whatnot.

They're then trapped in the store by the killbots.

It was called Robot.

I remember us all standing around hearing that it was going to be called Killbots

and we all went...

We didn't sign up to do Killbots.

Then they ran that title in it and didn't sell.

And when we heard it was Chopping Mall, I think that we all just died inside I guess.

Chopping Mall makes you think oh, people are chopped in a mall and that sounds really cool but

nobody got chopped at all.

They got lasered by the robots but I guess that's a moot point.

When we were all cast, we were friends in a mall having a party sort of living the movie

that we were making.

They didn't shut down the mall.

We had to wait for the stores to close.

When everybody was out of there, we set up really fast.

We shot until it was time for the stores to reopen.

Doing a movie at night, how do you even do that?

I've never stayed up like all night for a month in a row.

How am I going to sleep during the day?

Suzee Slater's head had to explode from being lasered by the robot.

That was a really cool kill.

If we want to get gleeful about kills.

My favorite kill is when I kill the killbot.

I definitely feel like I got the last laugh in Chopping Mall.

The Toxic Avenger is basically a satire.

The movies that Michael Herz and I have made it's all about the underdog.

We like comedy and we like social issues and politics and we like naked people, men and

women of course, and we like mixing the genres.

So, The Toxic Avenger is not a horror film.

It has elements of horror.

It probably has the first full head crushing scene in history.

The thirteen-year-old boy has his head crushed by the wheel of an automobile.

The MPAA made us cut I think 2O minutes out of the original Toxic Avenger.

The Toxic Avenger is a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength.

His weapon unfortunately is only a mop and he can jump.

That's about it.

We thought that was amusing because the mainstream movies of that time have all sorts of super-duper

weapons and sound effects and special effects and we thought it would be funny just to have

it be a mop.

And the movie is an environmental movie.

So, what better weapon than a mop?

A guy wandered in here looking for a job.

I showed him the rough cut in the editing room.

He said you should call it, The First Super-Hero from New Jersey.

A guy off the street.

Great idea. People loved it.

They're back.

It's almost like they're trying to capture lightning in a bottle again but this time

it's the toy phone that has voices for Carol Anne as the otherworldly Poltergeist forces

follow the Freeling family to Phoenix, Arizona.

Britt director Brian Gibson was trying to make sense of this movie since Tobe Hooper

was out of the picture and Steven Spielberg was focused on making more serious fare like

Empire of the Sun with a kiddy Christian Bale and also probably wondering why the Academy

dissed him over The Color Purple.

This time they recruit Will Sampson as a Native American shaman to show the white folks how

to triumph over cult creatures.

HR Giger designed two of the film's creatures including the killer who knows what it is

that Steven barfs out after he swallows the worm and gets possessed.

But don't we all get a little possessed when we drink too much?

Poltergeist 2 definitely has its flaws but it's worth checking out alone just because

of Julian Beck as Reverend Henry Kane.

He's so creepy with his little hat and sing-songy voice.

You'll never forget that performance.

Next stop, Chicago.

Tony was probably the smartest actor that I've ever met but he had a European art film

sensibility.

So, when they came back for Psycho 3, he insisted on directing it.

Psycho 2 is a very respectful film.

It's sort of tiptoeing around a giant legacy.

Psycho 3 is crazy.

Psycho 3 is Anthony Perkins deciding that he's not going to tiptoe around that legacy

anymore and he's going to go to 11 with it.

Where Psycho 2 is very sort of measured and calm, Psycho 3 is colorful and garish and

weird and he bashes Jeff Fahey's

head in with a guitar.

It was sort of well-received at the time but I think Psycho 3 is due for a massive reconsideration

because it's Anthony Perkins grappling with this thing that he's had to live with for

20-some odd years at that point and decided to own it which I think is a significant moment

in the genre.

Psycho 2 and Psycho 3 are miles better than the remake of Psycho which is I wouldn't say

an abomination but I think it's just one of the most misguided ideas for a movie

I've ever heard of.

Not that it's terribly made or anything like that but it's just such a non-movie.

It's like, why?

And somebody said well, it's because kids won't watch black and white.

And you know what I say? Fuck em if they can't

watch black and white. You have to remake the movie with other actors? That's ridiculous.

What happens when a movie is made completely driven by cocaine?

Maximum Overdrive has Stephen King directing from his Night Shift short story Trucks.

His one and only time behind the camera as a director King has since said publicly that

he was coked out of his mind for the duration of the shoot.

He didn't know what he was doing and it shows.

Still, there's lots to love about this over-the-top movie.

And of course, Emilio Estevez coming off the Brat Pack and seeing him at the forefront

of Maximum Overdrive like look, I know it's not a great movie but boy is it fun.

A comet passes by bringing all machinery to life with a mind to kill naturally.

You have coaches getting pelted with soda cans and just ridiculous over-the-top moments.

It's also fun because the cast features a pre-Simpsons Yeardley Smith.

If it's anything great that came out of this movie it's that killer AC/ DC soundtrack.

I'm the biggest supporter of Maximum Overdrive.

People hated the movie but listen, I derive pleasure from watching that film and as well

as a lot of other bad movies and I think as long as I recognize those flaws and can admit that,

Just let me have my thing man, I like it.

Tommy Jarvis had his own kind of three picture arc in the Friday the 13th franchise.

He was played by different actors. Friday 6 begins pretty fast.

You got Tommy Jarvis, you got his friend and a pickup truck.

They're going to the grave site to go dig up Jason and make sure he's dead and I'm like,

why would you do that man?

Jason gets a resurrected in a very Universal monsters fashion with the bolt of lightning

and he becomes zombie Jason.

When Jason returns and there's all these kids at the camp, I was like, oh my God, Jason's

going to kill all these kids.

But when Tommy finally faced Jason in the lake of fire and then like he drops to

the bottom of lake I was like yeah man, you saved the kids.

That's all that mattered to me, just save the kids because I was about the same age as those

kids and I went to summer camp.

So, I didn't want Jason killing me.

And if I knew Tommy took care of Jason everything was going to be okay.

So many performances in horror in the '80s were slept on because horror was disreputable.

Seth Brundle is one of the great anti-heroes.

I mean he's a hero but he's his own worst enemy.

Seth Brundle's speech in The Fly about his insect politics may be the pinnacle of the decade for me.

Insects don't have politics. They're very brutal.

He's hero and villain and he's victim all-in-one.

But I think a horror protagonist that gets really overlooked in the '80s is Veronica from

The Fly.

She goes through a very powerful arc of falling in love of a breakup.

There's an abortion subplot in there which is pretty hot button for the '80s and she's

essentially euthanizing her life partner at the end of the film.

And her sobs at the end of that are maybe one of the most real moments of '80s horror

I've ever seen.

She's one of the most complex and most well-rounded women protagonists in the genre.

Cronenberg's always rife with allegory.

The Fly, he will tell you and I agree, it's not about AIDS, it's about death and dying

and watching someone who you love become a different person by degrees.

And whether that's about disease and aging or whether that's just about a relationship

running its course, I find The Fly to be a super powerful allegory.

I think what's interesting about Night of the Creeps, it's Fred Dekker's attempt at

making a current slasher kind of monster movie but he's still jamming some things together.

I mean it starts with aliens for crying out loud that get into your brain so now you've

got a zombie movie basically started from alien origins and Jason Lively running around

on prom night. It's coming of age, it's sex, it's dressing up, it's staying out late but now

you got to fight zombie aliens, slither monsters in your brain that have killed your

best friend.

It was just so bonkers and so '80s.

My personal favorite of any film that I've done.

It's sort of like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers only it isn't.

These little creeps, they look like slugs and they shoot into your mouth when you open

your mouth to go ah, they're in and then they eat you out inside and you're a zombie.

My job is to destroy them.

The girls are all waiting for their dates to arrive.

I walk to a window and I look out and I say, well girls...

I've got good news and bad news girls.

The good news is your dates are here.

What's the bad news?

They're dead.

They're dead.

Anything that Tom Atkins says in that is probably the best.

Creepy crawlies...

and a date for the formal.

This is classic, Spanky.

And of course, you got "thrill me."

So, that's just like what is that?

Thrill me.

Thrill me.

Thrill me.

Thrill me.

Thrill me.

That's an iconic statement that everybody knows now that we can use at anytime that

you want to.

In the bathroom scene, there's a Monster Squad easter egg.

On the back of the wall that was sort of I guess the week that Fred had learned that

Monster Squad had got a green-light and so we had his art department graffiti

Go Monster Squad on the back tile of that bathroom.

We had the best time shooting that movie.

The biggest treat of all is an action figure of Detective Ray Cameron with the shotgun

and a beer.

How about that?

Atkins - Man of action.

Tobe Hooper for me is a monumental figure.

He took risks as a filmmaker and he was making a sequel to his original classic that was

not lost on me.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It's just those three words just had such power especially when combined.

But when I came out of Chainsaw, I was completely dumbfounded. lt just completely blew my mind

and I realized that the cure for Chainsaw was not to see it a hundred times and try

to dismiss it, but it was basically to join the Sawyer family.

He had already been hired off of a little movie

he had made a parody called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure.

A copy of it got to Tobe and Tobe hired Bill off of that film.

And I was shocked that Chop-Top was a big part.

Now the idea that Chainsaw 2 had a great sense of humor to it, I think really took people

by surprise.

One of my favorite scenes is the introduction of Chop-Top and I come in to threaten Stretch,

Caroline Williams, the DJ.

She's back on the record vault getting terrorized by Leatherface and I.G. Lou Perryman comes

in and l jump out of the record vault and start pounding his head in with a claw hammer.

The hammer itself was foam rubber.

When Tobe would call action, I started pounding on I.G.'s head.

And making up stuff like if I had a hammer and a one and a two and a three

and just pounding away.

We've done about 12 takes and Tobe goes yeah, yeah, that was great that was great.

Let's just do one more take.

I looked at Tobe and I said Tobe, "Am I doing something wrong?"

And he looked at me and he goes oh, hell no, Bill, I'm just having fun watching you.

Undoubtedly the signature moment in the whole movie is the chainsaw between my legs.

Considered to be at the time an anti-feminist moment, to the contrary I consider it to be

the quintessential feminist moment.

This is a woman who is being almost raped with a chainsaw with an implement.

She manages to take that moment in hand and turn it as much to her advantage as she can

saving her own life.

If she's killed in that moment the movie is over.

What does she do?

She's is going to go after him.

It sort of launches the rest of the action for the rest of the film and that crazy inverted

bloody, nutty trip through Oz.

It's one of the moments I'm proudest of.

At the time we shot it all I could think is I don't want my mother to see this movie.

In From Beyond, Stuart wanted to prove that it was going to be a more serious movie.

The humor element of Re-Animator perhaps took him a little bit by surprise so he wanted

to make sure that the tone of the next movie didn't replicate that.

I remember getting that note a lot that this is serious business this movie.

It's a very cinematic idea.

The idea that you can't trust your five senses.

That our senses are so limited, we're not even aware of all this stuff.

There's these other dimensions and things that are around us all the time.

It's a really great concept.

Lovecraft, he was a hypochondriac and the idea of these invisible things that are in the

air that can kill you.

In From Beyond, Barbara plays the mad scientist essentially.

And Jeffrey Combs is the victim in a way From Beyond reversed the roles that they played

in Re-Animator.

I was able to do a lot in that characterization in the space of one movie because of the Resonator

I was able to get in touch with my deep urgings and repressed feelings.

There's certainly more sadomasochistic kinky kind of - that the whole movie is about stimulating

the people's sexuality.

All of that pent-up comes roaring out.

Barbara Crampton used to say and I used to say I don't understand the expression

less is more and I used to say, I think it should be more is more and she said no, Stuart with you

it's more is not enough.

Look at Jeffrey Combs coming out of Pretorius's blobby figure and trying to save Katherine

McMichaels and then being absorbed by the monster and it was all this gooey slime.

I had it all over me, Jeffrey had it all over him,Ted Sorel as the monster had it on him

and it was just this grotesque disgusting mass.

And at one point the monster was like over my head and trying to absorb me and suck me

inside and it was a dirty business I got to say.

I never felt so ugly or hideous like Quasimodo in this makeup and you're in it all day.

Crawford has the pineal gland sticking out of his forehead.

Stuart used to say, well it's a red asparagus spear.

No, it's a dog dick, that's what it is. It's a dog dick.

Each movie carries its own signature.

It's the sounds that begin to intrude on the silence and on the darkness that create the

biggest element of fear in a horror film.

It builds the sense of anticipation that something is about to happen.

Sound design is really what gives the movie that kind of creepy feel.

For instance, just that image of Freddy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 walking down the alley.

The knives against the wall and it just like goes through you.

That's what creates really memorable lasting memories of movies.

It's not just the image.

It's like a bass player in a band if he does it right you never notice him but if he does it

wrong, you're like mad at them the whole time.

So, I think the sound design is the same way.

It's supporting this story and so you get lost in the story maybe you don't really notice

the sound design.

We talk about the point of view camera in Friday the 13th.

One of the things that makes that really work is that there was a sound that went with that

point of view.

Every time you were around Jason that sound would be there it'd be in the fabric of the music.

If you watch Friday the 13th or any movie without sound, it wouldn't be that scary

but oh boy you put that music in, it's everything.

Our first screening of Friday the 13th which was pretty much close to the final cut seemed

endless and so long and tedious because nothing happens

Cut to a month later and we had laid in the sound, we'd mix the whole thing and it became

exciting... same footage.

But somehow or other your emotions get involved because the music goes straight to your heart,

straight to your guts and it just, it tells you how you're supposed to feel and where

you're going and whether you can relax, or be afraid or whatever.

That's the vital, vital element of a very good score.

A creepy scene can be so much better with very cool music and Harry Manfredini is a genius.

The music delivers the drama.

Every film has tension, chase, kill.

Your job as a film composer in general you have to deliver the story.

Whether it's a scare or a laugh, a kill or someone crying.

Is it a better scare if it just jumps out at you or is it a better scare if I'm really

leading to it?

Those are actual mechanical compositional things that you deal with.

If you've already got the audience at a seven like they're really agitated and they're really

nervous, the biggest hit you're going to get is a three because you can only go to ten.

But if you pull the music out and you let the audience calm down then you hit,

then you've got a chance of getting a seven on the Richter scale of jump, ya know?

I think Harry doesn't get enough credit for his discofied Friday the 13th Part 3 score.

Well, the piece of horror music I'll always remember was John Carpenter's opening theme

from Halloween because I remember sitting in that theater and the lights go down and

that music comes on with that pumpkin on the side and that scared me.

Just the music got me frightened.

That was my first encounter with music that really set a mood and got me creeped out before

the movie even began.

Well, I don't know if John invented using the synthesizer for horror or something like that

but I mean he certainly capitalized on it.

We were both in a rock-and-roll group coming out of film school so I know his background,

his father was a musician and he grew up knowing how to play the piano, the guitar, the bass

and all kinds of things.

So, he's very accomplished.

He said he wrote that, the score to Halloween for instance I think in an afternoon.

He just had an idea and this 4/5 time was the clever way of approaching it.

If you have that skill you can think in pre-production about the music, you're thinking of

it when you're shooting.

The score then becomes a part of the life of the movie to you, I think.

It started out as economics.

When you have a little tiny budget, you don't have a budget for a big-time composer and

an orchestra.

You have to do it on a synthesizer and that, I could do it myself.

So, it started in Halloween and then it became a creative choice after a while.

Although, I worked with Ennio Morricone on The Thing and he was just a brilliant composer.

What they ended up with was a very Carpenteresque score that is very minimalist and

it's about the last thing you would have expected from the maestro Ennio Morricone and it works.

That's some spot-on stuff.

If you've seen the movie and I play you that opening, it just takes you someplace.

You're transported into this world that you remember from that experience.

And it just builds that feeling of dread, the same thing in Jaws.

They know how to get you.

After all this time I'm still moved by those different elements of craft.

Sound design and in composition, the differences that makes in your movie-going experience.

I really got into soundtrack collecting in the '80s.

Probably why I didn't get into pop music as much because I was collecting soundtracks

and listening to a lot of that.

The Shining soundtrack has a snowed-in ambience and you can't get out.

It kind of rolls over you and your captured within the sound of the movie.

Haunting, very dark, it's a sound-scape throughout the whole movie and I think the movie in itself

is also very cold.

They reinforce each other very well.

Super effective.

I think my favorite soundtrack that doesn't get brought up a lot is Halloween 3.

I'm not talking about the little jingle on the TV, I mean like the score that's in it.

It's one of the best John Carpenter scores in my opinion.

Music is very important to horror and very easy to get wrong in horror.

There's films that we watch that have just been carpeted with stock music and you can

tell and there's music that has been more carefully curated for a film and when you're

in the hands of say Howard Shore with Cronenberg stuff.

That's an unexpected union that really works.

Howard Shore goes very operatic with Cronenberg's scores

which you wouldn't think would be the case with some of these films.

Every horror picture is different. There's the essence of it, certain chord structures that appear

in all of them and many of them come from our friend Bernard Herrmann.

I can go through film after film and tell you how much he's affected the way music works.

So, when someone says to me that sounds like Bernard Herrmann, I go thanks.

In Re-Animator when it opens with that kind of sort of jaunty for want of a better word

rephrasing of Bernard Herrmann's Psycho theme.

I know a lot of fans have criticized Richard Band for ripping off Psycho but it was always

intended as a homage.

There's supposed to be a credit at the end saying with apologies to Bernard Herrmann or something

like that.

But that was another one where that music comes up and right away I could kind of tell

that this movie was going to have kind of a satirical kind of anarchic take on horror.

Just the way it used that music.

Bernstein's score for A Nightmare on Elm Street is mostly electronic.

It sounds very basic but it's a theme that sticks to your mind.

Simplicity and repetition is a great formula when you don't overdo it of course.

I also really like some of this smaller super low budget soundtracks.

So, The Slumber Party Massacre for instance, the entire soundtrack was made on a thirty-dollar

Casio keyboard and three crystal glasses that they would just sort of ping.

It cost nothing to make.

I don't think Giorgio Moroder is sitting here thinking about let me make an '80s synth horror

score but in congress with David Bowie he makes maybe one of the quintessential synths driven '80s

horror scores with Cat People.

It sticks in your mind and lingers in the memory in a way that a more traditional horror

score would not.

It was almost like a musical version of passing the torch.

Going from analog to digital, going from the past to the '80s where everything was expanding

and that fingerprint, I think is on all of those '80s movies.

The Day of the Dead score is just one of those really haunting electronic scores.

Now at first when you listen to you think is quite simple but there's actually

quite a lot of layers going on underneath that main refrain.

It's got a very clinical feel Day of the Dead and I think the music adds to that because

it's very stark kind of synth work and it makes it almost more alienating like as the

movie if that had like an orchestral score for instance, the whole feel of the film would

have been thrown off.

As far as the soundtrack of Hellrasier goes, it is to me by a distance the best horror

score of the decade.

It's beautiful, it's monumental, it's a requiem mass.

Magnificent.

I have no idea why heavy metal was so prevalent in 1980s horror movies.

I mean there was a glut of movies Slaughterhouse Rock and Trick-or-Treat, they were based on

heavy metal characters and bands.

And then every sort of hair metal band in America decided that they had to get a song

on a horror movie.

Rock and horror, they live so closely together.

For all its flaws the soundtrack to Trick-or-Treat is fucking amazing and I will fight anybody

who says differently man.

All of those songs are insanely catchy and really, really good.

Whether there was Bauhaus's Night of the Demons, Tangerine Dream and The Keep

The Lost Boys had such a great soundtrack to it.

Dokken in Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Alice Cooper in Friday the 13th Part 6.

These were speaking to the times.

They're speaking to the punk rock kids, they were speaking to the new wave kids, they

were speaking to the pure kids that were growing up on classic rock like I did.

It became the soundtrack to your own life growing up.

The third Nightmare on Elm Street film Dream Warriors has Heather Langenkamp returning

as Nancy Thompson to assemble a bunch of dream warriors.

Kids who are in a mental institute who battle Freddy Krueger in their dream with their dream

powers.

I feel like this is the Nightmare movie that everyone thinks of when they think of the

series because the first one's a classic but this one has all the fun and games of people

engaging with Freddy in their dreams and fighting him.

The Dream Warriors were collectively all pretty awesome.

And I played the role of Kincaid, the first black in A Nightmare on Elm Street to kick Freddy's ass.

Kincaid represented the minorities, not just African Americans but he represented the minorities

all over the world and he was a hero.

Heather and Robert Englund was like big sister and big brother to all of us.

She was a connecting dot to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that was needed.

It's got so many standout special effects in it and one of my favorites is the giant

worm with Freddy's head especially because that's when he first sees Nancy Thompson again.

We had three units shooting.

Two were for the principal actors with two cameras. Chuck Russell the director would run

back and forth between each set.

And the third unit was specifically just for special effects.

Kevin Yagher did Robert's makeup on the second and the third one.

Rodney Eastman in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 he's stuck to a false bed with a false chest and

Bob Kurtzman and I had to rig all the letters to say come and get me bitch and that

took hours and hours and hours.

There was a lot of creative killings.

My absolutely favorite scene was when Freddy put Jennifer's head through the television

and said, "Welcome to prime-time bitch."

This is also the movie where the quippy almost fun Freddy Krueger comes into his own.

The brilliance of a lot of it was Robert.

Robert really came up with a lot of those lines.

Robert Englund was the boogey man.

He was the Mummy, he was Dracula, he was all of them because he could be in your dream.

My favorite Kincaid line was...

Let's go kick the motherfucker's ass all over dreamland.

Wes Craven had his own style and he made sure

that an African American was the first to survive a horror film and return to a sequel.

He had a great influence on horror.

Now we don't get killed.

I've always been kind of afraid of dolls.

I remember when I was a little kid somebody brought a ventriloquist dummy to my house

and took him out of a suitcase and I was like out of that room in a second and a half.

The thing I've discovered with dolls was of all the movies that I've done a lot of people

consider it the scariest.

Dolls certainly was a poster before it was a movie.

The little female doll that's holding her own eyes.

That's just wrong.

And we made sure that we shot that scene because of the poster.

I was not expecting to make that movie at all.

I was working on From Beyond and had a meeting with Charlie Band and he said we'd like you

to make another movie using the same sets.

And he tossed me a script for what was called �The Doll�originally by Ed Naha.

Stuart's idea was to do it all practically and to do regular nice dolls but not scary dolls.

And he said well, it's what they do

that's scary.

You had literally hundreds of dolls coming to life in this movie.

An army of dolls.

It wasn't just one doll.

It wasn't just like Chucky.

That turned out to be major undertaking and we used to just about every technique

we could.

We used puppets, we used mechanical dolls and we got Dave Allen to do stop motion for the

scenes where we couldn't get it done any other way. It ended up taking an extra year to make

that movie.

It came out after From Beyond because the effects were so difficult.

Well, the big scene in Dolls is the one where the evil stepmother is killed by the dolls.

That's the first time you really see the dolls in action and that was my wife Carolyn played

that part.

My own kids came to the set when I was working on that movie.

The idea that I was taking their toys, their dolls and turning them into killing machines

did not sit well with them at all.

There is one scene in particular.

The characters hear a rustling in the woods and it's a teddy bear.

It's a kind of goofy teddy bear comes up out of the woods and the character is like no, not

that.

Then the teddy bear like transforms kind of into a real bear and devours them.

It kind of sums up the appeal of what that movie is.

Evil Dead 2 was a blast from the minute that we landed in North Carolina to the minute

that we left.

Working with Sam Raimi was just a complete experience that I'll never forget.

He was so imaginative, so funny. So much of what he loves and what he does is based on

the comedy.

If you look at the original Evil Dead it's pretty terrifying.

I think when we did Evil Dead 2 a lot of us were assuming it was going to be as relentless as the

first movie just a lot better special-effects makeup and Sam was a much more seasoned

director at that point.

He was really specific which helped me a lot because there was no doubt in my mind what

I had to do for each shot.

He had the whole script planned out to a T.

I remember we got the draft of the script.

There was a rewrite and it's the scene where Linda's head is in the vice in the tool shed

and the door flies open and Linda's headless corpse comes in with the chainsaw over it's head.

And I was like this is the most terrifying thing I've ever read. Because we shot that

early in the schedule,

I really hadn't at that point really understood Sam's sense of humor.

The fact that every time blood would spray it wasn't like you would never use just a

little syringe of blood.

You would use like a fire extinguisher.

I had like a couple of big trucks outside the stage with hundreds and hundreds of gallons

of colored liquid.

Let 'er rip boys.

It must have been thousands of gallons and Bruce was down there, there was no dummy,

there was no stuntman.

Very physical role.

Bruce Campbell was game for damn near anything in fact.

We're shooting the scene where he's smashing himself with the plates and he ends up by

flipping himself completely and that was all him.

That was not a stunt person.

He was up for anything and he did his own makeup for the cuts and all that, that he wore

for most of the movie.

That was his own makeup.

The first one he was just kind of this hapless guy just trying to survive any way he could

and then he became this very active and also snarky hero in Evil Dead 2 and then

Army of Darkness later on.

I guess with Ash we just get the sense that he's having a really bad day.

You don't feel like he's going to be scarred for life because of what's going on.

Like losing his hand, his reaction is just like oh, you bastards.

Everything in Evil Dead 2 is a very quotable moment from groovy to who's laughing now and

he's like chopping off his hand with the chainsaw.

We were such nerds in high school.

I mean we would quote that movie till our faces turned blue and no one knew what the hell

we were talking about.

When the hand comes off then it's running around and flipping him the bird and then

I think it was the moment where he puts it under the bucket and puts A Farewell to Arms

on top of it.

That's what I got what Raimi was going for and that's also kind of a perfect moment in

horror comedy history.

Oh, we got to shoot the evil hand doing this today and oh my God which one do we use?

We had a radio-controlled hand, we had stunt hands, a hand that would come up palm up on

the floor where it had a prosthetic stump glued to a guy underneath.

We had a palm down version with the same thing another stunt coming out so the hand can move

accordingly.

I don't think you've ever seen anything before that, that handled that kind of bridge of comedy

and horror so well.

Raimi was the first person who I think with legitimate genius blended those things together.

It ushered in a completely new genre.

That was when a lot of us perked up when oh, this is a masterpiece.

Rick Baker had been working with me ever since I started making films.

So, naturally when it came time to do the monster for It's Alive, I would give the job to him.

We didn't show it much.

I figured the more we showed it the less scary it would be and the more it was in your imagination.

I wanted to make The Return to the House of Wax and Warner Brothers said we can't give

you that title but if you want to make another It's Alive movie you can.

We had a lot of adventures on the picture.

Michael Moriarty was yelling into the bushes to the monster come on out, don't be afraid,

come on out.

And at that moment a wild boar ran out of the bushes right at him right into the camera crew

everybody running for their fucking lives and I'm yelling to the cameraman shoot it.

Get it on camera, get it but they didn't get it.

So, what the hell?

The monster was supposed to come up from a pond so he put the guy in the rubber suit

into the pond. On action he submerged and he's supposed to count for 1O and come up so we're

waiting a minute, minute and a half and the monster has not yet come up.

One of the actors runs into the pool and dives in and pulls him out.

His suit had filled up with water and he couldn't come up so he would have drowned.

So, he was rescued right on camera.

Daniel Pearl Lee, the cinematographer and his crew had this running joke of hiding a rubber

chicken in the scene.

I had to be on the lookout every day for a rubber chicken before we started rolling.

One day I missed it and the chicken showed up in the movie.

And that's what I like on this set is having a good time and I want everybody to have fun.

With Lost Boys it was almost impossible to see it working because it was such a bold

and almost audacious gambit which is let's take all of these standard rules of vampire

lore and let's squeeze them through almost like a big gaudy '80s teen sex drama, right?

And I was like that doesn't work.

That's like going to not work in spades.

It was Joel Schumacher and Richard Donner.

Donner was producing it.

I think we were lucky in the end that Joel, we got somebody who had like such an ironclad

vision for how to actually make that work.

He wanted the horror.

What Joel did was he took those tropes and he's like bridging the cinema of Nick Ray

and '80s horror and he's going to pull all of this stuff together.

The vampires represent the dark side of the other characters psyches.

Take all of the anxieties of being a teenager coming into your own as an adolescent and

your sexuality, isolation of being the loner in a new town.

I would argue an undercurrent of the AIDS epidemic and just to some of the phobias that

were afflicting the country at that time, the gay community and other communities and

then the sort of garishness of the 80's culture itself.

He's commenting on the garishness, he's not just showing you the garishness.

With Lost Boys you have sort of the perfect storm of horror meets rock and roll.

They were vampires that women wanted to be with, guys wanted to hang outwith, everybody

wanted to be with the Lost Boys.

What I think is really great about a lot of the stories in the '80s is there was a lot of stories

about single parents and there was a lot that I really enjoyed about Dianne Wiest in Lost

Boys in terms of the struggles she was facing raising Sam and Michael played by Corey Haim

and Jason Patrick.

There was something very realistic about the struggles she was facing in this very sort

of fantasy world of vampires.

To play this character who doesn't really say much, he's just this kind of teen, probably

a runaway, probably had a really fucked up background and then just gets to eviscerate

people sort of like gets to expunge all of his own anxieties like in these monstrous ways.

It was really satisfying.

We shot nights for a lot of our shoot.

We were vampires, we would go to bed in the morning and get up at night and we had blankets

taped over our windows and we were sort of treated like rock stars by the town.

So, we got up to a lot of trouble.

You have somebody like Ve Neill who comes in to do these vampires with the assistance

of Greg Cannom and Steve LaPorte.

They're all dressed up like glam rockers intentionally because she wanted to sort of emote

that 70s rock coolness of like Led Zeppelin but she was like well, if they're gonna explode and

do these cool things like I want glitter in there.

So, if you go and look at them, they're glittery vampires.

We had a full body cast of me that had like the blood pumping through it.

If you actually watch the shot of Corey staking me you can see the division of where it's going to

retract.

Pre-CGI days now they would just clean it up in three seconds.

And then Corey staked me and then they drop the body double, the rubber dummy and then

I landed in the dirt and then all the kids proceeded to kick so much dirt into my face

that I went to the hospital with a scratched cornea.

So, my screaming is real.

I like to tell Corey Feldman whenever I see him that uh, thank you for sending me to the hospital.

Being on the sets or just goofing off with the other guys is a really good memory.

The old clich� and the old kind of warning is don't work with kids, don't work with animals

and don't work with special effects.

And Monster Squad, that's all it is.

You're having this kind of swell of these slashers and villains and Dream Monsters and

guys in hockey masks which is awesome but then I think there's that question.

It's like how did we get here?

Where are the origin stories?

Where are the original monsters?

Fred Dekker what he did was take the original monsters that launched this whole thing.

Let's bring those back and pay a little tribute to those.

Characters who are meant to be Dracula, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon,

they managed to skirt the Universal copyright through some clever dodges.

I actually think that improved them because you weren't recreating something.

Tom Woodruff Jr. is working with Stan Winston's shop at the time and he actually designed

the Frankenstein applications redesign.

My favorite man in a monster suit always was and still is the Creature From The Black Lagoon.

I wanted to be the guy in the monster suit and Stan gave me my first role when I played

the Gillman in Monster Squad.

Somebody else in the shop said well, have you worked out your walk yet?

And I'm thinking uh-oh. Not only is there a walk to figure out apparently but I haven't learned it

and now I'm thinking and I could feel my confidence now starting...

I'm thinking what did I do?

I said, I don't even know the terms.

The fascinating design done unlike any other creature design suit and build and actual application

of it than anybody had ever done at the time and then now Tom's zipped up and glued into

this one-piece suit and has to figure out how to be this character.

We're on the back lot at Warner Brothers and climbing out of the fake manhole cover and

going through a fight with some very enthusiastic stuntmen with hard rubber clubs and then having

to move in on the store with Horace stuck out front with his shotgun and that's when I finally

thought now it's time for my walk.

It was sort of like a monster effects buffet.

I got to sample everything.

Some stunts here and some squibbing and falling and my walking and breathing.

All that stuff.

And I got to die on screen.

I don't think I will ever be able to relive those glory days because it was pretty high up.

Monster Squad has a lot of memorable one-liners.

Other people have great lines like I wish I had that line but obviously Wolf man's got nards

is the line from that movie.

The problem with Monster Squad I think was a couple things.

The subject matter and the story and the action and the kind of monsters were a little too

much for the 8-9 to 10-year olds and it was too kid-like for the 15-16-17-year olds

that went to see the Lost Boys and dug that.

So, like I'm not going to go see a kid's movie.

So, really when he left a small sliver of an audience in there that couldn't go because

of the rating or their parents wouldn't take them so they got left out twice.

But we kind of made the first tween movie.

Hellraiser was written and directed by Clive Barker adapted from his own novella,

The Hellbound Heart.

Central to a lot of Clive Barker's work is the idea of the monsters being the good guys

or at least being more complicated than simply being the bad guys.

Pinhead is not the monster in the film.

The monsters in Hellraiser are Julia and Frank.

The humans are the ones causing the trouble.

I increasingly saw Pinhead as an impartial judge.

As far as Clive was concerned, he was not to be the focus of the film.

Clive's focus was all on Julia.

For Clive, Hellraiser was about creating the first great female horror monster.

I feel as though there's an element throughout the 1980s of people being given a chance.

Clive had never directed a film.

So, I knew absolutely where his imagination was but it is true that he arrived on set

on day one on Hellraiser and said, "So who's in charge here?"

He was extremely lucky I think in having Robin Vidgeon by his side as director of photography

who's no small part of the success of Hellraiser.

He worked with Clive and met Clive's imaginative vision head on.

I was blessed with a lot of wonderful lines.

We have such sights to show you.

There was one line that I highlighted and I wrote next to it - laugh.

And people ought to laugh but they ought to laugh slightly uncomfortably because

as well as being a joke, it's a threat and that line was, "No tears, please."

I've always said that Pinhead is a horror monster who would be perfectly at home at

a garden party with Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde trading epithets.

Kathryn Bigelow is probably one of my favorite filmmakers.

Particularly her work on Near Dark is incredible and I'd never seen a vampire movie like that.

She leans into sort of this western style - is a coolness to it.

It's a bunch of vampires that are traveling across the country and they bring in this

new kid into their fold.

It's so different because it really messes with vampire lore and you've got an incredible

cast with it.

You've got Lance Henriksen, you've got Bill Paxton.

It's so well done.

For as much as I'd grown up sort of trusting somebody like Lance Henriksen, seeing him

transformed into this creature with no set of morals.

Like he's just out to eat and to exist and to survive with something else.

The vampires take over this bar and they're just slaughtering everybody and laughing.

Normally, it's your vampire comes in bites somebody and this it's like no, they're reveling

in it that they're murdering people.

To see Bill Paxton becoming this sort of unhinged crazy man of a character was so awesome.

It's just such an interesting and different take on vampires than anything we saw during

the '80s.

Horror goes directly to our primal nerve centers and the things that are most basic about being

human and that's fucking and killing.

You get sex and nudity on screen and it's just as much of a hook as the violence was.

Nudity has never seemed that gratuitous to me in horror films.

It's always seemed part of it.

I mean if you look at the old movies from like the '60s and early '70s in Spain and Italy.

I used to show them on my show Movie Macabre

and we'd have to cut out three-quarters of the movie because everybody was naked.

I guess vampires and witches just run around naked all the time I don't know.

It's interesting to me how society during the '80s sort of projected their own especially

U.S. cultures projected their own hang-ups on nudity on to this genre of films when it

really wasn't, I don't think that much of an issue.

Oh, I think I'll take a shower now, it's hot in here.

I mean it's just out there with it and I think it was completely gratuitous and

I think it was used only to sell the movie and I think it was completely unnecessary but

you have to get young guys in there to see the movie and how are you going to do that?

They asked a lot of girls to be naked in these films, myself included.

But at that time it was a little bit more forbidden and felt more base and a lot of men were writing

the movies and so they were writing what they wanted to see and yeah, they wanted to see

naked ladies.

For me, it sort of felt like here it is again, okay.

And it felt like it was a rite of passage okay.

If I keep saying no to these roles, I'm not going to be able to work so I said yes and

it was fine as long as the script was good.

A lot of women were exploited for exploitation purposes just to see it because they would

say yes.

The nudity helped get the butts in the seats.

Like if I had two videos in my hand and one said nudity and one did not, which one do you

think I'm watching?

I do think they need to have more male nudity.

Even way back I was like I never see a penis ever in a movie.

And even now it's still rare although getting a little better.

But I feel like if you have a naked lady then have a naked man.

Equality.

Halloween 3, I think you see my ass.

I had an ass then.

I don't have an ass anymore. I'm too old, it's all gone away.

I don't know why an audience of teenagers would think that over sexed teenagers deserve

to die but that's what was happening in the '80s.

So, we must have had a lot of undersexed teenagers enjoying the death of

oversexed teenagers in these movies.

America has always been very schizophrenic in that

it's a puritanical place.

And so a lot of the movies, if you had sex you would die, that was kind of the Friday the 13th model.

Anyone who would have sex you knew was going to be dead by reel three.

I think a lot of people were trying to equate sex with sinning and you're gonna go frolic

and you get what you get, you know?

It's kind of how in Scream they talk about the rules.

You had sex, now you're going to die.

Maybe not the healthiest message to send out to people.

It's a kind of old-fashioned, isn't it?

Especially after the freedom and outrageous goings on of the 60s and 70s.

And that was so ingrained that it was a rule that they deliberately had to start breaking.

And reviewers pointed it out, they had sex and they lived.

That's how strong that was.

I like that women have sexual power over men.

A lot of the time in horror.

No matter how the male antagonist or the villain may try to subjugate and victimize

the woman, she has always been able to very proactively and aggressively act on her own

behalf and get her revenge on the bad guy.

That works for me.

So, it's like different kinds of nudity in horror.

There's plenty where it's used for shock value, I guess.

Like lots of violence is happening on top of it and you're really confused because if

you're getting aroused as this is going, it's like am I a terrible person?

It's like maniacs like slaughtering people.

At what point are you allowed to enjoy it and what point is it kind of disturbing?

I really liked Critters.

I had a good time with it.

It was very Spielbergian.

Sort of a modern-day western but with little monsters.

And one of the things I really like about the Critters world and in particular Critters 2

is one of my favorite themes of Norman Rockwell goes to hell.

So, this is taking the idealized small-town America and just kicking it in the balls.

My main job was try to create some characters who were memorable and just not fodder for

little puppets.

The cast was wonderful Lin Shaye and Scott Grimes and Liane Curtis and Barry Corbin.

A really good group of people.

And the Chiodo Brothers were amazing.

They made these amazing creations on no money.

Another memorable moment in Critters 2 that stretches the boundaries of the PG-13 rating

is when one of the alien bounty hunters picks up the Playboy magazine and sees the fold-out

and transforms into Roxanne Kernohan naked.

A really great idea that Bob Shaye, the head of New Line Studios had when we were doing

the scene with the fold-out.

When she transforms and plucks the giant staple out of her navel that was Bob's idea and I

have to give him credit because it's so good.

The most complicated scene maybe to this day that I've ever shot is that chase between

the pickup truck and the giant critter ball because there are several different versions

of that critter ball.

One of them must have weighed a ton and was on an axle connected to the pickup truck and

it had all these remote-control puppeted faces that are biting on it.

There's another version, it's just a bunch of critter pelts on an inflatable ball that

when it first comes into town you can see two of the Chiodo Brothers' legs behind

it as they're pushing it.

That's real high-tech visual effects.

But when the critters ball is rolling, one of the people running away from it gets rolled

over and reveals the skeleton of him immediately after you hear gobble, gobble, gobble and it's away

and there's the skeleton with a little meat left on it.

That's a favorite moment of mine and always gets an amazing reaction.

Friday the 13th Part 7 -The New Blood is the first one with Kane Hodder as Jason which

is surprising that the most famous Jason came in during the seventh movie.

The really memorable thing about this movie is of course the psychic character Tina who

serves as the first person who can actually stand up to Jason and fight back.

And it was directed by the late John Carl Buechler who did a fantastic job with it.

The single reason I ever became Jason was his insistence that I play the character because

nobody was against C.J. coming back from Part 6.

He had done a good job.

I still think he did a good job but Buechler was adamant that I play the character.

Unbelievable honor.

I said I have to do whatever I can to do this character justice.

Tina has a vision of me killing Bill Butler with the tent stakes.

So it's sticking out of him and I'm standing behind him and he's going like that.

That's the very first thing I ever shot with the hockey mask on.

So, that'll always be a cool memory.

My favorite fire stunt I've ever done is as Jason in Part 7 because there is so much

fire on me.

I'm on fire for so long.

Just an amazing looking stunt.

Everybody's afraid to offer me a fire stunt because one almost killed me.

I was in the hospital five and a half months.

It took a year to fully recover and get back to a somewhat normal life.

Even though it almost killed me I always looked back and said man, I just liked doing fire

stunts because they were so scary-looking.

With Kane Hodder behind the mask, Jason undergoes a ton of punishment.

He gets a house falling on him and electrocuted and nails stuck in him but then his ultimate

death comes from the hand of like a zombie dad coming out of the lake and dragging him

underwater.

It's totally bizarre and a little rushed but you definitely remember it.

One of the movies I would point people to is Killer Klowns From Outer Space by the amazing

Chiodo Brothers.

This is a movie that is not long on plot but is rich and intimate.

The designs for the Killer Klowns, clowns let's face it, always being kind of creepy

are really, really, really disturbing.

The horror is there, the comedy they keep it consistent.

They're killing people with pies.

They're taking people and wrapping them up in cotton candy.

Lon Chaney once said that the clown is funny in the circus ring but he's not funny at your door

at midnight.

These guys are at your door at midnight and even though the story is ridiculous it's filled

with strange slapstick violence.

It really, it gives it a special place in my heart.

When I got the script of Phantasm 2, it wasn't called Phantasm 2.

It was called either American Gothic or Morningside.

It went through different versions. It was top-secret.

You get page two and it says the Tall Man

and I'm like yeah, I think I can figure out what it is.

Angus Scrimm and his Tall Man character couldn't be further apart.

Angus was the sweetest most gentle human being, a wonderful actor.

Just a sweet gentle soul.

When he becomes the Tall Man he just switches it 0nH.and"B0yF

And then switches it off and he's Angus.

Yeah, I love working with him.

It's so clear that they had a big budget on the sequel.

They were able to do a lot of the concepts that Don Coscarelli had had with the original

that he couldn't fully flesh out because he just didn't have the money.

Steve Patino created a ton of different spheres for the film.

He did a wonderful job.

Spheres were flying, spheres were dropping, spheres that had a little blade come out and

start spinning and spheres just for blood pumping.

He had dozens of these things for different effects.

Anytime you got that completely shiny chrome ball on set, it's basically a mirror reflecting

everything around it including the film crew.

So, you had to be very clever about how you shot it like through a hole in the wall or

something so the camera wouldn't be seen.

We had a lot of fun with them.

I even tried one on myself.

My favorite scene has to be when the ball is chasing the dude through the mausoleum

and it just comes up right in his head and you're like ah, that sucks and then the drill

comes out.

Not expecting that at all and just... and his blood flying everywhere. It drills through

the guy's brain.

It's insane. It's so well done.

Phantasm 2 in terms of its effects takes the whole franchise to a completely different

level and I don't think any of the films since have ever touched what the work in Phantasm 2

was like because I think that really set a bar for that whole series.

The Blob is a film that I think deserves to be up there with The Thing and The Fly as

one of the great '80s remakes.

It's really an example of how you can take an older film and use the new cinematic technology

and really tell the story in the best possible way.

It's a monster that doesn't really get quite the recognition that it deserves.

They had a much bloodier story it was different from the original it made The Blob an even

bigger force to be reckoned with.

Here you have this thing from outer space that is just a mindless killing machine.

It's just carving a path of destruction across this town, eating everybody in its way.

It kills a theater full of children. It's just something that they would have a hard

time getting away with today.

The 4th Nightmare on Elm Street film The Dream Master picks up where The Dream Warriors left

off and then quickly just kills all the survivors from that movie.

Kincaid is the first African American to ever survive a major horror film

and return to a sequel but I think they forgot because in Part 4 they killed my black

ass off during the credits almost.

So, I used to tell people if you want to see me don't get popcorn, don't get no drinks,

go straight to the theater and after about five or ten minutes then you can go get some drinks.

We actually filmed that in a junkyard and it took us a week to film that scene.

It was where Freddy came back to life and it was because of my dog that was named Jason.

And the dog pissed fire so... and that's what brought him to life.

If you go back and look at it Robert Englund had develop a swag about himself and he just

put on his hat and he said, "You shouldn't have buried me."

He stuck his razors into my chest and grabbed my heart.

I think he was supposed to pull it out but that was going to be too gross.

It goes on to feature a new bunch of kids fighting Freddy in their dreams including

The Dream Master which is an all-new thing that this movie came up with.

My favorite effect from the movie is done by Screaming Mad George who's really good

with bug effects and it's when Debbie becomes a cockroach.

We're talking full-on Gregor Samsa here.

She just turns into this gross, gooey, icky cockroach who's got antennae and limbs popping

out before she's ultimately crushed in a roach motel by Freddy with a one-liner.

Ken Russell was a very distinctive filmmaker who had a very distinctive point of view that

was slightly mad.

He took on a Bram Stoker short story called The Lair of the White Worm.

Amanda Donohoe plays this priestess of the white worm, sort of.

It's crazy, it's funny, it's really haunting and spooky.

The Lair of the White Worm also has one of the first performances of Hugh Grant and he's

the fumbling, charming guy that we all expect.

But it's in the British countryside and it has to do with curses and ancient religions

and things and it's very much a Ken Russell special.

A really wonderful, unique movie that you would never expect came from a short story written

by the same guy who wrote the book, Dracula.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was like a dream come true.

We finally get to see Cassandra Peterson do an extended version of Elvira and some of her

little hosting snippets.

We get to see her personality and we were not disappointed.

It became such a great way to make the character three-dimensional, myself and the two writers

that I worked with John Paragon and Sam Egan.

It was like a discovery every day, kind of about myself. It was almost like a therapy session.

Here she is this woman that looks like something between some kind of a sorceress vampire witch,

we don't know what, and she wants to be a showgirl in Las Vegas.

It actually came from my real life so...

It was fun discovering who Elvira was.

She just went on a road trip where she's like a fish out of water and the townspeople just

want to crucify her. But we all know she's super cool.

I put my life on the line in that movie so many times being surrounded by fire

first on the pyre up there and then later when the house is burning down.

That fire is real.

I mean my wig would have gone up with all that hairspray, like a bomb.

So, I was covered from head to toe in flame-retardant which they failed to tell me made

you itch like mad and I have my hands tied behind my back so I couldn't scratch myself.

I was wanting to tear my skin off.

It's making me itch right now.

We had the casserole monster's scene we call it.

The pot monster was a puppet, the guys that were under the table had to get

very, very close to me and I was like oh, no just come on sit right here between my

legs and I guess they had a great time down there.

It's such a good movie. It's so well done and she was just a hero

to little horror girls like me, it's like...

So Pumpkinhead is an amazing film.

It has Lance Henriksen as the dad who loses his adorable little kid and understandably

wants revenge.

So, he brings back this crazy monster which is my favorite all-time monster ever and revenge

happens

It's makeup effects legend Stan Winston's directorial debut and Tom WoodruffJr. as

the dude in the pumpkin head suit.

People ask, "What was your favorite movie?"

And I always tell them it was Pumpkinhead.

And he turned over the design aspects of that entire show to us, his guys and we were going

to design Pumpkinhead and Stan was busy directing.

So, that was an affirmative nod from Stan to let us do that.

We always wanted to make sure that we were delivering something to the audience that

didn't seem like the guy in a rubber suit.

We would do things like extend the legs with a leg extension to make them long and skinny

and the suit was very thin in places so it didn't add a lot of bulk.

It was all practical but it was a little bit of puppetry, it was a little bit of man in suit

but I just love the design of what Pumpkinhead was.

There he was with this kind of bulbous head but he was very demonic, he had this long tail,

he was able to climb trees and take out people.

Whenever Pumkinhead was walking around you can hear this weird chittering noise

in the background.

It sounded like cicadas and you always knew if you heard that, you were doomed.

It was always hard for me in the suits to communicate but when Stan would get close

I'd say can we do the King Kong thing? And he goes the thing with the T-Rex.

So, we both knew exactly what we're saying and that was thing where you pick up Joel's

head and kind of move it around a little bit and play with it.

Even though this was an '80s movie it extended much further before that from when we both

had each had seen King Kong and we brought that into some kind of life for a moment.

After Halloween 3 confused the hell out of everyone and bombed at the box office,

they resurrected everyone's favorite slasher.

Halloween 4 has Michael Myers returning to Haddonfield this time to stalk his niece

Jamie Lloyd played by a young Danielle Harris.

My favorite kill in this one is mostly because of the victim who is played by Kathleen Kinmont

wearing a very memorable shirt that says, "Cops do it by the book.�

Michael just takes a shotgun and instead of using it to shoot her, he impales her into

the wall with the barrel of the shotgun.

I think Halloween 4 is really the movie that made Michael into one of the iconic slashers.

Michael Myers you're just like Jason Voorhees.

One of the things about the '80s it was just different than my belief system as the unrestrained

capitalism that came into being, Reagan brought it in.

The things that he implemented I felt were not real great for people.

Especially low-income folks.

This greed is good business was just...

I just couldn't...

I couldn't believe it.

They Live was the response.

John had upped his game as a director by the time we got to They Live.

It's political significance and resonance is probably more acute today than it was even then.

I had to come up with a visual device that showed the audience the hidden reality around them.

And so the sunglasses were a perfect metaphor.

Jim Danforth did these matte paintings and they would work in black and white with sunglasses.

Perfect for our low budget.

Subliminal messages put in advertising.

They Live addressed it head bang on.

You don't know what messages are being broadcast to us today.

That's not necessarily an alien concept.

The fight in They Live was fun to stage.

We rehearsed it for quite a while.