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Horror movies.
Mutilation, decapitation, torture.
Does that sound entertaining?
In the 80s, horror really dove into this gritty,
grimy, gross, horrific, psychotic exploration
of the chaotic maniac,
the questionably motivated murderer,
the individual who seemed to be after
nothing but a blood lust as punishment for promiscuity.
Or materialism.
Telling stories without really worrying too much
about justifying the horror that these villains
were imposing upon their victims
was exploited in a really wonderful way
by the filmmakers of the 80s.
I'm most interested in fear, the emotion of fear.
People pay to be scared, and when you think about it,
it's real ridiculous.
Underneath all of it were these cracks
in the veneer.
This place has a way of making us think
about the kind of future our young people will have.
Nationwide, we found that minor cases
of satanic activity light up the map.
It's 10 p.m.
Do you know where your children are?
It's very much, for me, the decade in which America
tells stories about itself.
There were hundreds and hundreds of horror films
produced in the 80s.
The essence of sex and violence.
It is the explosion
of that video rental market that fuels
the modern horror films.
There's something very sexually attractive to horror.
It's almost like you're attracted to the forbidden fruit.
Kids get the movies
from the horror section of the video store.
Most of the violent movies are rated R,
and aren't supposed to be seen
unless you're 17 years old.
My mom would have died
if she knew some of the stuff
I was bringing home and watching.
So many weird things in the movies of the 80s.
I was genuinely scared.
Maybe my imagination was too vivid.
It is a bit weird, isn't it?
Strange horror.
We just wanted to say things really fast and loud.
You know?
Everything was kind of over the top,
and we were at a party.
The 80s were a proving ground
for horror films to be commercially viable
as movies that also were not intellectually unrespectable.
We will not be showing you extreme violence
in these movies.
We've picked scenes that only suggest the violence.
We want to inform you, not offend you.
It's just as well we're not showing some of those scenes.
I think people would turn their sets off.
Yes.
I could watch 80s horror movies on a loop forever.
It's never enough.
Thrill me.
"Death Ship".
Your holiday in hell.
"Death Ship" is about a bunch of people
on a cruise liner that sinks,
and the survivors get onto this passing freighter
that turns out to be haunted by Nazi ghosts.
It's like it's running itself.
This old ship seems to have a life of its own.
The movie stars Richard Crenna and George Kennedy.
This is my ship, and I am the captain.
It was directed by Alvin Rakoff,
who primarily was a TV director.
And it was written by Jack Hill,
who was friends with Francis Ford Coppola.
They actually went to film school together.
And then afterwards, they went and worked
for Roger Corman on a movie called "The Terror".
"Death Ship" was a very early example of Canuxploitation,
which was something created by the Canadian government.
There was a tax break that allowed it to be easier
for Canadian filmmakers to make movies.
Thanks to Canuxploitation,
there were a lot more Canadian horror films that were made,
as long as they included Canadian actors and crew.
We commit her soul,
and we commit her body
to the deep!
No!
It's not a very bloody film,
but it's a very disgusting film.
It's blood!
Hold on!
There's moments in the film
where they discover what the ship is.
They're going through the bowels,
and they start opening drawers,
and they're finding gold teeth,
things that were leftover from tortured prisoners.
Still running.
And it makes the film a lot darker
than you would initially think.
Let's get the hell out of here!
Go!
Watching it now, it doesn't have as great an impact
as it would have back in 1980.
It hit harder back then.
Because that was so much closer to the Holocaust.
Something terrifying has happened
to the children.
Pray you never meet them.
So many of these movies have these idyllic beginnings.
It's like, look at this town,
look at these beautiful little white children on a bus.
They're singing.
They love their life, it's great.
There's a toxic plant, there's a leak,
and the leak is, like, leaking into the ground.
This yellow mist is coming off of this toxic stuff.
Then we cut to the kids.
♪ Jolly, we love everybody
And they all drive through this yellow mist.
So we know something bad is going to happen.
♪ Cheers to the bus driver, the bus driver ♪
The kids never come home from school.
They find the bus abandoned by a cemetery.
Convenient.
I just found the school bus,
about 100 yards from the Ghoul place.
Motor's still running,
but no Fred, no kids.
This idea of creepy kids is very pervasive.
It's universally scary, because you don't want
to fear your child.
Daddy!
You want to protect your children.
These evil kids are different, because they smile at you,
and they reach for you,
and it's very hard to not go to them.
And when children will kill you,
it's just terrifying.
Particularly if they're, like, void of a soul.
Evil kids are always gonna be scary.
Whoa.
Whatever did this Billy, got Harry too.
Then once it gets into the suspense part of the film,
I'm like, I know this music.
Mommy!
This is kind of the same exact score
as "Friday the 13th".
It had a lot of
without the ch-ch-ch, ah-ah-ah.
The score of this movie is by Harry Manfredini.
Of course, "Friday the 13th" came out in May of 1980,
and "The Children" came out in June.
Oh my god!
Daddy!
Harry Manfredini's score was more than the budget
for the actual filming of the movie.
Well, you get some violins and you make them scream.
I had more money to spend.
So, consequently it opens up way more choices.
There was a score by Jerry Goldsmith called "Coma"
where all the violins go
like that, and I go wow, that's cool.
That's effective.
And so I figured out how I would do that.
I'd be running from the kids, though.
I'll tell you that.
I'll tell you that and three quarters.
I'd be like, nope.
Joni!
No!
Kathy, don't!
Don't get got
by your child with an inexplicable manicure.
It is not your child.
Little Billy has left the building.
He gone.
"Prom Night"
If you're not back by midnight, you won't be coming home.
Slashers, a lot of times,
especially in 1980 as a reaction to "Halloween",
they weren't necessarily going very deep emotionally.
That real life horror of prom night
is what kind of sets it apart from a lot of different
slashers from that time.
Kill!
The setup is so vicious that you really felt the atrocity
of what happened.
Six years later, it's prom night,
and somebody's gonna pay for that little girl who died.
As we go through the high school experience,
which everybody knows is just a form of torture.
Certain people try to rectify that experience.
All these people that had been carrying this secret
for so long, you can't hide stuff like that.
You just can't.
Not for long.
Not forever.
It's been a long time.
Tonight, it's my turn.
The suspense is great.
You know, the fact that it's a backwards whodunit,
because you know, we're trying to figure out
who's going to do it, the whole time.
How about a muffin?
No, cookie.
Like me better now?
There's always red herrings in the movie,
but then, of course, the killer starts picking them off,
one by one, like at the prom.
Kelly!
You've got Jamie Lee Curtis at her sassy best,
and I love her.
- I did it! - Oh, shut up!
She has this little 80s cut, this little flip thing,
which is everything that I needed in my life.
She is not Laurie Strode in this thing.
She's like a popular girl this time.
It's reminiscent of so many other influences.
"Carrie" is in there.
"Saturday Night Fever" is in there.
♪ The feeling's right
It's sort of this last bastion of disco culture.
♪ Tonight is the night
Jamie Lee Curtis was dancing her little booty off
in this movie, and I'm here for it.
One of the fun things about "Prom Night'
is that at the end, the song that's playing
is called "Love Me Til I Die".
♪ Love me til I die
♪ And keep me satisfied
Don't necessarily expect prom to be the best night
of your lives, because a lot of people could die.
- No! - Now!
This one, along with "Terror Train",
these were the movies that really solidified
Jamie Lee Curtis as a scream queen.
The big moment for me is the end,
and the reaction from Jamie Lee Curtis,
because she knows who's behind it all,
and it's a real traumatic moment.
♪ Imagine something deep inside ♪
Watching severed heads roll out on prom night
is pretty fun.
No!
He knows you're alone
And it's going to be for the very last time.
You know, sometimes our dogs of the week
are laughably bad.
This one borders on being evil.
Staten Island slasher.
Love a regional slasher.
This one you have Caitlin O'Heaney
playing a young bride-to-be
who's being stalked by a serial killer
right before her wedding.
And I like when a slasher just tells you
who the killer is at the beginning.
Here's Ray.
Ray.
This is the killer.
"He Knows You're Alone" is a 1980s slasher
directed by Armand Mastroianni.
He, of course, went on to direct other 80s entries,
like "The Clairvoyant", "The Supernaturals",
and "Cameron's Closet".
This one's a bit of an outlier
because it's actually a studio produced slasher.
MGMUA did it.
So it's got a little higher production value.
♪ It's the night again
It's got your garden variety slasher effects in there,
but there's a memorable head in a fish tank moment.
Tom Hanks' first movie.
America's favorite, Tom Hanks.
I stretched out an extra foot to make sure I'd trip you.
Why'd you do that?
Well, it seemed the best way to meet you.
Apparently, he was supposed to die in the film,
but they cut it because of how great
his performance was.
Horror movies and the roller coasters,
and the House of Horror ride-
I wanna go on that next!
You can face death without any real fear of dying.
Everyone loves Tom Hanks.
They're like, we can't fucking kill
this lovable, likable man.
He's a darling.
We're not gonna murder him.
It came without warning,
and now it's coming for you.
"Without Warning" is from the great Greydon Clark
and it doesn't get nearly the amount of praise it deserves.
It's got an amazing cast, with Jack Palance,
and Martin Landau, who at the time was mostly known
for "Space: 1999" and "Mission Impossible".
And he's playing this wild-haired conspiracy nut,
who's the only one who knows about the alien,
and no one believes him.
Look, I warned you!
When they start eating on you,
don't come to me for help,
because you ain't getting any.
You've got this gigantic alien
who's on earth to hunt humans.
It throws these little parasitic alien frisbees
that latch onto people.
The movie was shot by Dean Cundey,
who is the award-winning cinematographer of "The Thing",
as well as numerous other John Carpenter films.
In 1987 during a press tour, Arnold Schwarzenegger
stated that the movie "Without Warning"
was a direct influence on the movie "Predator".
It's done really well, and it's such a creepy-looking alien,
when I saw it when I was little,
it scared the hell out of me.
And who's in the costume?
Kevin Peter Hall, who was in the costume of the Predator.
The movie made its way to a company called Filmways,
who didn't want to release it.
They actually wanted to bury the film
Greydon Clark had to threaten to sue
in order to get the film released.
Knowing this was the creative spark for "Predator",
you should absolutely check it out,
especially if you love that film.
You can see the influence coming from here.
By the time they believe in him,
it will be too late.
"The Boogeyman".
Rated R.
In classic slasher tradition,
this movie starts with a prologue with children,
who are being traumatized in some way.
Its "Halloween" DNA is very present
out of the gate.
With the music, and its POV,
and sort of a voyeuristic thing,
looking at folks engaged in carnal frivolity.
What are you lookin' at?
They've walked in on their mom
making out with a fella
who then ties up the boy.
The boy's sister, she cuts him loose.
The boy goes on to kill the man who tied him up.
And he gets trapped in this mirror.
He is suddenly a supernatural presence in their lives.
I know he's here.
Who?
When I broke the mirror, I released him.
Lacy, he's dead!
There's a guy sitting in the car,
pricks him in the neck with a knife.
His girlfriend comes in through the passenger side
to, like, give him a kiss.
So they're skewered together,
and it's like a double-death scene.
I never seen a kiss this long.
That was kind of an amazing kill.
It gets very bizarre, only because it's like
three different things in one movie.
Like they were just kind of throwing everything at it
to see what stuck.
Let's just do all of it.
Let's make it a weird voyeuristic kinky slasher
supernatural exorcism cyborg demon thing.
Get away!
There's some unique stuff happening behind the scenes
on this one.
Susanna Love, and Nicholas Love,
actually brother and sister in real life,
playing siblings in the film.
Moreover, Susanna is the co-writer of the film,
and married to her writing partner
and the director of the film, Ulli Lommel.
An incredibly underrated director.
He's imaginative, he's different.
"Boogeyman" was a low budget film
that was incredibly successful,
and that's what really put Lommel over the edge.
The sequel is another interesting one,
because the "Boogeyman 2" predates the "Scream" franchise
in that in concerns a Hollywood production
trying to make a film about the events of the first film.
So it's very meta in that way,
and meta before there was a whole lot of meta going on.
Boogeyman!
"Christmas Evil".
The night he dropped in.
I just love horror set at Christmas.
And in the 80s, there's tons of it.
Christmas is a time when things are
supposed to be a certain way,
and horror films are all about subverting
what it is supposed to be.
And so Christmas and horror really go hand in hand.
Brandon Maggart plays a middle-aged man,
doesn't have any friends,
doesn't have a girlfriend, or anything like that.
Works at a toy factory,
and he likes Christmas a little bit too much
to the point where he starts to kill for Christmas.
I have superlative taste.
Merry Christmas!
"Christmas Evil" is a movie that usually gets
classified as a horror film,
but it's really more of a psychological character study
similar to "Taxi Driver", or something,
where you're just watching this lonely
socially isolated guy just start to crack.
Lewis Jackson was obsessed with Fassbender
and German expressionism at the time of making it.
What are you saying?
I'm gonna play my tune now.
Everybody'll dance.
You'll see.
And adding that art side to it
I believe gives it the more fantasy element,
and Christmas is based around magic and fantasy.
The look of the film is great.
Every scene of this movie glows of Christmas.
Merry Christmas everyone!
The holidays are hard for a lot of people.
Even if you are well-off, the holidays
are a very stressful period.
And "Christmas Evil" captures that.
Harry?
Merry Christmas, Frank!
It's so nightmarish and weird.
You see him tug on his beard and it doesn't move,
like it becomes a part of him,
like a horror version of Tim Allen's "The Santa Claus".
Are we seeing him become Santa Claus,
or is Harry seeing himself become Santa Claus?
Merry Christmas!
It's a movie that I think will surprise
a lot of people the first time they watch it,
especially the ending,
because that comes out of fucking nowhere.
Are we seeing what we're seeing
onscreen actually happening?
Or is this how Harry is dealing with it?
"Christmas Evil" was the title of the movie
that the distributor gave that Lewis Jackson
did not approve of, and actually didn't know
that it was called "Christmas Evil"
until he saw the trade when it was being re-released.
But the film was called "Better Watch Out".
That's what he filmed it as, and that's what
he knew it as, and he still to this day
does not like the name "Christmas Evil".
♪ Merry Christmas
Fun fact.
Brandon Maggart would later go on
to become singer Fiona Apple's dad in real life,
proving once again that the apple
never falls far from the Christmas tree.
One of the big reasons that horror films
have remained so popular is that it is
a guaranteed way to make some money.
If you don't spend a hell of a lot of money on it,
there's gold in those hills.
There are people out there who are willing
to take a chance on any kind of horror movie.
And the video revolution came along,
and it changed everything.
Now this is a video tape recorder, or VTR,
actually sometimes they're called
video cassette recorders, or VCRs.
The ability to play a movie, or a show,
an entertainment, at whim, at will,
that did not exist prior to this home video revolution.
That's the thing that most people today,
where everything's accessible and fast,
don't realize that it was not like that.
Now, some of the best movies on television
aren't on television.
They're on SelectaVision.
Well, now it was instant gratification time.
400.
Set it today.
It was a whole world opened up to people.
Movies in the 50s and 60s, I mean,
you hoped that a Hammer film was gonna play
in your neighborhood, because if it didn't,
you weren't gonna see it for five years
until it went on television.
You largely couldn't see it at all,
or if you could, you had to see it chopped to pieces
on the 4:30 movie.
So when video appeared, it was like this dam broke.
There was this new distribution outlet
for these films that were able to be repackaged
and given a whole new lease of life,
or films that had only come out in their native country,
then all of a sudden, they had an outlet
in other territories.
"The Curse of the Devil".
The video tape revolution brought a new appreciation
for some of my films, especially "The Thing".
What really began video, like with the internet, was porn.
What's it like to become
one of football's cowgirls?
Debbie Does Dallas has all the answers.
I think the first VHS I ever bought
was a porn tape that cost, like, $80 back in the 70s.
How a lot of us consumed media at that time,
it impacted the way people made movies.
Especially the beginning of the VHS,
all the video stores were private
they're just pop-ups.
They had to buy product.
So they would go out and buy 5000 VHS's for their store.
What did they buy?
Sex and horror.
We cater to their demands.
Whatever, they tell us what they want,
and we try to get it.
And we have a large horror section,
and of course with real heavy nude releases.
We get a lot of films called B movies.
There's distributors who were feeding that pipeline,
and they needed somebody to make the movies.
Those movies, they became products.
They needed to fit a certain mold.
"Halloween" and "Friday the 13th".
These two films dominated the box office,
and then they dominated home video.
Once horror started doing well on video,
that's when everybody realized it very quickly.
The 80s began the period of crapola movies
made straight for video,
only to satisfy the insatiable VHS market.
It was just tons and tons of new horror movies
being made all the time,
especially the super low budget ones.
I think everybody with a camera and 10 bucks
made their own horror movies back then.
Companies, they were also buying cheaper films
that were independently made to put in stores.
And those were your direct to video days.
Shot on video brought the price of making a film
down to $50,000, $40,000, $30,000, and even less.
You could make a movie on Monday
and have it in the video store by Wednesday.
You didn't need a big studio.
You didn't need to go begging for someone to produce it.
You could just make your project
and put it out there on video,
which I did many, many, many times.
Hello darling, and welcome to another
fabulous Thriller Video.
Thriller Video.
We had a collection of horror movies
that were kind of old and tired and bad
that nobody wanted to see,
so I did my wraparound thing on them,
and we released them to video,
and they sold like hotcakes.
Now this one's in kind of a different vein,
jugular vein, that is.
There were more distribution companies
than you could count.
Jack Valenti, the head of the MPAA,
was whining that video cassettes
would destroy copyright law.
The studios wouldn't license their stuff.
They saw video as being a threat.
So there was open field for anybody who wanted
to start a company.
Charlie Band took advantage of it the most.
Charles Band was a pioneer in this time,
creating multiple labels, putting these films
in video stores.
This is a tough business,
but every business is challenging.
It was rental that made the thing explode
Come to the warehouse,
and rent the hit movies you want when you want them.
Around 1982 is when the video stores
started doing way, way better.
By 1985 there was around 12,000 video stores
in the United States.
You can now rent a video overnight,
and hire these great movies from only 99 cents.
Close to the late 80s, there was around 40,000 places
that were renting tapes, so this was a huge impact
for the horror genre, because people
were renting horror films.
Tapes around that time weren't $5.
They weren't $2.
They were typically 49.95 up to $100.
So if you had 40,000 stores buying at least one tape,
you were lining your pockets full of money.
And this was a million dollar industry.
And a lot of video labels had either one
to maybe 20 titles in their catalog,
but that's all they needed,
because it was millions of dollars
that they were making.
And then they started producing their own stuff,
giving filmmakers $50,000,
because they knew that they were gonna make millions
selling to video stores,
so it just revolutionized everything.
Troma became a staple of the home video market,
because we had accumulated about 60 movies.
We wanted to own our movies,
we wanted to own all the rights,
and we wanted to have a collection, have a library.
The theory behind Troma was to own your negatives.
Lloyd Kaufman, Charlie Band, and Roger Corman,
they were businessmen, but they were filmmakers.
Those core three are definitely a huge, huge reason
why the direct to video horror was so impactful and huge.
As the 80s started winding down,
like every business, it starts monopolizing.
By the 90s, you had Blockbuster reading scripts
to give so much shelf space.
Any time there's a new technology,
the majors, the oligopoly, the cartel,
throws a monkey wrench into it, tries to screw it up,
and then they take it over, which is what happened
with video cassette, Blockbuster put all the independents
out of business.
♪ Wow what a difference
♪ Blockbuster video
I've never seen 10,000 tapes in one store.
We can really, really thank the mom and pop stores
out there, because they carried the really interesting
innovative films that were out there during the 80s,
films that someone like Blockbuster wouldn't touch
with a 10 foot pole.
And Blockbuster sure didn't have that little room
with the fancy movies back there.
Today you can go out and make a movie for no money.
I mean, the world has changed dramatically.
It's still in the story you tell, if it's compelling,
I mean, whatever the medium is,
you need to be able to tell a story,
and put it together in a format that people,
whether they're gonna rent or buy or download
or view for free, find entertaining.
That part has not changed at all.
"Fear No Evil".
It'll scare the devil out of you.
"Fear No Evil" is thematically in the vein
of a lot of these films in the 1980s
where it's like a guy who gets picked on
has been underestimated.
Be careful who you pick on,
because he might be the Antichrist.
"Fear No Evil" is a hormonal overload.
I mean, come on.
High school's hard enough without the inconvenience
of demonic possession, right?
"Fear No Evil" is like if Damien from "The Omen"
was in high school, and was pretty gay.
"Fear No Evil" was really my coming of age story
in a lot of ways, and so all that angst,
all of that confusion is reflected in the film.
There's this scene in "Fear No Evil",
it's a locker room scene, which it's definitely the source
of a lot of anxiety for a lot of people.
This scene is like, ooh, very cringey.
Only the most uncomfortable high school
shower scene since "Carrie".
Plug it up!
Tony goes in to kiss Andrew,
and then Andrew uses his special devil powers
to make the kiss last longer.
Like, that's his big revenge.
It's like, make the bully gayer.
It's Andrew who's compelling this,
but Tony's latent homosexuality,
I mean, he hates women, right?
This guy, this thug, Tony.
He's a bully, you know?
Lots of these bullies are, right?
They can't face their own sexuality,
and so they take it out on others in this manner.
Look, if you don't keep your mouth shut about this, right?
Guess where that was shot?
At my old junior high school.
First day of the shoot, what I do.
We go in there, we shoot this, the shower scene.
Get in there with all these naked guys in the shower,
they're kissing.
They didn't know anything about it, of course,
until the film was released.
Come on, come on!
I mean, it has a nice gothic feel.
I wanted it to have a Hammer Horror feel.
The iconography.
I mean it's so frightening.
All the iconography surrounding Catholicism.
We raised, ultimately, 540,000 to make the picture.
We had no money to finish the film,
and I was concerned that if we got a bite
from a distributor, that that would be it.
I'd lose control of the picture.
Damn you!
Avco Embassy.
They were the boutique low budget horror distribution house.
They had control, total control, over the final cut,
but they made me make the edits
with an editor that was assigned to the picture,
and it was horrendous, because little by little
I saw it restructured, reorganized, chopped up.
The picture that at best works in fits and starts.
But what really kills me is I've read some things
about it being possibly homophobic.
It's anything but that, in my estimation.
I mean, it's a coming of age story, right?
The people that are particularly inclined
to love "Fear No Evil" are gay.
They consider it campy enough to have fun with,
or it genuinely moves them as to their own
coming out struggles.
Unlike "Jaws", where you're not safe in the water,
this one, you're not safe if you're on the beach.
"Blood Beach".
The tagline says it all.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water,
you can't get to it.
It's great to see John Saxon
from "A Nightmare on Elm Street",
and Burt Young, who's Paulie from "Rocky",
trying to solve this mystery.
He was foolish enough to lie down
on this particular beach.
Never would've happened in Chicago.
Yeah, one more remark like that out of your mouth,
Chicago's where you're gonna be.
It's a charming movie, and it has a real moody,
beachy feel, from the opening credits
with this lingering monster POV vision under the pier.
A $2 million union movie.
Jeffrey Bloom wrote and directed it.
The coolest guy of all time.
The way our monster that traveled through the sand,
we did this movie 10 years before "Tremors".
Please help!
Oh god!
What is happening?
Help!
That's me, and the effects guy
yanking those people under the sand.
We got a tractor out there on the beach
by the Santa Monica Pier,
and we dug a big pit, and we built a big
rubber membrane with a slit in it,
and he and I, down in the pit,
and when they are acting, and flailing around,
they are kicking like crazy.
And we are grabbing onto them like crazy,
yanking them under.
Ah, it was so much fun.
The monster didn't turn out that great.
The effects guy, bless his heart, did his best.
I know the director was not happy with it.
But, you know, like not showing the shark in "Jaws",
it worked to an advantage.
We built all these sets onstage at Culver City Studios,
where this monster lived, and it was all supposed to look
like Santa Monica Pier, and whatnot,
but I brought seaweed in my trunk
and threw the seaweed behind the stage.
Begins to take on the shape,
where it slept.
I think Smell-O-Vision is a very important part of sets.
You don't want it to smell like latex paint.
We want it to smell like whatever it's supposed
to smell like.
It really helped.
I ended up with the monster on my ranch,
where my nieces and nephews played in it for years
until it slowly withered away.
I saved its head in my monster collection.
But that's the sorry end of the "Blood Beach" monster.
It's also one of those lost movies.
It came out on VHS, and then that's it.
It's legendary for being caught in limbo,
rights-wise, and residual payment-wise.
Jeffrey Bloom, the director, told me,
I don't think he's ever made any money off the picture,
and he wrote and directed it.
It's really a mishmash of problems.
I'd love to see that reissued,
somehow, if somebody could untangle the issues
surrounding poor old "Blood Beach".
Oh, "The Hand".
Oh my god.
Michael Caine in "The Hand".
It could have been so not good,
because it's about an artist whose hand gets cut off,
and the hand goes around committing crimes
that he's trying not to commit.
The hand goes and does it.
Oliver Stone, he had gotten a lot of notice
with "Midnight Express".
And he thought "The Hand" was gonna be a major movie.
Made and released by a major studio,
but it had this really hopped up
kind of exploitation tone to it
that was very Corman.
It just was really intense and outrageous.
I rented it as a kid because I knew it dealt
with comic books, and like a phantom appendage.
So there's this guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown,
I guess, and he is a comic book artist,
like a famous, established comic book artist.
His marriage is on the rocks.
There's this scene,
as a kid, it was really horrific.
It's Michael Caine, you know, one of our greatest actors,
squirting blood all over the place.
Anybody who messes with Michael Caine
gets the hand.
Killing anybody that's standing in the way
of his mission.
Or is it?
He doesn't know if he's insane,
or there really is a disembodied hand chasing him.
Michael Caine's a terrific actor,
but he went through a period where he never saw
a paycheck he didn't like.
They call it the Michael Caine School of Acting,
you know, when you get a role, take it.
Even if the material isn't good, he delivered.
I think that at least you-
I think.
You should get out of here.
And it always elevated every movie he was in.
It's from a book called "The Lizard's Tail".
We struggled for many, many months
playing with that idea of what is the sound of the hand?
Does it breathe?
Is it just fingernail sounds when it's crawling?
Because whenever the hand approached,
we wanted to get into that sound design moment
of the universe, the sound universe changes.
And we brought in a team of trained actors
who would do group vocalizations,
but we had them do what we called Fellini-esque
vocalizations, so we did weird breathing patterns,
and freeform screaming.
It's really, really cool stuff.
For a disembodied hand movie, it's quite well-written.
As I used to say in marketing the movie,
it's one of the best disembodied hand movies ever.
What happened to the hand?
Oh, mommy went to look for it.
But it ran away.
"Bloody Birthday".
A terrifying journey into the bizarre.
Will you get out alive?
Three kids are born at the same time in a hospital
during an eclipse.
It's a boy, Mrs. Taylor!
And for some reason, this has astrologically
made them evil.
When they get to be 10, they sort of go on killing spree.
It plays on the fear of how scary kids can be,
especially if they don't have the influence
of discipline, and adults.
Like that scene with the cake.
That's terrifying.
He's trying to make her think
that he's poisoning the cake.
The poison was just sitting on the counter.
I was putting it away.
You were not, you little liar!
That scene is so messed up,
because he knows what he's doing as a child,
and taking advantage of his seemingly innocence
for his own benefit.
Debbie, she's a horrible little child.
I just love her as a villain.
Can you and Timmy come over to babysit?
Sure.
What time do you want me to come over?
11 o'clock.
Okay.
My little sister is selling tickets
to watch me, you know, get naked.
I was very young, it was one of my first years
as an actress.
So many actresses, especially at that time in the 80s,
that they had some sort of film
where they had to be naked or topless or something, right?
It wasn't that uncommon.
So I thought, okay.
I wasn't gonna, like, be topless in the audition.
So they said, well, we need to see your boobs.
And I'm like, why?
And they go, because what if you have
a weird boob or something?
So I took my top off in the room,
and I took a Polaroid.
And then they let the director look at it,
and they gave it back to me.
I don't know how other girls are cast
for topless things, but that's what happened to me.
And there's a little hole between the closet and her room,
and I look in there, and then they hit me in the eye
with an arrow, and that's how I die.
They're dragging my dead body around
for a big portion of it.
And that's depressing.
And at first I wouldn't talk about it,
but then I thought, really, who cares?
Right?
Even though honestly my son doesn't know about it,
and he's never seen it.
So.
Debbie?
What's wrong, Debbie?
"Bloody Birthday" wasn't well-received at all
when it came out, because of the fact that
these were evil kids.
People would get so offended
by all the sexual and violent situations placed in it,
but the kids were actually having a great time,
and they thought it was playtime,
and that was comforting to know,
because we wouldn't want them to be traumatized
at all by the experience.
Does anybody know what the word murder means?
Pray you're not invited.
If you get a great image on the cover,
that's half the battle.
And when you see that guy with his mouth open,
and the skewer, the shish kabob is going in,
like, I'm in.
And Melissa Sue Anderson, who is from
Little House on the Prairie.
This was gonna be her big moment as an adult,
playing a high school girl in a slasher flick.
This was more like the tail end
of the holiday murder movies,
so people were still taking it seriously.
They were like okay, we're gonna ride this wave.
This could be a massive hit,
so let's really, really go for it, you know?
It's about this group of kids at this elite school.
The killer is one of them, because every time
someone gets killed, it's like, oh it's you.
Virginia, who was kinda new to this group,
we slowly learn that she has these holes
in her memory.
And today I remembered.
Yes.
And tomorrow, you will remember more.
Even the-
Even the accident.
Her friends are like, they're disappearing
more than dying.
So she has all this trauma around her birthday,
which should be a moment of celebration.
Hi there.
Rudy!
Where have you been?
Who's doing the killing?
Is it her?
Because she's messed up?
Or is it not?
Lighten up!
You touch me again, I'm gonna fucking kill you!
And that's a very real, tangible,
real life fear, of having a part of your whole memory gone.
What happened before the accident?
You've got to try to remember.
The kills are great.
The gore is great.
There's some very good tense moments in it.
One of the classic kills from this movie.
We have Greg.
He's doing his weights, he's very strong.
Okay, that's it.
Holds the weight above his penis, and drops it.
Greg is dead.
From a weight to the peen.
Yup.
I panicked!
I came here, god I thought you'd help me!
So the ending of "Happy Birthday" to me
is what stuck with me
all my life, because it's crazy.
♪ Happy birthday to me
Pray for day.
"Hell Night".
One of my favorite things about "Hell Night'
is just being able to see Linda Blair
do something different.
Who's she?
Oh, that's one of the new pledges.
They call her Marty.
And it feels almost like,
what if Regan survives after "The Exorcist",
and she decides to go to college?
She's gonna go and be in a sorority,
and she's gonna have this normal life,
and she ends up stuck in this mansion
where it's like a weird, mutant offspring.
It feels really unusual compared to a lot
of the other sort of teen and 20-something centric
horror movies that were coming out in the early 1980s.
In 1850, Virgil Garth built this mansion
with the gold that was pouring out of his mines.
So they introduce this whole backstory
about Garth Manor, and this guy who kills his family,
like he kills his wife, and he has mutated kids.
And then Raymond Garth got a rope
and hung himself to death.
And then he hangs himself,
but two of the kids are missing.
It was like okay, we're gonna throw a couple sorority girls
and a couple fraternity brothers in a house overnight
and see what happens.
We'll see you four a dawn.
Just about six hours.
You have Peter Barton and Linda Blair,
and they're sort of hanging out,
and then you've got promiscuous gal,
and then the stoner surfer dude,
and they're gonna get together and have fun.
Hey!
And then it evolves into this whole
elaborate gothic nightmare for them.
Peter Barton, he actually did get hurt during the film,
so there's a lot of the movie where you see him
limping around, but that was very real.
That wasn't because of what happened to his character.
No!
They couldn't stop filming,
so they just had to push forward,
and he basically had to work through an ankle injury
for like half the movie.
It's got some issues, but I think ultimately,
"Hell Night" really stands out
in comparison to a lot of other horror movies
that were coming out around the same time.
A gem I discovered on cable back in the 80s,
and that I push on people as often as I can
is "The Unseen".
The terror is unleashed.
No!
The horror is unequal.
"The Unseen".
"The Unseen" is about an all-woman news crew
who are covering a festival in Solvang California.
They screwed up, someone didn't make a hotel reservation.
They have nowhere to stay.
They hit up this museum where they find
the great Sydney Lassick, who offers them a place to stay.
It's, it's not the Ritz,
but it'll run a close second.
Sure.
That's great.
The leader of this news crew is Barbara Bach.
Of course, Mrs. Ringo Starr,
the Bond girl from "The Spy Who Loved Me".
It's remarkable.
I'm impressed.
Scat.
Get off there, Ralph.
Sydney Lassick is one of the great character actors
of the second half of the 20th century.
He was in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".
He was in "Alligator" as the pet store owner.
He is off the chain.
He is just going for it in this film.
Boo!
It's a delight to watch him just chew the scenery.
Don't concern yourself with that, Virginia.
Just get the room ready.
The secret sauce of "The Unseen"
is that it's very, very talented people
doing something very, very unsavory.
Sydney Lassick's wife in the film, Leila Goldoni,
and he have a couple of very intense scenes
about a secret that they have in their basement.
They could find out.
Don't worry, my dear.
No one will ever find out.
Junior in the film is this developmentally disabled
grown man wearing a diaper living in the basement.
I see you've met Junior.
Played by Flounder from "Animal House",
the late great Stephen Furst.
And you come to find out
he's accidentally killing these women
because he doesn't know his own strength.
"The Unseen" is, in a lot of ways,
not a defensible film.
Ingestion is not endorsement.
I enjoyed it despite how wrong it is.
Boo!
"The Prowler" is a stalk slasher plot
with a group of kids getting ready for a graduation party
and they're stalked and killed
by a mysterious killer in a GI outfit,
in Cape May, New Jersey.
There's a little historical thrill
to seeing Farley Granger from "Rope"
and "Strangers on a Train"
in an 80s slasher, as like the sheriff
with a mysterious past.
Just some deodorant.
No sweat.
Get it?
That keeps you on the edge of your seat.
You're just like, oh god, he's right there.
Oh god, ugh, you know?
It's Savini at his best, man.
The kills are fucking crazy, the gore is nuts.
Tom Savini did some of his best work in the film.
That kill scene in the swimming pool
goes on forever.
It's unbearable to watch.
Also one of the first exploding heads.
I don't think it was the first exploding head,
but it was one of them.
It was the first pairing of Savini and Zito,
who then went on to do "Friday the 13th" part four.
Zito, man, say what you want,
but he had a great eye for it.
Putting aside George Romero's relationship with Savini,
no director films Tom Savini's kills
better than Jo Zito.
And I think that that is front and center
of "The Prowler".
Not only how Savini has designed them,
but that the director has listened to Savini
in terms of how to present those things.
There's something so perverse about riffing
on the "Psycho" shower scene,
but with a pitchfork.
It's bright lights, nowhere to hide,
just in your face kills.
I was just following what they needed to happen
in the film.
I wasn't concerned with how they were shooting.
Joe Zito, we showed everything.
So there became an appeal for that.
I rode that appeal in the movies of the 80s.
For me, it's the guy with the hand over the mouth
and he's getting the bayonet in the head.
The way it's edited, and the way it's timed,
and it's just whites of the eyes.
It's grizzly, and it really, really works.
It's a magic trick, which Savini's always said
his effects are magic tricks,
but that one is like, bang on.
Indonesia produced an interesting horror film in the 80s
called "Mystics in Bali".
I'm surprised that a pretty girl like you
would be interested in learning black magic.
Well, I'm just curious.
It seems like a bit of a fever dream,
what happens in this film.
But essentially, it's about a woman
who wants to learn more about the mystical stuff
that happens in Indonesian culture.
You'll never forget this face.
And they're looking around for this mystic,
and what they see instead is a 50 foot tongue
coming out of the forest, which is incredible.
It's like a snake-like tongue.
And what happens is this tongue imprints words,
the name of the creatures, on her thigh,
and then things go from bad to worse
from that point, where this woman manifests
into this creature, but it's absolutely batshit.
I'm very interested in the mythology of this creature,
which is very much like a manananggal,
because you see that across all different Asian cultures.
So she has the ability to split her body in half,
and the top half of her torso,
with all the entrails hanging out, can fly around,
and jump on people and kill them and eat them
while the bottom half kind of scuttles around the floor.
One of the most interesting scenes in this,
and kind of gross, is when this disembodied torso
goes between the legs of a pregnant woman,
and then basically eats her unborn baby.
It is nuts.
Then it goes up a level of nuttiness,
they call up the good version of this mystic,
and they have this big battle using magic and animation,
and it's very interesting.
The ultimate theme of "Mystics in Bali"
really is curiosity kills the cat,
because this woman wants to know information
that she has no right knowing.
This supernatural stuff is way too powerful
for a normal person, and I don't know why she thought
that she could control it, and harness it.
That particular transgression ends up
in the consequences that befalls them
and everyone around them.
Now police have been skeptical
of investigating these acts,
just as we are in reporting them,
but there's no question that something
is going on out there.
When we think about the 1980s,
we think about the Reagan era,
and a return to family values,
and there is something in the air
about the way that things should be.
There is sin and evil in the world,
and we're enjoined by scripture, and the lord Jesus
to oppose it with all our might.
Religious right somehow had moved into the mainstream.
Demand those parties and politicians
align themselves with the eternal values in this book,
and America will be forever
the greatest nation on this earth!
There was a lot of stuff in the ether
as far as satanic cults and the evangelicals.
Whether Satan exists is a matter of belief,
but we are certain that Satanism exists.
Their fears were sort of in the zeitgeist.
Could it be?
Satan!
Growing up in the 80s under the veil of the satanic panic,
you know, we were all convinced by the far right
that there were these cultists out there,
meddling with the dark arts to try and abduct us kids
and suck us into their covens to drink babies' blood
and perform witchcraft.
We were like, no, they're just cool scary movies.
I'll do that when I grow up
and I have a house of my own, thank you very much.
I dread going to these kinds of movies.
It really has become the most depressing part
of my job as a film critic.
And there we are, in total agreement.
In the UK and here in the US,
the census definitely clamped down
on what was allowed, what was acceptable content.
Half of American households
now have video cassette recorders,
and for many children, they're a ticket
to R-rated gore that the kids are too young
to see at the movies.
There were a lot of city people running around
saying oh, we can't have this stuff.
It's much too violent.
Well parents and psychologists are very concerned.
I have very vivid memories of the Video Nasty Panic.
I was probably nine or 10 years old
when it started to hit the news
that this filth was entering our homes,
and a lot of moral do-gooders and church people
and politicians started to talk about these movies,
saying that they were dangerous for society,
because anyone seeing them, it could cause them
to be scarred, and to go out and inflict harm on society.
Even today, if one is inclined to believe in Satanism,
it's a way to actually see the devil,
and perhaps be inspired.
I think people were really afraid
because they were told to be.
That was the beginning off the cult of fear
in this country.
I don't believe in censorship.
But I do believe that we parents and leaders
have a reason to be concerned.
It was such a simple use of religious moralism
that they cracked down on us in the 80s,
and in doing so, really resurrected
a lot of these archaic ideas about religious fundamentalism
that are so easy to use when you're trying
to manipulate large masses of people.
Sure, television should present life the way it is.
You can't tell somebody else they can't like it,
because you don't like it.
That kind of psychology is so unhealthy.
We needed the movies of 80s horror cinema
to release a little of that pent up steam.
And finally, music.
Which is found here in the neighborhood record store
under the category of heavy metal music.
There's a link between heavy metal and horror.
They're like some strange cousins.
They always have been.
♪ We're the dream warriors
In the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films,
the Dokken soundtrack is a classic.
The satanic message is clear,
both in the album covers, and in the lyrics,
which are reaching impressionable young minds.
It's question of content and values,
and parents need to tune in to their children's world.
Anytime there's any kind of a new wave of music,
there's always somebody who's gonna have a problem with it.
And the fact that you had Ozzy Osborne
supposedly biting off the heads of bats onstage and stuff,
that certainly threw people for a loop.
This is entertainment?
This is what our kids are looking at for entertainment?
Yes.
So in the height of satanic panic
as the most metal and punk rock thing to do
from the film community, is they did films
about rock and roll and Satan.
The times that we were living in,
it was a perfect tapestry for us to utilize
what was going on in the world as far as politics
and us making movies.
♪ Get down tonight
I was in school in the 80s,
and there was a concern among the whole caucus
of evangelicals that Dungeons and Dragons
was a satanic sort of thing.
A lot of people hear the phrase my sweet Satan.
♪ My sweet Satan
My sweet Satan.
The lyrics playing backwards and all that stuff.
It was kind of a hysteria,
which doesn't feel all that unfamiliar anymore.
It tells you how to close the gate.
Parents just didn't know it was the record companies
that were telling them that if you spin records backwards,
you'll hear Satan.
Literally one of the best ideas for record companies
to come up with in the history of music
was getting stupid people to believe that.
But they did conjure up Sammi Curr.
All a part of the plan.
All right.
In the 80s, we had a big controversy
with the lyrics, and parents being very concerned
about what their kids were listening to
in heavy metal with the pentagrams.
There were Senate hearings, and Congressional hearings,
that kind of thing, and a lot of the wives
of the politicians took up this cause
against heavy metal music.
♪ Rock and roll
♪ Rocking
"Trick or Treat", there's a scene where Sammi Curr
is testifying against what's supposed to be the PMRC.
If you were a parent,
would you want your kid growing up around rock music?
Rock musicians?
I mean, with that kind of values?
And he basically tells him to go get fucked.
You cannot legislate morality.
- The teenage daughter- - We will bring you down!
And that's the way I was with my heroes.
That's the way my fans are with me
when I'm telling the establishment
to go fuck themselves, you know?
There will always be a need for a platform
to give people hope in a sea of hopelessness.
I carried an M16 and you,
you carry that, that, that guitar!
What they came up with was a warning system
on the albums.
They wanted to rate them, like rated R,
and things like that, but they ended up
with just sort of a warning label.
But the album sold better when they had
the warning label on them.
♪ We're not gonna take it
To me, horror and the discovery of horror,
you start finding these voices outside of the mainstream,
who are willing to push a lot of boundaries
and question a lot of the establishment,
and scaring the crack out of all the PTA moms
and school superintendents and Cub Scout leaders
that were trying to make sure we all fit
right into the mold that they wanted us to.
God!
God is dead!
- Hail Satan! - Satan lives!
It's an ever-perpetual cycle
that the entire human experience centers itself around,
that events are out of control.
There has to be something that can set it right.
And there are many people who will seize on anything.
They want a solution.
They want deliverance.
We fall for everything.
I recall that being the most ridiculous waste of time.
It's been heading in that direction for a long time.
Now we're totally divided as a country.
And it's crap like that that does it.
"Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker".
Rated R.
Starts Friday at a theater near you.
"Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker".
I mean, that's an incredible title.
That movie should have done really well.
"Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker"
is another of the Video Nasties.
So this is the cover that I saw on the shelf
when I saw it in around 1983.
And it is Susan Tyrrell covered in blood.
The kind of thing that I would have rented.
I'm gonna get that scholarship if I can!
I'm going away to school, and no one's gonna stop me!
Not even you!
"Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker" is about a kid
who wants to go off to college, and an aunt
who doesn't want him to.
And the murder that she goes to
to keep him there.
Everybody's so obsessed with the sex life
of a 17-year-old.
I was thinking, um,
can I invite Julia over for my birthday dinner?
Julia again?
Sounds serious.
That's probably the most real life part of this movie,
is everybody trying to figure out if this kid's gay.
Do you like girls, Ms. Roberts?
God, you're a pig.
"Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker"
is about people trying to out you.
So tell me.
Are you two making love?
I am not going to answer that.
The kind of twisted perversity of the movie
is like really interesting, I think.
It's cheesy, but it's also queasy.
You're just kinda like, is she trying to fuck him?
This is making me uncomfortable.
Ooh.
You're so cute.
It dealt with incest.
It dealt with repressed sexuality.
Homicidal tendencies.
I mean, this is like Tennessee Williams pathos
that we're dealing with in this really messed up film
where these people gave these
really disturbing performances.
Will Asher seemed like an odd choice to me,
having come from being creator of Bewitched,
and having directed I Love Lucy,
but he had a way with actors,
and he really brought in some great performances
in that film.
♪ Billy's got a girlfriend, Billy ♪
Billy, don't do that.
That's disgusting.
It's kind of a tour de force
mad over the top performance
by Susan Tyrrell.
The only thing that's wrong
is that you are in my house.
Now get out of here!
Get out!
I just-
Get out of here!
I just want-
Where is her Oscar for "Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker"?
Retroactively give it to her.
What do you think you're doing?
This performance is like the performance
of the 1980s.
A new girlfriend.
Susan Tyrrell is just getting more and more crazy
as the movie goes on.
Just a pleasure to watch.
It also has Bill Paxton in it, by the way,
who's kind of playing a bully character,
very similar to the character he plays
in "Weird Science".
He was supposed to be the lead originally
but they ended up going with someone
who was then more famous.
Some of us think we're better than others.
Some of us are better than others.
Paxton was so gung ho at the beginning of his career
that he would come to the cutting room.
He was the guy who really wanted to learn
about the whole movie making process,
and he went on to have such a great career,
and was gone way too soon.
I believe that you and Phil Brody
were having a lovers quarrel.
It has these queer themes, it plays on gay panic,
but in 1983 when it's re-released
as Night Warning, it's released into a world
that sees gay characters a little bit differently.
Keep it limp like
AIDS, by 1983,
it was referred to as Gay Plague, and Gay Cancer.
And that's what people were afraid of at the time.
Do you know that homosexuals
are very, very sick?
Do you know that, Billy?
Coach Flanders is not sick!
I don't know if I'll ever watch it again
for the rest of my life, but I'm glad I saw it
when I was a kid.
Probably made me into the weirdo that I am today.
I don't know.
"Parasite".
The first futuristic monster movie in 3D.
"Parasite 3D" was a Charlie Band movie.
And Stan Winston created the Parasite effects for us.
Low budget.
We gotta do something.
Notable for Demi Moore making her film debut.
Tell me where it is!
Go to hell!
It was set in a post nuclear world,
and there's this character who develops this parasite.
When it reproduces, it will cast millions
of microscopic spores into the air.
It grows over the course of the film,
and it gets into people,
and absorbs them from within,
and eventually it turns into this
big toothy creature.
Stan Winston, Stan did my very first movie
in the early 70s called "Mansion of the Doom",
and later on did "Parasite".
And Stan became super successful,
and I couldn't afford him, even though we stayed close
til almost the end of his life, which was way too soon.
"Parasite" was one of the first 3D movies in 20 years.
It did really well, relative to a small movie.
I was hooked with the gimmickry of 3D.
Why was that cool for a while?
Well, 'cause it was another dimension,
and it was something you couldn't really see at home.
Unless there's trickery or stuff that comes at you,
and you're having fun with the three dimensions,
to me it's not worth it.
I remember it being pretty schlocky,
but the parasite effects were pretty cool,
and the 3D was pretty cool.
In terms of pantheon of Stan Winston projects,
it's not the one he's most proud of.
"Madman".
There is no escape.
I really love "Madman".
He was a farmer with this family,
wife and two children.
He was an evil man.
I have a "Madman" poster on my wall.
He walked into his bedroom
with an ax in his hand and chopped his sleeping wife.
It was kind of a "Sleepaway Camp" movie,
that I think fell under the radar a little bit.
His name is Mars.
Madman Mars.
Oh no, Madman Mars is coming upon us
at the campsite, but it was just like,
you loved it for the feel, the energy,
the New York vibe.
You know, Betsy.
I don't have many women friends,
and I think you're one of them.
Oh, I am.
Hey, give me your number in the city.
It's like, they're in the woods!
They're gonna get killed!
You just love that the Madman was coming,
and you didn't know who he was gonna kill.
We used to watch it all the time.
My friends would laugh.
Most of them were giggling, like ooh!
You know.
I couldn't even eat.
And the blood, and the effects.
It just all looked so real to me, and scared me.
"Madman" always looked like a big furry suit to me.
He was in a shadow, but he looked kind of furry.
And I was like oh, he's kinda cute.
I'm friends with Gary Sales.
He was really taken by surprise
with the success of the film.
With a lot of the 80s films,
there were no real boundaries.
They were just done, like let's push the envelope.
Let's have fun, not to intentionally hurt anyone,
but just because we're batshit crazy,
and we're making a horror movie,
and I think movies like "Madman" just went for it.
They were like, let's just kind of,
you know, get a monster.
Have him running around killing people, and woo-hoo!
And it's just simple, but so fantastic.
It's like silly and great, all tied into one.
Fans of gothic horror
will not be disappointed.
Jackie Karen inherits this rural estate,
and on the rural estate is a retirement home
full of elderly patients,
and there are mysterious deaths happening.
Bit of a murder mystery, because someone
is committing these crimes,
and you're not sure who
among these cast of characters it is.
Are there ghosts?
Are there supernatural elements at play?
Because it feels like you're in this dream.
It's kind of that moment between asleep and awake.
Jackie discovers her mother's childhood diary in the film.
Lights going on and off,
taps left running.
It comes to pass that the things in the diary
start to happen to her within the plot of the film,
which is all leading up to this revelation
that her late aunt might not be as late
as she was led to believe.
What's that?
Didn't die.
There are some horrific images in this.
It's a man drowned in the bathtub.
And he's just like bloated.
It's tragic, but it's also very scary.
Something that just like sticks in your mind.
"Next of Kin" was written and directed
by Tony Williams.
In this film, you can see a lot of horror DNA.
You can see some Clouzot,
you see "Les Diabolique" in there.
You can see some Fulci in there.
Any time somebody gets it in the eyeballs.
Linda!
Oh, it's rest home horror,
which is very cool, but it's very gothic,
and it's what we might call today slow burn horror.
It's got that nice Australian unhinged energy to it.
Australian horror from the 80s
doesn't get a lot of love,
but when there's a nice example of it,
like "Next of Kin", it's fun to revisit.
"Amityville Horror", big boogeyman story
on the east coast in the 70s.
True crime, kid shotguns his parents, and his siblings,
and he claims demonic possession was part of it.
It gets turned into a book.
It eventually gets made into a movie
with James Brolin and Margot Kidder.
To this day you see those windows, "Amityville Horror".
Three years later, they're making
"Amityville 2: The Possession",
which is essentially the true story
of the kid killing his family.
- "Amityville -The Possession".
"Amityville: The Possession".
It has to do with possession,
but mainly it's about incest.
Take off your nightgown.
What?
This prequel is loosely based on the DeFeo murders,
but the names have been changed.
Everything seems quite idyllic.
It's a nice little lovely family,
until it's not.
The dad's a fucking asshole.
He's abusive to everybody in the family.
- Think you're funny? - What are you doing?
Huh?
You can't hit him-
Burt Young is maybe the scuzziest dad in horror.
Please, don't hit that child.
Listen, this isn't your business, you hear that?
We've got a teenage son and a teenage daughter.
They've got a real weird dynamic right off the get-go,
and it's one of those things where you're questioning,
is it supposed to be like that?
Maybe the actors were just having
a little too much chemistry
for brother and sister.
Until the brother gets possessed,
and then gets it on with his sister,
who is not possessed, so I don't really know
what her excuse was.
Playing the young daughter is Diane Franklin
from "Last American Virgin", "Better Off Dead",
real apple pie, America's sweetheart type stuff.
And if you wanna watch her have sex with her brother,
"Amityville II" is the film for you.
This skin-crawling incest that happens in the film
was actually cut down from what was in the original cut,
and it was apparently a lot more graphic.
"Amityville II: The Possession"
was directed by Italian director, Damiano Damiani.
Written by Tommy Lee Wallace.
Best known for "Halloween 3: Season of the Witch".
And he co-wrote this with Dardano Sacchetti
who often worked with Lucio Fulci.
This one actually does have really wonderful effects.
I mean, it's just like 80s to the core.
Bladder effects, like as the brother
is becoming more and more possessed,
neck is just pulsing, or his head will be pulsing.
My favorite moment in "Amityville II: The Possession",
there's this part where the camera
kind of goes overhead, when he's like,
I guess the demon is really going into his body.
"Amityville: The Possession", and "Amityville"
the original first film are two totally separate entities.
The tone is not the same.
The first one is just straight up scary.
The second one has kinds of all these weird
other tones in it.
You wanted it!
You feel very uncomfortable for different reasons.
Look at them.
They're pathetic animals.
They'd be better off if you killed them.
The second one is just like fuck it,
let's go off the rails.
We're gonna loosely use this title,
and then just go way off into left field over here.
And it's for that extra bit of sickening material,
and there's lots of it in this picture,
that's the reason that "Amityville II: The Possession"
makes my list as one of the worst films of the year.
That no one would ever forget the girls
in "The House On Sorority Row".
That mystical world of the sorority fraternity culture,
in the 80s, all films were pointing us
towards that's where you're going.
If it's not "Revenge of the Nerds",
it's "The House on Sorority Row".
I wanna thank you for helping me
become what I am today.
Wasted.
And then it's like, what crazy debauchery
is gonna happen within the walls
of that sorority house?
And how will we be punished
for indulging in that debauchery?
You filth!
Evil house mother.
The house mother to end all house mothers.
Is killed accidentally
by sorority girls,
and revenge ensues.
I got my start "House on Sorority Row".
I'd just come out of theater school.
I think we got paid $50 a day.
We worked really hard, you know.
We shot night for night for weeks.
So we were like zombies during the day.
The director, he kept a firm hand
without ever being an asshole, to be honest.
Which is saying a lot for a first endeavor.
Everyone else is wearing a cute frock,
and I'm wearing these ugly beige pants
and this sweater, and I had to run around
in that stupid outfit, and put it on everyday.
And I did not feel like I looked terrific.
She's alive.
We put her back in the pool,
and she was still alive!
He also colored my hair brown,
because of course, smart good girls have brown hair.
Me being the good girl, the one who stays in the house
while her friends are being murdered left and right.
That always makes me giggle.
Would you not run away?
Are you gonna go roaming around in this house
looking for clues?
But I was drugged, so I do have that to defend me.
Just a mild sedative.
It definitely had a style
that a lot of low budget films really don't have.
"The House on Sorority Row" ended up being
one of those movies that became
a bit of a cult fan favorite.
As much as I like to say it's all because it's great film,
I think some of it is, you know, fun
in that it's a little bit over the top,
and when you think that's part of the appeal of the genre.
I never thought I'd be talking about it.
You know, I'm 63.
I was 23.
Wow.
But I have no regrets whatsoever.
It was fun.
As an actor watching films,
I certainly dial into performances.
I sort of learned my craft by doing.
I had taken dance lessons,
and so I started out doing theater.
♪ Lady Godiva
The first television project I did was Maude.
And it was a four camera sitcom
that we filmed like a play.
So stop asking who I was out with,
what we had for dinner,
and did we go all the way.
And then my next real film education
came when I did "Someone's Watching Me"
for John Carpenter.
I played, I believe, the first lesbian woman
in a television film.
And he had written a fantastic scene
in which her sexuality is revealed.
Who's he?
She.
And we did it, and John came up to me
and he said that was great, that was perfect.
Do less.
Don't worry.
You're not my type.
I'm not worried.
And it was the proverbial light bulb going off.
Oh, because it's film,
because it's not theater.
Do less.
Now, especially something like "Creepshow",
which was George Romero,
which was such an outrageous character,
which was George saying no, you can be bigger!
You can be bigger, you can be bigger.
That was like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I just spent the last three years learning to do less.
I mean, where would you be without me to take care of you?
The important thing about approaching a character
like Billy in "Creepshow", who everybody will watch
the movie and say oh, she's just a bitch.
When was the last time you got it up, Henry?
Huh?
When was the last time you were a man in our bed?
She's the most horrible, and she needed to be
so that everybody would cheer when Henry
arranged for her demise.
Don't you ever touch me again!
As an actor, you don't play I'm a bitch.
You explore whatever it is that made her
the way she was.
She's incredibly disappointed
in the way her life turned out.
Henry, goddammit!
How many times have I told you
to lock the goddam door?
You have to understand what it is
that drives the behavior.
At least Henry has me to take care of him,
don't you, dear?
I didn't see a lot of films growing up,
but I do remember something called "Donovan's Brain".
I don't know that I had ever seen a horror film
besides "Donovan's Brain", until John invited me
to the screening of "Halloween".
I had just done The Tonight Show earlier that day,
and announced on Johnny Carson
that John and I were engaged.
And then I went to the screening of "Halloween".
By the end of that film, I suspect that he was
black and blue, because I kept going, oh my god!
Oh my god!
I was like, oh, oh!
Oh my, oh!
You know?
It's the first horror film I'd ever seen.
It was at that point that Tom Atkins,
who is also at the screening,
leaned over to me and said Addy,
I'm not sure you should marry this guy.
We cannot let Adrienne marry this guy.
There's something wrong with him.
He makes this kind of movie.
But she married him,
and they had a lovely child together, Cody.
Well, stay up with me.
And I'll figure out some way to keep you occupied.
When John first had me read the script for "The Fog",
I was pretty involved in social issues.
"Coming Home" was a huge hit,
and "The China Syndrome" was a huge hit.
And I read it, and it was like,
uh, this is a horror film.
This is not about women's rights.
It's not about abortion.
But, I mean, I loved the character and everything,
and of course, since, it's one of the things
that I am most proud of doing.
The one piece of merchandise that I really love,
"The Fog" action figure.
I think that's a marvelous piece of merchandising.
None of us knew in the 80s
that the work we were doing,
"Escape From New York", or "The Fog", or "Creepshow',
would be as viable today.
The career of an actor, when it works,
is a wonderful career.
"Xtro".
Some extraterrestrials aren't friendly.
From New Line Cinema.
Rated R.
Roger begins with a horror film called "Xtro".
That's X-T-R-O.
Remember that spelling, remember that name.
So, "Xtro" is about an alien that kills people,
but it's also the cliche of the disturbed kid
with the powers, and evil clowns, too.
It's kind of everything.
I'd say it's very confusing
slightly surrealistic movie,
and I'm not really sure what it's about.
So a father gets abducted by aliens.
The wife thinks that he ran off with another woman.
The alien impregnates somebody.
Then the woman gives birth to a human child,
and it turns out to be the father,
who's been abducted and reborn.
I'm told that it's about abandonment.
Some very smart critic told me that.
And I just hung onto that word every since then.
I can't remember a thing until today.
I saw Tony in the streets, so-
You want to come home.
Like it was.
I think what makes marketable film
of any kind is being unusual.
Bob Shaye, who's the head of New Line,
and who started New Line,
I think Bob Shaye wanted to have his own "Phantasm".
We just wanted to shock people,
and make our little horror film,
and we wanted to have good acting and so on,
so you've got this rather uneasy business,
between all these little Shakespearean actors,
and all this nonsense that they've got to talk.
You'll be able to do lots of things.
Don't be frightened.
Use it when you need it.
The best part in "Xtro",
there's this creepy alien effect
where it's a person doing one of those
backwards spider walks.
The prosthetic is put on backwards,
so it looks very unsettling.
He's walking backwards with his back to the ground
on all fours, but with his stomach sticking up
to the sky, and the head of the creature on backwards,
which was absolute misery for him,
because it was cold, and we were having him
walking through swamps, and things like that.
A civilization develops enough intelligence
to come all the way to Earth from another star,
and then they don't have enough sense
to not stand in the middle of the road
when a car is coming.
When it came to this birth scene,
which, I think nobody understood
except me and the special effects guys.
We had to have a thing with the false floor,
and all this sort of thing, and trap doors, and whatnot.
We did a lot of it in one take.
As much of it as we could in one take.
All sorts of nasty kind of afterbirth stuff.
And then we had the umbilical cord,
that we made out of spaghetti, actually.
And he had to bite through that.
We were astonished we got it.
No, I wasn't a bit worried about it going too far.
I was worried about it not going far enough.
Bob, god bless him, was always more for having
more weird things going on.
He said hey, you gotta have a panther in there,
jumping out at someone.
Something like that.
He wanted his panther.
And he got it.
It's as if they're so pretentious
that they're trying to make some kind of
a philosophical statement.
It was garbage.
It was offensive.
Garbage is the operative word.
With little films like these,
the audience knows it's a low budget film.
They know right away.
They can sniff it from the first frame.
And they tend to be more forgiving.
That was just at the start of home video.
And I remember the first week that we came out,
we beat "Poltergeist", if you can believe that,
in the VHS ratings.
It grew legs, and it just ran off.
It absolutely killed in the home video market.
Amazing.
"Curtains".
The ultimate nightmare.
Canadian horror movie.
When you come from Canada, you don't really realize
that the movies are from Canada.
Like Rush.
You don't think of it as Canada's best band.
They're just a great band.
And what's the difference?
I mean, they're more friendly?
It kind of just blends in with the American ones.
"Curtains" is about a bunch of actresses
who go to a director's mansion to audition for a role.
Red flag.
And there is a killer on the loose.
And they're all also competing for a part.
It gets messy.
An actress named Samantha commits herself to a psych ward.
She's trying to, like, be the part.
And then the director fucking leaves her there
and goes to a mansion to hang out with five other
younger, hotter actresses,
while a killer in a hag mask goes after them.
It has these "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" vibes,
just because there is that element in the beginning
of the older actress who gets left in a psych ward,
and has to escape to get revenge.
What are you gonna do now?
What I love about the film
is it knows that Striker, the director, is a creep.
Now seduce me.
No words.
You can make sounds if you like.
The horror in "Curtains" for me
is the way that Jonathan Striker treats the women.
He forces two women to seduce each other,
and she's topless, and you can just tell
the women are not into it,
but they just do it because it's requested of them.
He preys on them, ends up sleeping with them.
Almost like an allegory on the industry.
And there's that great scene in the frozen pond,
where the one actress is skating away from the killer
with this doll in her hand,
and the killer's got the mask on
with this side, like raises it,
Fucking insane, and it's all in slow-mo,
and it's the weirdest mask you've ever seen.
You don't know if it's a woman or not.
It makes you fear the daylight,
and the emptiness in what can happen when you're alone
in a seemingly safe space.
Originally, they wanted to create a banshee creature,
but they didn't move forward with it.
"Curtains" has a very interesting kind of tone.
That's because it was actually directed
by two different people.
It feels almost very slow, and very mood building,
and then in some scenes, it's very slash 'em up,
and darkly lit, that it feels like an art house slasher.
"Curtains" is for people who like dolls
and ice skating, and old witch masks.
That has me written all over it.
So I'm sold.
"Hell of the Living Dead".
Also known as "Night of the Zombies",
originally titled "Virus".
But known in England as "Zombie Creeping Flesh".
This is the VHS tape, and a perfect example
of the lurid artwork that I would see
on the shelves of a video shop
and think that movie is for me.
There's a lab in Papua New Guinea
that has a chemical that accidentally gets released
that turns pretty much everybody into zombies.
And you follow this group of people
that travel around the globe
trying to stop this grand conspiracy.
Or maybe you just get eaten.
This is an Italian film that was dubbed in English.
It was directed by Bruno Mattei,
under the pseudonym Vincent Dawn.
If you're familiar with his work,
you know the dubbing is pretty terrible,
but that just adds to the awesomeness of it.
And we liked each other.
We'd be in the sack together by now.
That's your opinion.
Bruno Mattei was the copycat of Lucio Fulci.
"Hell of the Living Dead" came about in the wake
of the success of Fulci's "Zombie",
so essentially he was making an Italian zombie movie
which was shot in Spain,
but using the tropes that Fulci had come up with
on the back of ripping off George Romero.
Set to the scores of Goblin,
but none of the score was actually scored for this movie.
They used the soundtrack from "Contamination"
and "Dawn of the Dead" by Goblin,
and scored this movie with those scores.
Father.
What's wrong with you?
When the pandemic hit really hard,
of course I couldn't stop making movies.
The idea of "Corona Zombies" was these ditzy girls,
they turn a movie on that was the footage
from "Hell of the Living Dead", with all this
very funny clever new dialogue.
We have just received shocking video
of what is believed to be ground zero of the virus.
It was much like "What's Up Tiger Lily?"
Is that one of the corona zombies?
Shh.
"Hell of the Living Dead", it's very ahead
of its time, and it's very much against
man infecting the earth with pollution.
And that is what's causing the outbreak.
But it's also full of Fulci-esque rotting zombies
and gore and splatter,
and eyes being poked out,
and guts being poked out.
This movie is entirely enjoyable
from beginning to end.
It was the first example where I realized
that the Video Nasties panic was nonsense.
Father help me.
"Possession" is a film about a couple
whose marriage is deteriorating fast.
What do you expect of me?
Look what you're doing!
Mark and Anna, you can see that they are
extremely unhappy with each other.
They're screaming at each other.
Isabelle Adjani is incredible.
But especially in the subway scene.
And it's so disturbing.
One of the most effective scenes
of showing somebody just completely losing themselves.
Sam Neill as Mark in this film
is a very anxious character.
Cinematography really communicates
his inner feelings.
He's also very paranoid about Anna.
Their whole relationship together
is extremely hard to watch.
You know what this is for?
The lies!
Then you have to add much more.
They're very codependent, and very bad for each other.
The dramatic elements are really what drives the movie,
but then you have, it turns into this creature feature.
My god.
He made love to me all night.
She actually in this movie has sex with this monster,
which was created by Carlo Rambaldi,
who most people know is the person
who created E.T. for Steven Spielberg.
I can't believe that they talked her
into doing that entire scene.
And it looks so realistic.
"Possession" is the epitome of relationship horror.
That feeling of how it is to all out of love
with someone you care about.
Those moments of desperation and loss
are so heartbreaking.
It's a lot to take in.
It's waiting to see who will die first.
That is a movie that deserved all the Oscar love,
because it really took a lot of risks,
but it did a lot of profound things as well.
"Devil Fetus" was made by a bunch of first time filmmakers
that got a hold of themselves some iconic actors.
And it's crazy.
The special effects are insane.
A woman buys a vase.
The vase has a demon.
He crawls out, and he has sex with her
and impregnates her.
And that's the devil fetus title.
Everybody dies around her in miraculous ways.
That antique shop has a lot to answer for.
Like, I hope she kept the receipt.
It's a very weird movie.
What is cool about it is these special effects,
and it has so much 80s charm.
You have this animated thunder and lightning
coming out of people's hands,
you have them flying across things, and floating heads.
The martial arts in this is incredible, actually.
That's one of the biggest selling points.
There's all kinds of things happening
in this movie that's hard to explain.
To us it might seem like a fever dream,
but to the people who were involved in the culture,
they may know all of these things from childhood.
Very few category three films were cut,
and this one was.
It has to deal with gore and the assault
that happens in the film.
Cat three goes to 11.
You know?
It's a little bit higher than 10 and NC-17,
but it's not quite X.
Which, X-rated films were rated Cat three as well.
You think the film's going this way,
and then it goes in a different direction.
That's what's unique about "Devil Fetus".
It has the most epic last five minutes
of any movie you'll ever see.
"Eyes of Fire".
The secret is sleeping in the trees.
"Eyes of Fire" is a weird one,
because it's set in the 1700s,
and it concerns a preacher who is accused of adultery,
and is banished from town.
And he and his family find themselves
in the woods beset by spirits of Native Americans.
God damn them!
"Eyes of Fire" is an American folk horror movie.
This valley is where the lost blood gathers.
It's the home of the devil.
If you believe in it.
This film is entirely unique,
shot by a photographer called Avery Crounse.
I don't believe he'd made a feature film before this,
and he's only made a couple since.
It is a very photogenic folk horror movie
shot in the woods.
As opposed to the meat and potato slasher stuff
of the 80s, there's a lot of surreal imagery,
and surreal moments, faces in trees,
just weird hallucinogenic moments
that don't feel of a piece with the 80s, necessarily,
which in itself makes it exciting.
This is what makes it really unique and stick out.
Folk horror is a very broad subgenre,
but it had a real moment in the 60s and 70s,
and was primarily a British thing,
so the fact that you're seeing a folk horror film,
A, in the 80s, and B, set in America,
was a bit unusual.
It was independently produced by Avery Crounse.
He basically moved on.
He didn't particularly connect with the film industry.
We went to great effort to find him
so that we could include "Eyes of Fire"
in our All the Haunts Be Ours folk horror box set.
He basically still owned the movie.
He had the negative in a storage unit,
and it had been sitting there since the 80s, basically.
Had not been scanned since.
I can see again.
He sent it here so that we could scan it here
at Severin office, and he even had a previous version
called "Crying Blue Sky", which was longer,
and we were able to scan that and include that as well.
So the reason it had been out of distribution
was just because he was out of the business
and had not been traceable since.
Don't worry, my child.
Luckily we were able to get it.
"Boarding House".
Rated R.
"Boarding House".
It was a movie that didn't do well
that has gained a cult following through the years.
John Wintergate, and his wife Kalassu,
I believe they're a little drunk,
and they watched a horror film at home,
and they both have the idea
of we can do that.
An interview John Wintergate was watching
where George Lucas stated that video is the future.
He got this idea it was easy to make a movie on video.
You buy a video camera for a few hundred dollars,
and you buy some blank tapes, and you shoot a movie.
What is that?
It's apple juice.
Oh my god.
You didn't have to say that.
They decided to make a horror comedy.
They made the first big shot on video movie.
But Wintergate and Kalassu
wrote, directed, starred in this film,
did the music for it as well.
They were both musicians.
The husband and wife, making something different.
When people watch the movie, it's like wow,
this movie's crazy.
It's doing all these sorts of things
that don't relate to one another.
I'm preparing the Thorazine
for Mr. Ratchet's shock therapy.
Well, that's 'cause it's heavily cut,
and that horror comedy ended up being
two hours and 30 minutes long.
The distributors did not like that.
They told to recut the movie into what we got
with "Boarding House", which is an hour and a half
of a crazy, bizarre movie.
They cut out all the comedy in the movie,
and tried to cut it as a serious horror film.
I think that explains a lot of the weirdness
in "Boarding House".
Watch.
This was the first, and probably only,
wide release of a shot on video movie
to screen and theaters,
because he blew up 35 millimeter prints,
which was very costly.
"Blood Cult" is sometimes considered
the first shot on video film, but it is not.
"Blood Cult" was the first shot on video movie
made for the video market on home video.
"Blood Cult".
The first movie made especially for the home video market.
"Boarding House" paved the way for shot on video.
Filmmakers took notice that you could buy a video camera,
or borrow your parents', because they probably have one,
and then start shooting movies with your friends.
That kick started the shot on video boom.
You are trespassing.
This is my house!
Throughout the 80s, Asia were making
all of these horror films that didn't really get
much seen across the world,
but they were producing some incredible stuff,
from interesting places.
I grew up in a half Asian household.
My mum is from Philippines.
She made sure I was aware that monsters
and ghosts and creatures are real.
Asian horror just really gets under your skin.
The first time I was exposed to Asian horror movies
was when the whole boom came with "The Ring", "Ju-on".
"The Grudge".
That opened a whole new world for me.
I just thought, okay this is the stuff of my nightmares.
I think that Japanese people don't care as much
in the realism.
It's more deep symbolism,
and much more thought out inner mental things,
rather than just the coherent storytelling.
That is more important to me.
Their points of reference for what's scary
are often very different.
A lot of western horror, there's a Judeo-Christian
sort of root to it.
And their fears and their preoccupations,
and their boogeymen come from a different place.
And it's exciting to see that cultural difference,
exciting to see what scares people
in a culture that's not your own.
I was very attracted to the Asian flow
of movies coming in that are about dream scapes,
that are about ghosts, anything like that,
that gets me off in a way that is both scary
and not as uncomfortable as seeing a lot of blood.
My favorite Japanese horror movie from the 80s
by far is "Sweet Home" because it's so, so, so nuts.
At the same time, Capcom released a game version,
which is almost better than the actual film.
It's also the influence for "Resident Evil" as well.
"Resident Evil".
So Kiyoshi Kurosawa, he's the director of "Sweet Home".
And he went on to do some of the best
Japanese horror movies of the late 90s
and early 2000s.
If it wasn't for him leading the way
making Japanese movies that could potentially appeal
to a Western audience, you wouldn't have had
this J-horror explosion.
When you mention 80s Asian horror,
a lot of people think of "House" from Japan,
although that one's from 1977.
If you watch Japanese horror,
if you watch something from Thailand,
if you watch something from South Korea,
you're going to get a different experience
from each of those.
South Korea's horror movement that happened
just after J-horror explosion has been incredible.
South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines
kind of came into their own regarding horror
a little bit later.
In terms of horror that's commercially viable
in the Western world.
In the Philippines, there's actually a lot of horror.
It's very sad that I can not count on one hand
how many cross over to America.
One of the best places for Asian horror,
especially out of the 80s, was China.
A lot of it was based on the mythology.
We see demons, vampires, ghosts, poltergeists,
a lot of witches, a lot of wizards as well.
Some movies you should definitely check out
are "Kung Fu Zombie", "Human Lanterns",
"Seeding of a Ghost", and "Witch from Nepal"
with Chow Yun-Fat.
We know the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest
as the purveyors of incredible martial arts movies,
but they also dip their toe in a lot of horror as well.
Asian horror cinema,
I like vampire movies for that.
Scary things that there is a story of how they got scary.
The way they present their monsters
is just so fundamentally different
than how the Western stereotype of a vampire
is just completely blown up in an Asian film.
I'm completely obsessed by the "Mr. Vampire" movies.
I'd never seen Jiangshi vampires before.
I was mesmerized by how comedic they were.
They hop.
When you watch "Mr. Vampire",
you see why people are scared of them,
because they are relentless,
and you have to know all of the tricks
in order to defeat them.
"The Jitters" is an unusual film.
Plus "The Jitters" was directed by John Fasano
and not a Chinese guy.
There's a little bit lost in translation.
It played fast and loose with Chinese mythology
quite a lot.
Someone thought that since they're so popular
over there, we'd make an American version
of these movies, and see how that does.
I got him!
I'm uncomfortable with the movie now,
because there's a lot of racial stereotypes in there,
at the time, I didn't really think was a big deal,
but it is.
Understanding horror explored through the lens
of other cultures, it's an important thing,
and it's a cool thing.
Different cultures have all these different kinds
of mythologies to draw from,
and there's just this endless well of stories
that we can build upon.
When you're talking about Asian horror now,
people are looking at it from a broader perspective
because they've been able to watch these movies.
Whereas in the 80s, a lot of them were available,
but they just never really made it outside of their markets.
Asian horror was somewhat inaccessible
to a lot of us in the 80s.
Video stores didn't carry a lot of it,
and it's only after J-horror came up after the fact
that then suddenly we're retroactively going back
into these catalogs and finding these titles
that were not on our radar in the 80s.
In a way that's kind of cool,
because then that's a bucket of 80s horror
that we can go back and look for now.
School was hell, but vacation was murder.
"The Mutilator".
It was originally titled "Fall Break",
but the filmmakers apparently felt "The Mutilator"
was a much more user friendly title.
Four days of R and R at the beach.
I'm in.
Sounds good to me.
I got a bad feeling about this.
College kids on their fall break,
and they get picked off one by one.
I'm coming to get you!
By different use of power tools,
and home repair tools.
One of the friends, his dad hates him
because he blames him for the death of his mother.
Just like this angry dad who hates his son
and is gonna take it out on him and his friends.
"The Mutilator" is one of those that tries
to present as a comedy, but isn't sure it wants
to be a comedy, and you're not sure
if you're supposed to be laughing at a lot of it.
Looks like the party's over for this joker.
Oh.
Yeah.
My dad ran over him with a ski boat.
It's dancing to the beat of its own drum.
What's wrong with the water?
It looks like it's been loaded down with chlorine.
Will that hurt you?
No, in fact it probably prevents herpes.
The art for "The Mutilator" has this tagline
that says by sword, by pick, by ax, bye-bye.
Catchy title, catchy tagline,
and some eye-grabbing art.
The more extreme the exploitation level is,
the more likely a teen is gonna rent that.
And that's the idea.
And that's why we love these movies
so much to this day.
My first film in America,
which is absolutely adored doing, was "Maniac",
and I got to work with my lovely Joe Spinell again,
who I first met in "Star Crash".
People connect with Joe Spinell.
He is a compelling actor to watch.
I loved working with Joe because he was
such a brilliant actor, and a sweet, dear person.
"The Last Horror Film" is about New York cab driver
who's obsessed with Caroline Munroe,
and he follows her to the Cannes Film Festival
where a serial killer is on the loose.
It was called "The Last Horror Film",
and then they called it "Fanatic" after that.
This film was an unofficial followup to "Maniac".
I got talent, ma!
I'm gonna be a great director someday!
Don't yell at your mother!
It's great to see Joe Spinell
and Caroline Munroe together,
and I think the pairing is fantastic.
Who is it?
We were an odd couple.
We were, weren't we?
Jana Bates is going to star in my next movie.
It's all set.
I'm producing and directing.
Vinny, are you sure you're making a movie?
He was wonderful in that film.
Very quirky, very quirky.
And my character, she was spooked by Joe,
because Joe had an obsession for this actress, Jana Bates.
Who are you?
Get out.
I thought we'd just have a drink
and talk about the film.
You'll be absolutely perfect in it.
It was directed by David Winters,
who was in "West Side Story",
and sure enough, they just showed up in Cannes,
and started shooting this movie,
so there's a lot of run and gun footage
of the Cannes Film Festival.
One of the first guerrilla films
to be made there, for sure.
And I had to run along the crasette in a towel.
They were all lined up, real people,
to see Jack Nicholson, Leslie Caron,
go on the red carpet.
They said Caroline, you're just gonna have to run
along the red carpet.
I said what, I've got a towel on.
They said that's okay, just do your own thing.
Please!
Hot damn, that's Jana Bates!
"The Last Horror Film" is not as gory as "Maniac"
but it does have a good amount of kills in it.
There's a lot of meta elements.
There's one bit where Joe Spinell's in a cinema
watching a new horror movie,
and he actually is eating his popcorn,
and starts throwing up
because it's too gross, too disgusting.
It's questioning horror movies
because "Maniac" got a lot of backlash
because of how misogynistic it was.
Now tell us why you're such a failure, Vinny.
I'm a genius.
Jana Bates is going to star in my movie.
She loves me!
It's a very bizarre film.
So I would think the ultimate theme
for "The Last Horror Film" or "The Fanatic"
would have to be obsession.
Obsessive love.
He loved her.
Or he loved what he saw of her onscreen.
But he didn't know her.
Could you move your head a little to the right
in this space?
Perfect, just perfect.
I always think it's really interesting
when the protagonist of a horror film,
especially in this period, is a guy,
because usually we associate the 80s
as the time where final girls came into full force.
"Mutant".
"Mutant", originally released
as "Night Shadows" theatrically.
It turned up on VHS as "Mutant".
The two very capable leads are Wings Hauser
and Lee Montgomery.
Our car broke down and we just need a place to stay.
We'll be gone first thing in the morning, I promise.
They end up in a dead end town
because their car messed up.
They go to the local bar,
and instantly these locals beat them up,
rough them up.
Oh no!
They end up being patched up by the local doctor.
And they start to get their first inklings
that something is wrong in this town,
that people are going missing.
This is toxic waste infecting a small community
and turning them into zombies.
This mutation somehow causes
an increasing need for blood.
Just so many zombies.
They're all over the place.
It was obviously inspired by George Romero.
And you see this in a lot of films,
like "Return of the Living Dead",
and you see it in a lot of the Troma films.
Toxic waste was a big thing in the 80s.
I like my zombies to be serious.
They definitely got the vibe of what made
those movies so much fun.
No!
The effects are kind of hokey,
because when these zombies approach you,
and they touch you, which ultimately turns you
into a zombie, all this steam comes off you,
almost like they're pressing a shirt,
like a big life sized iron.
Jack?
But there's one real cool sequence
where you just know there's gonna be a zombie.
You just know it.
And then she slowly goes over to him,
slowly pulls out the covers.
These locals just inherently hate other people.
Some secrets should remain secret,
and the way you do that is by keeping
all the outsiders away.
"The New York Ripper" is a very violent giallo
made by Lucio Fulci after he'd already made
"Zombie Flesh Eaters", "The Beyond",
and "House by the Cemetery".
Fulci was kind of riding high at this point
in his career.
"Zombie" was a huge success internationally
by the standards of Italian exploitation movies.
He went on and decided to make a thriller.
About a ripper in New York.
During this time, a lot of Italian filmmakers
would come to the US and shoot establishing footage,
and that's all tied into how Italian filmmakers
were trying to make their films seem American.
The killer in the film has a Donald Duck
kind of quacking voice.
Said he called back.
Sounded just like a duck.
Like a duck?
Which adds to the element of the bizarre
of this movie, and I think it shows Fulci's
sense of humor as well.
There's a fair amount of sleaze in the movie
as well, and nudity.
There's a very famous sequence in the film
where an actress is tied to a bed,
and essentially gets razor bladed
in the eye and in the nipple,
and it's extremely graphic and close up,
but it has that ocular violence
that Fulci had become famous for,
and he was trying to outdo, it seems,
in every movie that he did.
It definitely pushed the boundaries
of what was acceptable.
This film made sure that in England,
if you were found with a copy,
you were definitely having it seized,
and you would probably be arrested.
Like a duck?
Quack, quack, quack.
Just like that.
"The Initiation".
The ceremony that will never die,
as long as new blood is pledged.
I rented that movie the very first time,
because I loved Daphne Zuniga in "Spaceballs",
and it was right when Melrose Place was hitting.
And we've got a girl in a sorority,
she's being hazed.
Her character, Kelly, is having these nightmares,
so she actually goes through a sleep study
trying to figure out the reason
behind her nightmares.
It's fairly common for the subconscious mind
to fictionalize certain emotional states.
There's a woman committing adultery
with another guy.
A little girl comes in and catches them,
starts stabbing the crap out of somebody,
and then the guy goes on fire,
and she can't remember what happens.
I was in a coma for three months,
and they kept me in this private hospital in Chicago.
When I came out of it, I had no memory.
Her father, who's played by Clu Gulager,
owns this big shopping building,
and she's tasked with breaking in
and stealing a night porter's outfits.
Course, a lot of bad things happen.
It is a movie that takes a little time
to get going, but once they get into that mall,
there's some really fun kills.
You're finding bodies all over the place
The security guard is a bummer.
There's so many wacky out there things in the 80s,
where I guess they just tried things
more than we do now.
You know, it takes some leaps and bounds.
Spoiler alert, there's a twist at the end.
Peter!
And you're left sitting there like,
wait, what is going on?
You have to rationalize it to yourself
so that you can move on and finish
the rest of the movie.
It's a total shock at the end.
I've never seen anything like that
before in my life.
The more I think about it, the more I think
they just wanted to blow our minds.
Scared the shit out of them!
The only reason that they would set horror movies
on holidays is that they had no marketing budget.
So it was a way to get attention from the press.
Most decisions made in the 80s
were strictly financial decisions.
A present from the people
who brought you "Friday the 13th"
now comes "Don't Open Till Christmas".
"Don't Open Till Christmas" is a real curio,
a slasher film set in the UK
about a killer who goes around
killing people in Santa suits.
It's almost like Fulci directed this.
It's so grimy and slimy,
and as soon as you step foot into an alley,
you're dead meat.
The reason for the serial killer killing Santa Claus
is obviously some trauma from when he was a kid.
And you see this in a flashback streaked dream,
and he's just been, for all these years,
hellbent on getting revenge on Santa.
The department store, you have this big, fat,
Santa Claus guy, who's going around
and leering at all the girls.
And as soon as he gets to the toilets,
you know what's gonna happen.
And it's just blood squirting everywhere.
He gets his apt punishment.
Caroline Munroe turns up in this film as well,
which was a surprise.
She's like a dancer in a club.
Man, that woman is beautiful.
If you blink, you're gonna miss me in it.
George Dugdale, my husband,
he did the effects on "Don't Open Till Christmas".
They got the Piccadilly Theater in London.
I went in for about two hours,
on the thing, and I wiggled about the stage,
and kind of sang "Warrior of Love".
Basically, that's my bit in it.
♪ I'm the warrior of love
♪ Yes I am
Father Christmas appears, and the trapdoor,
just as I'm mid-sing, and so I react to him,
the Father Christmas dead.
Maybe they just needed a bit of a filler.
Maybe they thought, oh we've got five minutes to spare.
Bang her in.
♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah
A lot of Santas die in this film,
so if you are into horror movies
for the festive body count, then this is the one.
There's a party going on!
Look, there's no party here, mate.
I wasn't allowed to watch horror movies
or sci-fi movies when I was little.
Because I was too sensitive.
I was older when I saw "The Exorcist".
That was the most frightening movie I've ever seen.
I felt it could really happen.
This study of the human psyche
has always been prevalent in my work,
and in why I want to work.
My whole method is the less I know
what's gonna happen, the more alive in the moment I am.
The most memorable scene in "The Hills Have Eyes"
with Wes was when I had to work with the tarantula.
They assured me that it couldn't hurt me.
Afterwards, I found out that oh yeah, it could've.
And I said Wes, I'm scared.
And he said, will you trust me,
that I will make sure that everything is handled
so that you're safe?
And that's just who Wes was.
You did.
To me, "The Howling" was the battle of good and evil,
which goes on within all of us.
There was so much in "The Howling"
that elevated that film, because of Joe Dante.
Joe brings more of who he is into his films,
because Joe is very funny.
And he always finds a way
to bring that humor,
even if it's dark humor,
into his projects.
"Cujo" was always about what a mother would do
for her child.
It was never a horror film to me.
It was a statement of how far a mother would go
to keep her kid safe.
It's not a monster, it's just a doggie.
I've heard from so many people,
I watched it when I was younger,
and it was a horror film.
I watch it now after I have kids,
it's a whole different film.
My father was a severe alcoholic.
So for most practical purposes, I had a single mom.
And she was a strong mom.
And I had a strong grandma that helped raise me.
So I had some really good personal material
to call on.
There were nine dogs that played Cujo.
Two black labs that could fit in a dog suit
if we needed it, and a stuntman in the dog suit.
The dogs were all trained to go after toys,
and we had to tie their tails down with fish wire,
because they were having so much fun.
Stephen King is the sweetest, kinda shy,
very gentle man.
When he came on the set of "Cujo",
I went, where does it come from?
And he just started laughing.
After "E.T.", I was plagued with mother parts.
It's not that I don't want to play mothers,
I just want to play everything.
Dear god, I probably have 800 roles
of every kind of mom.
Psycho mom, sweet mom, drugged mom,
killer mom, hooker mom.
Everything!
No!
No, no!
It was almost like poetry to me, "Shadow Play".
And I wanted desperately to work with Cloris Leachman.
I had to do that very artsy dream nude scene,
and my husband was not happy about that.
I don't think I've ever told this story before.
He called me, and he said
if you do that scene tomorrow,
I think we're done.
I said Chris, don't make me make that choice.
We got my therapist on the phone at three a.m.
in the morning, and we worked it out
that what was really bothering him
was that he would have to wait all those months
wondering what happened.
And if the director would agree to show him the dailies,
he would be okay.
Now, this is pretty funny coming from a guy
who had a huge naked love scene in "The Howling",
and he expected me to be just fine with it,
thank you very much.
But, you know.
That's a man for you.
Rubin Galindo Jr.
He's awesome!
Rubin has an amazing lineup of movies,
and he really made a stamp in the 80s.
Rubin,
The difference between the Mexican horror films,
and international horror films,
we like to mix a little bit of spirituality,
and to let some things to the unknown.
We don't tend to try to explain.
My dad did Luchador films,
with monsters films.
"El Santo Contra Los Asesinos De Ostros Mundos".
The saint against killers from other worlds.
It's beautiful.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
That struck me hard,
and then one day, my dad told me,
would you think it's a good idea
to make a film like Michael Jackson's "Thriller"?
I said, yes!
It's a great idea!
I wanna do that!
It's a bunch of teenagers,
they wanna have fun in Halloween.
They go to the morgue, they steal a corpse,
and they pretend to do a demonic ritual.
They woke up the demon inside, Devlon,
who was a killer.
And all of the sudden, Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
Pops out of the tombs.
I felt very compromised with the budget.
I had a hard time.
The lousiest effect of all
is when the guy that was taking a leak,
Alonso Garcia, finds the girl lying all dead
with blood all over her,
and then there is a flying ax
that hits him in the face.
You could see that the ax had a metal pole.
I wasn't looking through the camera,
because I was playing the ax.
I think that's the charm.
It's kind of looking at a kitsch art,
when you see a horror film
that was done with such a low budget,
it's looking at like an Ed Wood film.
The only guy that believes in the film
is the director.
It's hard to say what kind of influence
Stephen King had on movies,
because of so many directors attempted
so many different kinds of film, it's hard to say.
It depends on how well done they are.
I know Stephen King loves "Cujo".
Stephen King's "Cat's Eye".
Capitalizing on the popularity of "Creepshow',
and Stephen King in general,
the studios decided they should make
another horror anthology,
and that's how we got "Cat's Eye".
"Cat's Eye" is by Lewis Teague.
He'd done "Cujo" at the time.
It is also co-produced by Milton Subotsky,
who was kind of the king of anthology horror.
He's the guy who produced Tales From the Crypt,
and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, and Asylum.
"Cat's Eye" is three stories,
two of which are taken from Stephen King's
short story book, "Night Shift".
Watch for the "Cujo" and "Christine" references
in the beginning.
The first segment is called "Quitters Incorporated",
and it stars James Woods as a guy who's trying
to quit smoking, and the problem is what they do
to get you to quit smoking is incredibly extreme.
The second segment is "The Ledge".
This is about a rich guy played
by Kenneth McMillan,
who discovers that Robert Hayes
has been sleeping with his wife.
He tells him that if he makes it
all the way around the building on this ledge,
that he can leave and take his wife.
Boogie, boogie, boogie!
You bastard!
I just wanna keep you on your toes!
The third story was more or less
how the whole thing came about.
Producer Dino De Laurentiis contacted Stephen King
and told him he wanted him to write a story
specifically for Drew Barrymore,
because they had just worked together on "Firestarter".
He wrote the script in less than 24 hours.
Help me!
The movie's tied together with this cat, The General,
who's on his way to try to protect Drew Barrymore
from a troll that's living in her walls.
The troll's trying to kill the little girl
by stealing her breath while she sleeps.
Carlo Rambaldi created the creature,
and it is very realistic.
The troll was a little person in a suit.
They're doing puppetry, they're doing forced perspective.
It's fantastic.
The movie actually is in the Guinness Book of World Records
for making the world's largest bed,
and the world's largest pillows.
I love how the record player comes into play
with this segment.
Watch out!
Anthologies are kinda hit or miss,
but with this, I think all three segments are strong,
with the last one, "The General", being the strongest.
Anytime you have a movie where a cat is a hero,
I am in.
"Phenomena", from Dario Argento
is another sort of wildly weird movie in itself.
When I first saw it, I actually saw it
as "The Creepers" version.
There's actually three versions of the film.
"Phenomena" follows Jennifer Connelly,
who's a young student studying abroad,
who basically has a psychic connection
with bugs, of all things,
and she comes across Donald Pleasant,
who's an entomologist that works with bugs
in a means to help solve crimes.
It is just like, is Argento kind of of woke up one day,
and was picking motifs out of a hat,
and was like, here's "Phenomena",
but yet somehow it all works,
and I think a lot of credit is due
to Jennifer Connolly's performance.
Don't touch it!
Stop yelling!
It's a bee!
I know.
It won't hurt me.
Insects never hurt me.
Donald Pleasant is always a welcome addition
to any cast.
You're in a position to do extraordinary things
with that gift of yours.
Daria Nicolodi, who had worked so many times with Argento.
It's one of the first instances
I can remember her being a villain in a movie.
And she's so great in it.
Inga is the chimpanzee,
who is the assistant to McGreggor in the movie.
And she is a delight.
Early on in the movie, there's a point
where she's playing with a scalpel,
and he's like, Inga.
I don't want you ever,
I don't want you ever, ever playing with this again.
That moment has a payoff in the end that I won't ruin.
But Inga actually becomes your favorite part of the movie.
The "Phenomena" soundtrack is a lot of fun,
because it marries contemporary music of that time,
especially heavy metal music,
with these traditional score from Goblin.
It's really interesting that it's specifically
in "Phenomena" that Argenta would use heavy metal music
in these weird ways that shouldn't work, and yet it does.
♪ The smell of resigned leather ♪
♪ The sticky iron mask
♪ As you cut and thrust
♪ And parried at the fencing
Particularly during the kill scenes.
It actually heightens the tensions,
in those scenes in particular,
and makes them play in a very different way
than I think you see contemporary music
played in American horror.
What you love is the feeling
when you're stomping out life.
"The Doctor and the Devils".
"The Doctor and the Devils",
this is a classic British gothic horror story.
Quite lavish, quite beautiful to look at.
What now would they be doing for a living, lovey?
Grave robbers.
It's definitely one that seems to be missed
off a lot of lists of best British horror films.
Before we disturbed his sleep.
It's crawling with maggots.
I need fresh subjects.
Specimens that I can teach with.
This is, in fact, a decent movie
with a great cast, and a good story.
And I believe that that end
justifies any means.
And it stars some amazing British actors and actresses.
Dr. Rock needs fresh bodies.
Could we pay them, sir?
Only half.
Julien Sands, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Rea and Twiggy.
It was amazing to see Timothy Dalton in it.
We're scientists, not moralists.
I need bodies.
They're not called Burke and Hare,
but they're kind of analogs of Burke and Hare.
Quiet as death tonight.
Praise be the Lord.
For those that don't know, Burke and Hare
is the story of two grave robbers
who used to steal dead bodies.
And it's a true story.
Steal dead bodies and sell them for profit.
And when the dead bodies run out,
they start killing actual alive people,
and selling them on.
Quite the benefactors, the dead.
Their story kind of spins out on the head a little bit.
Put them out of their misery, Mr. Fallon!
That's what the major said to me.
Pryce, quite unhinged in the characters he does play,
and he looks evil, as well.
Fresh, Broom.
Fresh as new moon here.
This film was directed by Freddie Francis,
who you may know made his start
with Amicus and Hammer,
doing some great gothic horror for them.
And this is kind of a continuation of that.
And you can see a lot of the things he learned
with Amicus and Hammer,
the kind of level of detail in the period pieces,
in the architecture, in the costumes.
And that kind of gothic horror,
where you don't necessarily need to see the killing.
Fresh bodies, fresh bodies, fresh bodies.
You may just see a shadow on the wall,
or the aftermath, just that beautiful girl's
blood on her mouth.
The ultimate message in "The Doctor and the Devils"
is if you want something done, do it yourself.
But it's really well-done,
and I was actually surprised how well this holds up.
This city has a heart of goodness.
And the bowels of squalor.
For a good time, call-
"Transylvania 6-5000".
Is good, huh?
"Transylvania 6-5000" is an incredibly underrated
horror comedy, or should I say comedy horror,
from the 80s.
It's got a lot of really fun moments.
And the whole movie just has this uplifting
jovial feeling to it.
Ah, Radu.
Yes, master?
Everybody involved looks like they're having
an absolute blast.
You've got Ed Begley Jr., Jeff Goldblum.
Every time I give you-
Two reporters from a rag newspaper
are headed to Transylvania to try to find Frankenstein.
So I'm counting on you guys for a Frankenstein story.
I'm sorry, you're counting on us for a what story?
My favorite part is when they first arrive
in Transylvania, and they ask a point blank question,
hey, where can we find Frankenstein.
Frankenstein, you know Frankenstein don't you?
Frankenstein?
Yes, the monster.
Ah.
Instead of just laughing them off,
they drag it off and humiliate them.
And then they get the mayor to come out,
played by Jeffrey Jones,
and with the straightest face possible,
says gentlemen, we're in Transylvania.
Don't you want to ask us about Dracula?
And then just bursts out laughing.
I've got Godzilla in the back room.
I like it, it's a good one.
How about the Blob?
It wouldn't be much of a monster movie
without the monsters actually showing up.
You got the mummy, a Frankenstein monster,
a werewolf who looks like Chewbacca.
Geena Davis as a vampire.
And then there's Kramer, Michael Richards,
playing an Igor type.
Is good, huh?
Is funny!
Wearing funny goggles,
riding a mechanical animal in a closet,
and slipping on banana peels.
Look, it's a beautiful day today!
Whoa!
- Hey, hey! - Oh!
Are you okay?
This one would make for a wonderful double feature
with "Saturday the 14th".
They both have the same kind of sophomoric humor.
And fun creature effects.
"Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment".
This is a found footage movie
in the faux documentary style.
It has title cards, has an end card,
it's separated into acts, almost.
It is about three guys abusing this woman
in sequentially horrible ways.
And is absolutely gruesome.
And really effective, because it's done in a way
where it does feel the closest you'll see
to seeing a snuff movie.
It was made by Satoru Ogura,
who wrote and directed it in 1985.
And the effects are inventive,
but it's not something you can just sit down
with a packet of crisps and eat it,
because you'll be so grossed out.
It's a really interesting movie
that I wouldn't recommend to too many people,
but I will say, the sequels get more and more
and more interesting.
I am absolutely obsessed
by "Guinea Pig 5: Mermaid in a Manhole".
That movie manages to keep the grossness,
but add a really heartfelt story in it.
In the first one, there was absolutely no redemption
for these characters.
But in the later ones, they give the characters
a little bit more layers to them.
But they're still doing the wrong things.
Women still end up dying,
people still end up being tortured,
and even in my favorite moment in "The Manhole",
he thinks he's doing the right thing
by saving this mermaid in the sewer,
but he is effectively taken her out of her home,
and is slowly killing her for the sake of art.
These "Guinea Pig" movies are kind of notorious
as being the precursors to torture porn.
Things like "Hostel", things like that.
And I don't really see that type of movie
coming back again, because I think it was
really surrounding VHS, and the ability to share
horrific images with people,
which you can do at the touch of a button
with the internet now,
but back then, the feeling of having something
that you shouldn't have, a snuff movie,
and passing that around, is really the reason
why there's so many "Guinea Pig" movies,
and that's why also the "Faces of Death" movies
in the western world were so popular.
Spielberg once said to me
I would love to make a really vicious horror movie.
You wouldn't believe some of the dark ideas I have
that would probably challenge Cronenberg
as far as going the distance in shocking stuff.
But I can't do that because of who I am.
That was when he was best known
for "E.T." and "Poltergeist",
and more family friendly stuff.
He felt that that put him in a box
that didn't allow him to go to the other distance.
The most impactful horror films
will always come from some guy
in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of friends
who've made a movie, and it's really cool,
and is a huge success.
As soon as you have a committee involved
in making a horror film, it never works.
It's not a committee.
It's a singular vision.
Too many bones.
When you have one person with one clear vision,
that comes through in the final product.
So it's an important thing that there is a director
that sees it through from start to finish.
The lower the budget, the more creative
a filmmaker can get to realize their vision.
You just have to keep everything in perspective.
We're making movies.
We're doing what we love.
I said I think my ears are gonna explode.
I think that's really an important part
of being a filmmaker.
I wanted to affect something.
And that at the tenacity of the finish.
That's the whole thing.
Most people quit when things get rough.
And they always get rough.
Really the best directors I've ever worked with,
they hire the right people.
And they trust their talent.
When I think about the three great directors
that I've worked with, the ones that come to mind
are John Carpenter, George Romero, and Wes Craven.
They have a bunch of things in common.
They all knew exactly what they wanted.
And all three of them kept a very calm,
very supportive set, a very happy set.
Playing mind games, that's not the way
those three men directed.
Cut.
Prints, thank you.
I would argue that John Carpenter
was probably the most underrated
great American filmmaker ever.
And he's not probably largely viewed that way
by people who should view him that way.
He's certainly very revered by most people
who like horror, but he's much more
than a horror filmmaker.
Cronenberg, because he was headier,
I think got more due, and more acceptance
by the snobbier film community.
The relationship between humanity and physicality
is something that Cronenberg explores a lot,
whether it's "eXitenZ", or "Rabid", or "Shivers".
"The Fly".
He regurgitates on his food, it liquefies,
and then he sucks it back up.
It's a theme that he would come back to a lot
Oh my god.
John Carpenter's biggest influence on 1980s horror
was "Halloween" from 1978.
That really kicked off the slasher boom.
And paved the way for so many copycats after.
His legacy is that the genre was taken seriously,
and he wanted to give the audience,
not just a thrill, but just show how movie making
can be an experience.
♪ Just the two of us
I didn't watch as many horror films
as I should have during the 80s
because I was so busy.
But I remember a lot of the movies I saw in the 70s,
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" being a big one.
I loved that movie.
Tobe was a close friend.
Really upset by the passing of Tobe.
A very sweet man.
Really wonderful guy.
He made the cinematic experience for moviegoers
a lot more brutal I think than they were used to.
The two greatest movies that Tobe Hooper made,
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and "Poltergeist",
were both used against him to say well,
he didn't direct one, and the other one is crap.
And so he struggled his whole life
to become more accepted as a director.
I feel like every movie Wes Craven makes
was like a statement piece, was groundbreaking,
wasn't like oh, here's a horror movie.
It was like, this has changed the face
of what we're watching today.
He was making films and having a blast.
He was very kind of, in the New York intellectual scene.
Night and day different,
were Wes Craven's movies and who he was.
George Romero, for someone who made
such really creepy, disturbing films,
he was such a bear.
Just a cuddly, sweet, delightful presence.
My god.
George was a master, and he was always ahead of his time.
That's what was so remarkable about George's films.
They get better and better with age.
Dario Argento, he was consistently impressive
as a filmmaker, right up to and including "Two Evil Eyes".
What's special about Dario
is his operatic style of filmmaking.
He revels in murder.
He has a fetish for creating
these amazing murder set pieces.
Steward Gordon was a provocateur.
He liked to make movies that really provoked a reaction.
Stewart was the king of the party.
He made sure that everything was big and bold and body.
He has a different personality
with pretty much every movie he does.
"Dagon" has a different personality.
"Dolls" has a different personality.
"Stuck" has a different personality.
"Castle Freak", everything's a little different.
Kathryn Bigelow, in my estimation,
Mary Lambert, they broke the mold a little bit.
They were very bold.
I think they knew they were gonna be able
to find advocacy within the studio system.
I think they had that confidence.
And that confidence radiates from those products.
Fasten your fucking seatbelt!
It was very, very difficult for women directors
to either put together a film themselves,
or to get a job directing any film.
Well come on, baby!
Light my fire.
Now it's opened a lot more.
But we have a lot to ground to make up.
It was bad.
We're not as far along as we should be.
Let's just put it that way.
We have to get to a point
where women are not labeled
as female filmmaker, or like me,
Mexican-Canadian, blah-blah-blah, filmmaker.
Like, you can have all the labels.
My last name's already long enough.
I just want us to be recognized as a good filmmaker,
and it's taken all this time to finally get here.
But it's our responsibility as storytellers
to challenge audiences, and to challenge studios
to accept that.
Welcome to our house!
Puta!
We'll keep working hard.
And we'll keep challenging everybody
that watches our movies to accept it.
The Puttermans finally got themselves
a pet, but they never even had a chance to give it a name.
"TerrorVision".
"TerrorVision" was one of the movies we made
during those amazing three years or so
at Empire Studios in Rome, Italy.
That's when that, you know you conceive something,
you have a great poster,
and then it morphs into something entirely different.
It was originally gonna be a straight up horror movie
that this monster comes out of the TV
and eats the family.
But Ted had this kind of strange dark humor, and-
Whoa!
I just kind of pondered
how to make a monster coming out
of a satellite dish, have some kind of social commentary.
You must heed my warning!
Its appetite is insatiable!
Its curiosity is boundless!
I had to capture this moment of the 80s
about the overwhelming garbage of television.
Channel 69, Pops.
Stanley!
Man, it exploded into this technicolor kind of wildness.
Look out!
To the film's credit, or maybe its detriment,
I don't know, I made these characters
that are sort of really reprehensible.
My parents wanna meet you.
Oh, whoa.
What a drag.
I wanted our monster in "TerrorVision", Hungry Beast,
to be a sympathetic character.
Well, he's just a pet who really couldn't help
that he was hungry.
John Buechler and his crew
were kind of like the Charlie go-to makeup effects people.
John just looked at me like I was completely insane.
Once we found the basic design,
John threw himself into it
and created this character that is just like
the most doofus-y looking monster
that you could imagine.
No!
It was big and heavy and hot inside,
and required five or six puppeteers
just to make him work,
and shipping him over to Italy
must have been just ridiculously expensive.
♪ TerrorVision
That main title theme is just so perfect.
Sets the time period of the movie,
sets the tone of the movie.
We talked to Frank Zappa about doing the score.
Then I talked to The Cramps.
But The Fibonaccis, the quirky quality of their music
was perfect for the main title song.
♪ TerrorVision
My favorite sequence of "TerrorVision"
is the creature is sitting in the big hot tub
watching "Earth Versus Flying Saucers" on TV,
and laughing uproariously as flying saucers
smash into the monuments.
The kids come in and try to kill it.
That little sequence there, to me,
kind of captures the chaos and the humor.
Sis!
I was so pleased that it came out
as well as it did.
And then when it went into the theaters
for its one week run,
it was a fucking disaster.
Nobody came.
The reviews just hated it.
Man, this is the dumbest movie I ever saw!
What a bunch of crud.
But over the years, it's been really satisfying
to see how it became kind of like a
let's get stoned and watch this film,
and that's like kind of what it was intended to be.
I'm really happy that it's reached as many people
as it has.
In "Rats: Notte di Terrore", which is
"Rats: Night of Terror", ragtag band of survivors
after the last apocalypse are searching for food and water
in a no man's land.
They would find evolution has taken
a pretty nasty turn.
This is a really low budget movie,
and it's the first movie where I'm a lead.
It was only a gag.
Listen up.
Gags we don't need.
Any more and I'll blow your fucking brains out.
Get it?
They actually had cast my roommate at the time
to play my role.
Completely different type, American girl.
She's got red hair.
Completely different girl.
The budget was so low, she goes I'm not doing that.
Somehow I guess they heard I would.
Oh my god!
I won't even tell you
what I got paid per week.
That's how low it was.
They were paying you by week.
Not Diana, no!
The script was in Italian.
But I did my role in English.
And then that movie, everyone with the exception
of maybe two people, could speak English.
And then everyone else would be dubbed around it.
You made a bet with me and you lost, Chocolate.
You know it.
Put it on my bill.
Tonight I don't feel like it.
Now here's a fun thing about the set.
It's actually Sergio Leone's
old America from "One Upon a Time in America".
All the saloons, and all the stores they're going in.
It's the same set.
Mere weeks before, De Niro was in town,
and he was everywhere.
You could see him anywhere, and they were doing that.
And then we got to use the set.
Here's where my four-legged friend came from.
Look.
There's a whole nest of the sweet little things.
We don't have any actual rats in the movie.
We have lab mice.
Because only lab mice have the red eyes.
They dyed all of their hair.
It was a different time, a different era.
I wouldn't say that all of them were treated
the way we would do it now,
but we weren't going around
stomping on them, or anything.
And as you see the movie, there's real no CGI.
You can tell we got rubber rats
on the roller, you know?
The movie was so low budget,
they recycled the dead ones
to throw on us in the other scenes.
I've been on some smelly sets before.
But you've never been on a set
that's been housing a garbage can that big
of dead rats.
Suddenly they're gassed, and they die.
And in the most feminine faint in history,
I kind of faint like this.
It was a good beginning.
If you haven't seen the movie before,
pay great attention to the last scene.
And if you have seen the movie before,
here's the hint.
That's a split scene.
And I played both characters.
The terror starts the moment you stop
for "The Hitcher".
It's a straightforward thriller
that grips you and never lets go.
Tobe Hooper used to say horror films
are the new westerns.
Their mythology is all about trying to reconcile
the evil within oneself, the evil within a society,
the evil of a certain act,
with those who want to correct it, fix it,
fight it, avenge it.
Don't you know who he is?
You got the wrong man, Lyle.
The monster in the film is not a guy in a mask,
but he is exactly like Jason, Leatherface, Michael Meyers.
He's simply hitching a ride in the rain.
And this horrific story ensues.
You wanna know what happens to an eyeball
when it gets punctured?
The movie truly only has three characters,
and I love that economy.
It has C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Jason Leigh,
and Rutger Hauer.
He's one of the scariest human beings
on the fucking planet.
His presence fills the screen.
That gun is empty.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah?
It's a film about being paranoid,
and knowing something really bad is happening,
but nobody will believe you.
Jesus!
Oh my god.
He put that there!
To this day, when I'm eating fries,
I always look at the fry that I'm eating.
He's eating, and he gets there, and it's a finger,
and you're like, fuck!
It's a finger!
They've got the girlfriend connected,
chained up between the two trucks.
Do something!
If we shoot him, his foot is gonna come
off that clutch, and that truck is gonna roll!
And he just looks at C. Thomas Howell,
and there's that moment of, is he gonna let her go?
TriStar released "The Hitcher",
and they were a little skittish about the script stuff,
is because in 1984, the last horror movie they released
was "Silent Night Deadly Night".
And that only had a two week run,
and it was protested out of theaters.
So taking a chance on a movie like "The Hitcher",
they saw this script, and they were like
remove the slasher elements.
Figure it out.
"The Hitcher" was in that crossover period
where things were starting to get
a little bit less splattery.
Style, that 80s video style,
was starting to permeate thrillers.
Directed by Robert Harmon,
written by Eric Red,
who also wrote "Near Dark",
which is another example of that stylized
horror movie making.
Where are you from?
Disneyland.
The late great Rutger Hauer.
I could do a complete dissertation
on just how fucking unappreciated he was.
No!
He could have been the head of every horror family ever.
You useless waste.
So good.
Something fantastic in the 1980s
happened where they were like
"Gremlins", "Critters", "Ghoulies".
There are tiny creatures, they are going to take over,
and I'm into it.
"Critters".
They bite.
People kept trashing "Critters"
for being a bad cheap imitation of "Gremlins".
They're not the same movie.
No, the critters are fucking gonna eat you alive, man.
It's attitude with an emphasis on the drama.
I didn't even do nothing.
Boy, you shot her with a slingshot.
It's really just the way Stephen Herek approached it,
and took it seriously.
We want the Krites.
Oh really?
Who are they, some new team?
It acts like a studio movie,
and it's a $2 million little independent.
I love the little country family,
completely innocent of everything.
And boy, Dee Wallace gives it her best.
Get out of my house!
We had so much fun on "Critters".
I loved working with Stephen Herek.
He was so easy to work with.
Always knew what he wanted.
And it was a tough shoot,
because we worked mostly nights.
The creature designs in "Critters"
I remember thinking were really funny when I was a kid.
Little creepy yet adorable balls of spikiness,
and they have really terrifying eyes and teeth,
but that's what made them so fun.
The Chiodo brothers of "Killer Klowns from Outer Space"
fame created the Krites in "Critters".
With "Critters" there is an element where you are scared
because you don't know what's gonna happen.
They just seem in it to destroy things
and kill people.
They didn't have the big critter finished.
That's why in that one scene, you only see his eyes
coming up through the window.
It was hard to stay in the fear
and everything that we had to do
because it was pretty funny.
We would be ready to do this hysterical scene,
and Stephen would go okay, roll them in.
Just roll the little balls
across the set.
I did not have anything to do with the Krite and E.T. scene.
Nothing.
And the fans that are really fans
that are really knowledgeable,
they just get off on all that stuff, and it's great.
I think it's wonderful that directors
throw in all those cross references.
A lot of people make horror movies
just because it's the easiest,
or what they think will be the easiest
stepping stone to a career or a paycheck or something.
But there's a lot of love and craft in that movie
that I really appreciate.
"Manhunter".
"Manhunter"'s based off the novel "Red Dragon"
by Thomas Harris, who also made "Silence of the Lambs",
and just like with "Silence of the Lambs",
this is a movie that critics have to refer to
as a thriller rather than a horror movie
so they're allowed to like it.
The movie is about a killer named the Tooth Fairy
who bites people's faces.
You can't call this a horror movie?
Give a kiss.
William Peterson plays a detective, Will Graham,
who's investigating murders being committed
by this killer, who we later learn is this guy
called Francis Dollarhyde,
and the reason the novel was called "Red Dragon"
is because Dollarhyde worships this painting
called the Red Dragon, and identifies himself
as the Red Dragon.
You will lie awake in fear
of what the Red Dragon will do.
Francis Dollarhyde's played by Tom Noonan
who also played Frankenstein in "The Monster Squad",
and he's a very, very effectively creepy villain.
He's up there with Buffalo Bill
from "Silence of the Lambs", in my opinion.
Put the fucking lotion in the basket!
As a testament to how scary Tom Noonan is,
he can wear pantyhose over half of his face
like he's Howie Mandel trying to blow up a glove
with his nose, and still be scary.
Well, here I am.
This was the very first screen appearance
of Hannibal Lecktor, except this time
he's played by Brian Cox, not Anthony Hopkins.
And Cox as Lecktor is a lot more subdued
than Anthony Hopkins, but he still has
this quiet menace about him.
Would you like to leave me your home phone number?
Even if he seems to be cooperating with you,
he still never really lets you know
what his true intentions are,
but you can be rest assured that they're not good,
and he's smarter than you are.
I know that I'm not smarter than you.
Then how did you catch me?
You had disadvantages.
What disadvantages?
You're insane.
At this point, Michael Mann was famous
for the series Miami Vice,
and this movie uses a lot of the same
color scheme, a lot of the same use of music.
In a way, this could almost be like a really scary
extended episode of Miami Vice,
and I think that kind of ended up overshadowing
the movie a little bit.
Wes Craven, a very groundbreaking filmmaker,
whenever his name was on a film,
I would always either go and see it or rent it.
He definitely had a shaky track record.
But it seemed like he was always looking
to find something that would catch on.
He was always doing these very interesting stories
about how kids were dealing with a lot
in terms of their family dynamics, and things like that,
and we see that especially in the movie "Deadly Friend".
"Deadly Friend".
She can't live without you.
"Deadly Friend" was adapted from a story called "Friend".
They were trying to make this love story.
A little bit of science fiction element,
little bit of action, little bit of horror.
We're pretty close approaching
the way a normal human brain works.
"Deadly Friend" is about a guy named Paul
who is a genius.
He's created this robot friend named BB,
a robot with super strength who thinks for himself,
and has emotions, and feels things.
What could go wrong with that kind of strength?
Well, turns out everything.
I'm side eyeing this robot here,
because that robot's a killer
just waiting for an excuse to kill.
Sam was played by Kristy Swanson,
who we love her as the original Buffy.
Dad just will beat her,
which is terrible.
He yells at her, and then throws her down the stairs.
You whiny little bitch!
Ow!
She dies.
Paul's like, I think I can save her.
You're giving her a robot brain?
Giving her a computer.
It's a battery powered self-contained computer.
So now he has a robot's brain
in a human girl's body, but she's dead,
so he has to hide her, or else she's walking around,
she's a zombie, right?
And then it all goes badly, and I'm glad it goes badly,
because it would be weird if it didn't go badly.
She sort of becomes this very interesting
kind of totem, in a way.
How she's able to right the wrongs
of the way that she's been treated,
the way other people have been treated.
Elvira, played by Ann Ramsey.
She's that gun-toting get off my lawn
times 40 Karen that you could meet, right?
Who's out there?
What are you doing?
It's just me, Ms. Parker!
What is that?
BB!
But we love her.
We love Ann Ramsey from "Throw Mama From the Train",
and from "Goonies".
We love her in that mean scary woman character.
Damn kids.
BB picks up the ball,
and throws it at Elvira's head,
and her whole head explodes.
The whole head goes
That's my favorite kill of the movie.
When they had the movie together,
a studio watched it, and they said, no.
This needs more violence.
It needs to be gory.
Because they're under contract with the studio,
they went back and shot gore scenes.
Then they were told it was too much.
They needed to be trimmed.
So the creativeness is pulled back from Wes Craven.
Another movie where everybody had fun.
But I don't think Wes Craven did.
♪ Rock and roll
"Trick or Treat".
The ultimate rock and roll horror movie.
The perfect mixture of the mythos
behind the heavy metal culture in the 80s.
Just a great misfit in high school story,
which I totally related to.
All right, so "Trick or Treat".
You had Ozzy Osborne, Gene Simmons,
and Skippy from Family Ties.
One of these things is not like the other.
Rockstar Sammi Curr,
victim of a hotel fire.
Dead at age 38.
A rockstar dies, and then this evil something or other
comes back as a rockstar.
I knew that "Trick or Treat" was just candy.
It tastes sweet and then it goes away.
It's a story of Ragman.
He is picked on, he's bullied
by pretty much everybody.
I wanna nail every one of those bastards!
I don't know how, I don't know when,
but I'm gonna nail them.
His hero is Sammi Curr,
who is demonic, dark, in your face.
He ends up killing himself in a ritual,
setting himself on fire.
His soul gets trapped in the acetate demo
that Gene Simmons has.
This is very cool.
And then when you play it backwards,
he comes back from the dead.
You.
Great cameos by Gene,
and then Ozzy as the Bible thumping PMRC minister.
These evil people have just got to be stopped.
And it's just so off the hook.
They were looking at a lot of different rock stars
to play Sammi Curr.
Eddie.
We had a deal.
I didn't wanna be this guy with leather studs.
I was much more interested in the DJ.
It's party time, yeah!
This is the old Nooser coming at ya
right here on this fine, fine Rocktober morning.
It's the sweeping sensation,
like patterned after Wolfman Jack,
who was a DJ at the time.
I just had two or three weeks off between a tour,
and wound up doing it.
Eh, Ragman!
I remember I was so excited to meet him.
I said to him, hey Gene Simmons,
can you do the thing with the tongue?
And he said no, I only do that for girls.
Tony Fields was genuinely scary
playing Sammi Curr.
Hiya, bud.
Boy, he got that rockstar stuff down.
He could dance and sing and move with the guitar
and jump off the stage,
and capable of so much,
and we lost him way too young.
The film script was funnier and darker.
I think what we ended up with was something in the middle.
Charlie Martin Smith was directing for the first time,
"Trick or Treat", that was his first time.
We had a kinship, a nerd-like kinship,
that other directors might not have picked me.
I have to be honest with you.
Keanu Reeves was up for it.
The gore is great, the kills are great.
When he yanks the old lady through the TV,
and she just immediately turns to dust.
Uh, what the shit just happened, dude?
This is insane.
We were blessed to get Kevin Yagher
to do the special effects and the makeup in the film.
It was the first time that I had acted in a movie
with an imaginary monster, and things happening, and stuff.
Oh.
Of course, the amazing soundtrack by Fastway.
♪ Rock and roll
♪ Rockin' on a midnight
♪ Steal your soul
Just such a killer collection of great tunes
that I still listen to to this day.
♪ On a midnight
♪ Steal your soul
We were giddy, it was so good.
We were like, this is good.
If the film was successful when it came out,
it wasn't successful enough for them to do the sequel,
and I'm not still living off of it.
If you think about all the movies that are out there,
it's unimaginable that people still care about this movie.
Un fucking real.
Heavy metal fans stayed true.
Marty Rantzen is still a dork,
but tonight he's getting even.
Vestron Pictures presents "Slaughter High".
April fool's!
"Slaughter High" is about a kid
that gets bullied, and years later at a reunion,
he comes back.
Starts killing.
It's a revenge film.
It's a horrible prank, and a prank that went
horribly wrong for everybody else.
I'm sorry, Marty.
We didn't mean to!
First of all, it was called "April Fool's Day",
and of course, that's like the American "April Fool's Day",
so we had to change the title.
It was meant to be shot in the States,
and there was no budget, so it was all shot in England.
Three directors.
George Dugdale, my husband.
Peter Mackenzie Litten, and Mark Ezra.
They all took different roles.
Peter Litten did the special effects,
so he'd step in and do those scenes.
Mark was more the writer, and George would be
very hands-on as the physical director,
which worked really well.
Good friends.
I've never had that before, but it was interesting.
Carol, my character.
Come on.
She wasn't a very nice person at all.
She was a bit of a tease,
and she thought she was the bees knees.
And she was meant to be an 18-year-old.
I'm sorry.
I was in my 30s at that point.
They were clever in the casting,
because they got people in their late 20s and stuff,
so it didn't look too out of place.
You filthy stinking bastard, Marty!
What do you want from us?
There was a mix of Brit actors,
and then we had about four, five Americans,
so that made it credible.
Simon Scuddamore.
Very intense, and he did a brilliant job.
He made Marty totally come to life.
It was wonderful.
How do you want it?
Please, stop!
No!
And what they did, I don't know why they did it,
it was just like a pack of hyenas, really.
The scene with the bunsen burner.
They did such a good job with that.
No CGI.
All practically done in front of your eyes.
It all sets on fire.
I think it's a fabulous sequence.
It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek play
upon other films that were maybe more serious.
Given the budget, I think it stands up quite well.
People seem to like it, especially in the States
when I go there.
They say, we love it.
I say, what do you like about it?
They say it's so cheesy, we just love it.
Maybe it is a bit cheesy,
but it's cheesy and fun,
and the effects were really well done,
and hopefully the acting's okay.
Look, Manny.
The guy's weird, the story's weird, and-
And what?
And you're weird.
"Class of Nuke 'Em High", like all Troma movies,
was a movie ripped from today's headlines.
There was a nuclear power plant being built
about a quarter of a mile away from the United States'
most populous city, namely New York City.
And right next to where I lived,
so that gave me the idea of let's talk about that.
But sir, if we could just shut down for 48 hours-
Shut down?
They'll investigate us.
The EPA, the NRC.
"Class of Nuke 'Em High" is like a Cuisinart of genres.
People really enjoyed the mixture of humor and horror,
and social satire, and politics, and violence.
It's an excellent film.
It's very entertaining.
It's got something to say about pollution and radiation.
We have found no connection
between that unfortunate student
and this facility.
I almost killed one of my kids in it.
That was kinda fun.
We had to have a motorcycle run into a bake sale
with a lot of women with cakes,
and I put my wife and kid right in the center of it,
so that if anybody got hurt, you know, my fault.
Nothing happened, but they came pretty close.
Well, the whole idea of blowing up your school,
I always loved that.
And I think that was one of the reasons
it was successful.
We literally destroyed a school.
Once it got into theaters,
we made over 100 prints.
A video cassette company called Media Home Entertainment,
they sold over 500,000 video cassettes
around 200 bucks for a video cassette.
You know, "Class of Nuke 'Em High"
is still very popular with fans.
Nostalgic, too.
We've got all these young people
who are now in their 50s
who still like "Class of Nuke 'Em High".
They want to see the future, but now.
It's a good movie.
It's so good that there's "Subhumanoid Meltdown:
"Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 2",
"The Good the Bad and the Subhumanoid:
"Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 3".
There are five of them.
Tromaville High School will be
temporarily closed for remodeling.
All right!
This is actually based on a true story.
"The Zero Boys".
Dawn of a new breed of heroes.
This really did happen upstate California.
There was a group of people that would go paintballing,
and there was a maniac that would kill them.
Somebody said I'm gonna write a movie about this, and did.
In the movie, there's a group, and they're called
the Zero Boys, because they never, ever, ever, ever win.
But this one time, they won.
Do it.
The Zero Boys are the best!
Fucking assholes.
And they won my character.
And so she's very unhappy about that.
I am so thrilled to be with the champions.
Go on.
Show me what makes the Zero Boys tick.
So they get up there, and all of a sudden
something is wrong.
Jamie.
It was kind of more getting into the torture thing,
like really kind of sick and weird.
Directed by Nico Mastorakis,
who was this Greek guy who loved action exploitation horror.
And Nico just delivers this powerhouse of action movie
mixed with horror.
The running and the hanging by our feet
and all that other kind of stuff,
a lot of inventiveness with weapons, and crossbows,
and things like that.
And this movie is brilliantly photographed
by Steve Shaw.
Every shot of that movie is almost like a painting,
especially when they're out in the wilderness.
It was a lot of running around in the woods,
that's for sure.
Everybody camped together and went
we have a serious problem here.
What are we going to do?
And did it as a group.
You have to get engaged with the characters,
and care about them, or relate to them,
or have an opinion about them.
If you don't know who these people are
on an intimate level, then you don't care.
We wanna care.
My favorite kill in "The Zero Boys",
he falls into this pit of spikes,
and then you can't get out.
But it was a good kill.
Joe Estevez played the killer,
and he looks exactly like Martin Sheen.
Probably scarier, because he has more experience
doing these kinds of things.
It was Hans Zimmer's first American score.
Frank Darabont was on the crew.
I remember he was telling us all about
how he had a story that he bought
from Stephen King for a dollar,
and it was "Shawshank Redemption".
"The Zero Boys" is under the radar because it always was.
It was always an underground thing.
What's scary about "The Zero Boys"
is you could be doing something that you love to do,
and be in mortal danger.
There's no place safe.
My real name is George Tani.
growing up, I was very impressed
with Ray Harry Haroldon movies.
"Jason and the Argonauts".
My dad took me to the theater.
He said it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be a fighting movie.
It's like a skeleton, you know, you're gonna like it.
And I said oh, that's great.
I have been watching "Godzilla", and all those,
tojo and kaiju films.
When I saw "Howling".
The first time I saw the man turned into the werewolf,
changing right in front of my eye,
I was like, this is it.
And then you see more coming up
from Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin.
And then Dick Smith's "Altered States".
The images of that really made me decide
this is the way to go.
When I went to New York studying in school
of visual arts, right in the beginning of punk movement.
♪ God save the queen
I saw the art side of it.
Punk music really gave me the art,
okay, we can do a lot more on edge.
I can perform something shocking to the people.
"Nightmare 4", my effect was Debbie's roach,
the girl that hates the cockroach,
and then she becomes a cockroach,
and then crushed by Freddie.
That's like Kafka, you know?
And this is a surreal sequence.
The fake body, we take it off
so she can put her head out,
and fake arm, it breaks.
It's old trick, but the images,
and what happening, really creep them out.
Everybody is like really, ugh!
That's gross!
I succeeded the illusion.
I'm very proud of that show.
It was Brian Yuzna.
We were really creating the scene together.
Especially the chanting sequence.
It's a real grotesque orgy.
I love Dali.
Dali is the one that made me really into art.
My crew was all inside, you know?
Inside of that creature.
They can move.
That's why you don't have to have expensive
mechanical movement, you know?
And the people can move organically.
I put in my 200, 300% on it.
So my sleeping time is really maybe average
of two hours a day, or something,
during the show.
There was not much budget, so I just have to
sculpt everything myself, pretty much.
And fast.
Making things for "Bride of Re-Animator",
we didn't have enough time to shoot everything
that we wanted to do.
It was very rushed.
Herbert West, he does a bunch of experiments,
so I can do so many different idea.
The design comes in as outrageous as possible.
You stupid biped!
Vietnam veteran, Noble Craig, is an actor
who is amputee.
I've been working with him since "Poltergeist II".
The vomit creature, crawl across the room,
that is Craig.
And then "Big Trouble in Little China",
sewer creature, the creature comes out from a tunnel,
eats the guy, and then comes back, right?
That's it.
It took three months to make it.
That too, Noble Craig is inside there
in special makeup effects.
I think that is one of the evolutional happenings
happened in film industry.
When I was in Japan, first I call myself Toshusi Mad,
and then I wanted to have something
that is really crazy.
Mad is something that is much more crazier than crazy,
I think, you know what I mean?
More power with it.
And then I remember the blues singer
named Screaming Jay Hawkins.
If I use Screaming Mad George.
That sounds good.
Screaming Mad George is my artist name.
"Witchboard".
"Witchboard" is the reason I will not allow
a Ouija board in my house to this day.
Don't come into my house with a Ouija board.
All I ever wanted to do was figure out
where I could get a Ouija board.
I wanna try this thing out.
Can you hear me?
That movie came out right at the right time
for my puberty.
Tawny Kitaen, the quintessential wow.
I had already seen her in "Bachelor Party".
I'd seen her in all the fucking Whitesnake videos
at that point.
♪ Well here I go again on my own ♪
Doing flips on the cars, and splits and things.
It was very impressive.
I'd really like to try this.
"Witchboard" is about somebody
who becomes obsessed with the Ouija board.
David, do you remember me?
A Ouija board that then opens the portal of hell
to a demon.
Ooh, that's a little spooky.
It's a little stupid.
It's a lot stupid.
The visceral horror and gore that starts to happen
once the horror is unleashed in "Witchboard".
It really scared the crap out of me
in a really fun way.
It's the very first film that we got
from Kevin Tenney.
This was a precursor to "Night of the Demons".
He starts to frighten and terrorize her,
gradually breaking down her resistance.
And once that's done, he's able to possess her.
The thing that Kevin Tenney brought to the table
that set him apart from other directors I've worked with
was his sense of humor and his passion for horror.
Ouija board was copyrighted
so that he couldn't call his movie "Ouija Board",
so he changed it to "Witchboard".
It's pronounced Ouija, not Ouij-i.
It comes from the French and German words for yes.
Oui and ja.
Ouija.
It was great working with the late great Tawny Kitaen.
You must be Linda.
She was fun to act with.
She had a little brown dog
that she brought on the set all the time.
Jim, this is Zarabeth.
The best medium in northern California.
When we did that seance scene,
every time they'd say action,
and I'd go like, whoo.
Pretend like the boy was in my body.
I'd look over at her and she'd be like,,
she'd start laughing, and then we all start laughing.
And nobody could ever pull it together.
And I was like, I can't do this!
It was so goofy.
But with the scary music, when we finally got a take,
it worked, you know they put a weird effect
on my voice or something like that.
She hurt me.
She won't talk to me anymore.
Zarabeth to me is definitely a highlight of "Witchboard".
Just some more psychic humor.
Come on Brandy, let's hit the musky dusk.
Her death is so gnarly, too.
They'd say action, and then I'd get to
pretend like I land on the sundial,
and I had got one of those blood pills in my mouth,
and I did get to go like,
and like split out blood,
which I adored.
They had taped the top of the sundial to my back
so I ran down the set,
pretending like I was a shark.
I see danger ahead.
For Linda?
For you.
If you miss my house.
On "Witchboard", I had so much fun laughing.
It's coming up on the right!
A little more psychic humor, huh?
With tears and belly laughs everyday.
Tawny Kitaen.
When I saw that she died,
I felt loss, and sadness.
She was a blast, and funny, and smart,
and lovely, and it's weird for me to even think
that she's not around.
It's bizarre to me.
"Blood Rage", also known as "Slasher",
and "Nightmare at Shadow Woods".
I mean it's like, make up your minds,
will you people?
There's so few Thanksgiving horror movies,
that I feel like this has kind of had a resurgence
in recent years, because everybody wants
a horror movie to watch on the holidays.
Twin boys, one crazy, one not.
There's a mix-up.
One gets put in an asylum.
One's out loose.
Nobody in the movie knows.
Everyone in the audience knows.
Here's to the new family.
"Blood Rage" is about a Thanksgiving meal
that just goes completely awash in blood.
I'm not a fan of horror.
When I got "Blood Rage", it was a new
genre for me completely.
I went to the video store, and went to the horror section.
I literally had to go and investigate it.
What, are you gonna try and shoot me again, Todd?
It's twins.
You know?
So I'm going, are they kidding?
Do they know what they're getting involved with?
That's a chore for most people in any film,
let alone on a low budget.
I broke it down, Stanislavski, building a character.
The psychopath, you know?
And then the other guy was closer to what I usually played,
the sort of hate yourself, low esteem,
I'd played a couple of prisoners,
and stuff like that, and mixed up kids.
Very intense.
"Blood Rage" operates in a world
where it's the family Thanksgiving and murder.
Looks like you're gonna get a chance
to meet the rest of the family.
My psychotic brother just escaped.
It's the turkey and killing people.
It's rich.
I'd say that this big bird is ready for carving.
Why does this make me so crazy?
Time to eat, let's all sit down.
It's time for dinner.
Look what the cat brought in!
Louise Lasser gives 110% in that movie.
She's incredible.
She was, god bless her, a force of nature.
Mary Hartman was seminal TV, man.
That was hot stuff.
You know, murder with no reason, or no motive,
I mean really senseless, when you think about it.
Do you think this is too spicy, or not spicy enough?
She set the tone for "Nightmare Mom".
She creates the world for the film
Oh please.
Please don't do this to me.
She had that voice, she would just
get into these states.
She was transformed.
Come give mommy a kiss.
That scene around the refrigerator?
I mean, come on.
This is a woman who's freaking out over food.
And it's so over the top.
I've been calling you and calling you!
Why didn't you answer the phone?
Todd's here!
And he's killing again!
She was bringing it.
She got an applause on the set,
and I've only been around that a few times.
It's bananas.
It's a movie where no one in the movie
is making the same movie as anyone else in the movie.
They're all singing in their own key,
and the movie's all the better for it.
It's unhinged, it's delightful.
Shooting a melodrama like "Blood Rage"
is a whole different thing.
You can tear up the furniture.
You can do crazy stuff you just don't normally get to do.
It's horror, low budget horror.
But this had a building audience
and a genre that had legs.
It was like heavy metal, man.
This ain't going away.
This is gonna be a decades long thing.
Get used to it.
It's not cranberry sauce, Artie.
It's not cranberry sauce.
They have opened "The Gate".
Pray it's not too late.
One of the greatest things about "The Gate"
is that for a lot of kids at that time,
it became their gateway horror movie,
because it felt like a kids movie
that didn't play by the kids movies rules.
Already filled it in.
Whoa, whoa!
"The Gate" is about a group of kids
that dig a hole in their backyard,
and find demons.
Hi.
Hey.
It's a PG-13 horror film.
I always saw it as a film
that the whole family could watch,
that adults could be sort of nostalgic
about growing up, and kids could find an adventure in it.
Sacrifices.
We had so much fun making that movie,
even though it was very difficult.
Money was short.
All those people put their heart into it.
The actors, the writers, the special effects people.
We were able to pull the most out of everybody.
The album, backwards!
Tells you how to close the gate.
It's like the first heavy metal horror movie for kids.
They got their lyrics from this thing
called the Dark Book.
It's like the Bible for demons.
So you have somebody like Tibor,
who had a background working
in heavy metal music videos
coming in and being able to infuse that
into this kids movie is pretty astounding.
It's always much scarier when horror
comes into the normal world.
Stephen Dorff was just so cool to me
when I was a kid.
It seemed like something that could happen to me.
I could look down in my backyard
and I was always sure there was the potential
for a portal, monsters.
I always feel kids can make great actors
if you can key into them, you treat them like adults.
When they're in the right frame of mind,
you can do amazing things,
and get very real performances.
We have to close the gate.
We have to go to the hole and do it right.
You mean you guys were serious about that demon stuff?
The main theme of "The Gate" to me
is sibling relationships and friendship
to overcome insurmountable odds.
You need your friends.
I think of all the effects that they were
able to do in that movie courtesy of Randall William Cook.
I was already reading Fangoria
and I was into the effect part of it,
like the technical part of horror filmmaking.
I knew that we would have to use an encyclopedia of effects.
There was no one solution to all that stuff.
And thank goodness that Randy was so good
at all of those things.
When the workman falls over and breaks into the minions,
that to me is like a seminal important moment
in the movie where you go wow.
Even I go wow.
But it is still cool as hell to watch that sequence,
and I wish we got more movies
that tried to do stuff like that more these days.
Like, I don't care if it looks a little dated.
I don't.
Because it's still magic to me.
It's like a bespoke movie.
It's handmade.
It's kind of rough around the edges that way.
That's what draws people to it.
They can see the love that went into it.
"Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" is the story
of a band called The Tritons, led by Thor,
who was a very popular wrestler, rock and roller.
He was very popular up in Canada.
So this band comes to this tiny little farmhouse
on the outskirts of Toronto
to record their new album.
It's kind of like a vacation.
I like it.
You would.
Come on you two.
Don't start.
It turns out that they are in a house
that had been possessed.
And one by one, they start being killed off
by these demos.
Kind of this quirky movie
directed by John Fasano.
It's hard to call these things demons.
They're puppets.
I can destroy and destruct-
Demons that are rejects from Fraggle Rock.
We talked so much about the glorious age
of practical effects of the 80s,
but sometimes, they were not so glorious.
My favorite monster effect
in "Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" is one that I did.
The chicken monster.
That was a really fun project to work on.
And then I got to puppeteer it.
Jon Thor is a sweetheart.
He's always so positive.
He was up for anything.
♪ You get me any day
♪ Energy
It was November, and we had that wind
coming off of Lake Ontario,
hitting you like a brick wall.
This house that we were shooting in,
which had no electricity, had no hot water,
and they're in a shower, buck naked in this shower,
freezing to death.
I mean, that water was ice cold.
But the ending is not to be missed.
I walked onto set, and I saw Jon standing there
in this little gold speedo, and codpiece,
and this gold lame cape.
And at one point, I looked over,
and I could see his cape was starting
to spark and catch fire.
Oh my god, that would have been
just the icing on the cake for sure.
Of course, you gotta love the big devil at the end.
It was a disaster.
Nice effect, Randy.
It weighed 50 pounds at least.
And it was so unwieldy.
It was just a mess.
But of course that's the scene that everybody
loves the most in that movie, because it's so outrageous.
Like you have to see this to believe it.
"Jaws" follows in a line of horror films
where nature is out to kill you.
"Jaws: The Revenge".
It's just the idea that meeting a shark
face to face in the water
is more likely than finding Jason Voorhees in the water.
The Jaws sequels were never like the first movie,
and so anytime they sequelize something,
it was like, oh god, what are they gonna do?
Lorraine Gary, who once again stars
as Chief Brody's wife, now a widow,
she travels to the Bahamas,
and what do you know?
That goddam shark is still after her.
And she's convinced that the shark
is following her family,
and she seems to have some telepathic link
with the shark.
It's such a far cry from Spielberg's original.
Just like the idea of a shark being a slasher movie
villain that's gonna follow these people
from Amity Island to the Bahamas.
It has a grudge against the Brody family.
It's just absolutely ridiculous.
- Their family- - What shark is this?
A friend of the other shark.
Is this like a cousin, a nephew?
You got it.
They just
put that movie together, really quick.
They cast all of us before they even made
the arrangements with the special effects guys.
They kind of did them almost at the last minute,
and they were like, wait a minute.
We can't do this, what you wrote in the script.
We can do something like this,
but we can't do that.
So they had to rewrite the scripts.
I got a script that I thought
oh, this is a pretty good script, you know?
I believe it, I play this guy.
Everything this guy does makes sense.
This is not gonna be stupid.
It's gonna be great.
About three days before we started shooting,
I get a new script
that accommodates all the technical stuff
that can be done.
For me, was like, oh god.
I couldn't make sense of it,
so I was pissed off all the time.
We were like that, you just try not to make it unbelievable
and it's hard.
I didn't know sharks sound like that.
Jesus Christ!
What's great about it is Christmas.
Who saw that coming?
Like, "Jaws 4: The Revenge", Christmas Jaws.
♪ The first noel
♪ The angels
We blew through most of the acting
in three weeks in that movie.
I was on that movie for five months.
So there was a lot of sitting out in the ocean.
We spent months sitting doing nothing
because the shark didn't work.
We were shooting this one scene,
and it was in a little, little tiny rowboat.
The whole boat goes down.
The battery pack that powers the camera
is encased in plastic, but it might leak.
So as soon as that becomes submerged,
this hand grabs me by the shirt
with one hand, yanks me out of the boat.
It was Michael Caine.
Get the fuck out of that boat!
I mean, I don't know that I would have been electrocuted,
but that's what he was thinking.
So he just acted like that.
Hang onto your socks, lads.
Michael Caine saved my life.
Oh shit!
Even if you kill them,
they're still deadly.
"Creepozoids".
Fun movie, little TNA
with a wonderful director, David DeCoteau,
who remains one of my closest friends.
"Creepozoids" is a very, very, very low budget alien.
It was really fun, because we did it in,
which then, was really quick, seven days.
This place may not have all the comforts of civilization.
Civilization doesn't have all the comforts
of civilization anymore.
That's just my point.
There's this horrible thing
out after us that was not from this earth,
and it's killing us one by one.
When you are doing low budget things,
the monsters are usually very fragile.
You had to be very careful of these monsters.
So you're battling, but holding back too,
because you could break them.
My mom came to set,
and both of us are afraid of rats.
So what do they have?
These huge rats.
It didn't look bad, that baby mutant,
but it was kind of silly.
It was a fun adventure, because that was the first time
I really got to fight, and be like, no makeup,
and a soldier.
I did, in "Creepozoids", hae to battle a stuntperson,
which was interesting, because they go all out
I'm like oh, I'm gonna get killed.
I'm gonna get hurt.
Linnea and I go back to a movie I made
1000 years before that, which is hard to believe,
called "Fairytales", and before that,
a movie called "Auditions".
It became apparent that most
of the female applicants were non-professionals.
The whole idea was they would come in,
sign a release, get paid I think $10,
because we made it clear that their audition
was gonna be used in the movie.
And the girls had to take their tops off,
because they had to be kind of sexy
fairy godmother, Cinderella.
I forget the story.
Many years later, suddenly she's back
as a more mature still very young woman
in the lead of "Creepozoids".
When I did "Creepozoids", this one girl
would not do a topless scene.
She was such a prude, I thought.
And she was doing all this backstory on herself,
like who is my mother, who is my father.
On a $60,000 film.
But she went on to big things.
She became a porn star.
And I was like, wait a minute.
You wouldn't take off your top.
Now you're a porn star.
Let's not turn this into a slumber party, okay?
"Zombie Nightmare" is the story of a young man
who is murdered, run over with a car
by these bunch of teenagers.
His mother goes to a voodoo woman
to bring him back to life
to take revenge on these kids,
these spoiled brats.
See look, I told you.
There's nobody here.
At the same time, there are two detectives
working to try to figure out
who's killing these kids.
Let's not have any more high school kids
turn up dead.
Understand?
The script was actually much better
than the final film, that John Fasano wrote, by the way.
It was about racial tensions, also.
Pretty young thing has just walked
into the wrong neighborhood.
I do believe you're right, Mr. Barnes.
Hey, don't be so uptight-
I went to Montreal with Adam West.
It was surreal.
It was like, I can't believe this.
I'm acting in a monster movie
with my childhood hero.
Come on, Frank.
I'll buy you a drink.
Jon Thor, he actually replaced
the original zombie actor in "Zombie Nightmare".
We actually filmed the end of the movie first
so the zombie was still played by Peewee, the stuntman.
And he's big guy.
I'm the young detective, and I arrive at this garage,
and I get there just in time to see
the zombie kill Tia Carrere.
Right?
Police!
Hands in the air!
He knocks the gun aside,
and picks me up by the throat,
and then throws me onto a car.
It's my first movie.
I'm fighting a monster.
This is what I wanted my whole life, right?
Mystery Science Theater discovering "Zombie Nightmare"
definitely saved that movie from disappearing forever.
It's called "Zombie Nightmare",
and it stars Adam West and ...
There's a scene when one of the zombie characters
is essentially dying.
His mouth is open, and his eyes have sunken back,
and there's all of this mist coming out of him.
At the time I thought, oh wow.
That really looks good.
Maybe this is gonna be good.
I had hope, anyway.
Kill me!
Kill me, Frank!
Frank!
"The Video Dead".
I love "Video Dead", because it does something different
with the zombie genre.
We're given this weird nightmarish suburbia,
where these zombies are killing people,
but they all have a story.
They try to live.
Like, they try to adapt.
You have this haunted TV that gets delivered.
And initially it goes to a writer
in the opening of the film,
who's played by Michael St. Michaels,
who would eventually go on to become
the Greasy Strangler.
The TV somehow is a portal for this zombie movie,
but also real zombies as well.
That's the first movie I've ever died twice in,
and one time I killed me.
When I shot it, I was the first 20 minutes of the film.
The distributor didn't want that,
so they took out a bunch of my scenes.
The hardest thing I did in "The Video Dead"
was being dead.
That scene where they open the door.
We had to do that two or three times
because I could not stop shivering.
Holy shit!
A few days later, they called me up
and said would I be interested
in being in the movie some more?
I came back as Jack the Zombie.
The actor who originally played Jack the Zombie had died.
I don't know how or why,
so they had a vacancy, and I was
the right height and weight.
All those zombies had personality.
They weren't just eating brains
for the sake of eating brains.
They were going places.
They were doing things.
Those are some of the best zombies we have
of the entire 1980s decade.
The bride zombie, she's doing all these domestic things.
And then you have the rockabilly Flock of Seagulls zombie,
who's kind of like the ladies man of the zombies.
My favorite scene is when I'm the way too cool zombie.
Yes, I like you, you know?
I could tell I really creeped her out.
I really enjoyed working with Robert Scott.
He really didn't want anybody to know
that that film had only cost $35,000.
It was shot on video, transferred to film,
and then transferred back to video again.
It was generating a nice amount of money here and there,
prior to Avco Embassy going bankrupt.
People were impressed that I was in it.
I didn't have to pay for video rentals
in a couple video stores.
This bar I hung out at kept me drunk
for about six months, because I brought in
a copy of the thing and showed it at the bar.
People look at that film, and they wonder
whatever happened to that guy.
And now they get their answer in "The Greasy Strangler".
"Slumber Party Massacre II".
If you go, don't go all the way.
Oh god, anybody got any tranqs?
A lot of us straight boys
used to wonder in deep thought
about what must be going on
when girls are having a slumber party.
You look like a big chicken.
Bawk, bawk, bawk!
I love the "Slumber Party Massacre" series.
They're all written and directed by women,
and that shows in the content of the film.
One of the cool things about "Slumber Party Massacre 1"
is that it's really satirizing the slasher genre
at a time when the conversation around
whether or not slasher films were feminist.
But "Slumber Party Massacre 2" takes that and runs with it.
Come on baby!
We gonna rock and roll!
"Slumber Party Massacre 2" is actually a meta film.
A comment on those kinds of slasher movies,
at the same time that it is one.
Plus, it's a musical.
♪ I love to jam it to the floor ♪
♪ Let its wild parts roar
I was working for Roger Corman,
and I said Roger, I'd really like to direct something,
and he said, okay.
I have something you can direct immediately.
He said "Slumber Party Massacre II".
We have to make it, because I've sold all the rights to it.
"Slumber Party Massacre II" is about some girls
who get away for a slumber party at a cottage,
and it's interrupted by a musical icon serial killer,
who is going to sing and kill them
with his crazy guitar.
Yoo-hoo!
I'm home!
What could be more evil
than a weaponized electric guitar?
To drill poor innocent victims' heads in?
I couldn't think of anything that represented
the phallic nature of rock music
any better than a guitar that had a drill on the end.
Atanas Ilitch plays the driller killer.
And this is Atanas Ilitch's only album.
If you look, he's holding a cat on the back.
He was full of lots of enthusiasm and ideas,
and I didn't have a choreographer,
so he and I had to make up his "Let's Buzz" dance together,
and the chorus was
♪ Let's buzz
He's out there.
♪ Let's buzz
It was a sexy song.
My favorite two things is the dead chicken
that jumps out of the refrigerator
onto Crystal Bernard's chest,
and spews weird liquid out of its cut neck.
The other one is they're driving away,
and the Driller Killer, of course, is in the backseat,
and he drills the kid who's driving through the seat.
It sold a tremendous amount of video cassettes
which was what Roger wanted to sell at that point.
He said it made over $6 million
on a $390,000 budget.
It actually got banned in the UK.
They wrote a letter to Roger
saying you can't show this film in the UK
because it's a particularly virulent combination
of sex and violence.
I wish I had a copy of that letter.
They sounded extremely offended.
The way she broken my heart,
it made me cry,
so don't you know she had to die.
The 80s, like any other film decade,
was about transition.
I think that there was forward motion in a lot of fronts,
and there was backward motion in a lot of fronts.
Move lady, or I'm gonna blow off
your old man's 'acho bizeezhiis!
The 80s was before we were PC.
Gay people, black people, Asian people,
in the 80s movies were always the butt of the joke.
And we just dealt with it.
We were just used to it.
Urban stereotypes of black people, Asian stereotypes.
And yes, they were harmful,
but we weren't as aware that they were harmful,
because we just had not awakened ourselves yet.
No!
I think stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason,
because there's a lot of truth in them.
But I also think that the 80s is more complicated
and messier than just a reductive,
the black guy dies first rule.
I look back at Romero, "Night of the Living Dead",
a black leading man.
Very bold move on his part.
He wasn't there as a symbol of a black man.
He was there just as a man.
What people don't give Romero enough credit for
is that in his zombie trilogy, Romero's always
putting the underdog at the front.
Get out of the way, bitch,
or I'll go right through you with this.
We're getting to make this a habit, man.
"Night of the Comet", we had a Mexican man
as the male lead, which, because it's Los Angeles,
we didn't think anything of that,
but everybody else was like, whoa!
Jeez!
There goes the neighborhood!
In those days, it was defiant to cast a Latino.
I would be very happy when I would watch
a horror movie back then, and see
the kind of diversity that did show up.
Want one?
Because representation is such a new idea,
because sometimes you don't know what you don't have,
until you start to get it,
and then you're like, oh.
We didn't have this before.
Oh, look at that face.
Okay do the other one.
I'm from a Filipino family,
and our culture was never represented.
Unfortunately, even today, we're very limited.
Looking back on the way casting was in the 80s,
I know it can be easy to be upset at the past,
but it was of its time,
and it was kind of rough.
No!
In the rare instances where you do see yourself
represented onscreen, or something that is even
closely akin to you, and it's shown in a negative way,
or there's violence being done to this person,
it weighs on you.
I feel like we can learn from our mistakes,
but not beat ourselves up about it,
and not feel like we have to change the edit.
I don't think we need to throw away
representation that isn't perfect,
and in the 1980s, representation was not perfect.
It's important to remember what the social context is
when something's made.
We should be talking about our history.
There's a reason why this isn't okay now,
and was happening then.
Context, context, context is what's important
when it comes to these films.
Doesn't it bother you that he's a fag?
Come on-
Tell me, Billy.
Are you a fag?
We need to talk about more than just the word.
We need to talk about what the word was doing there,
and who put it on that page.
Every filmmaker, their upbringing
influences their storytelling.
With that in mind, I began to make my own films,
and I began to write my own films,
and I began to create opportunity,
not only for myself, but for everyone else.
What do you make of it, Mark?
Beats me, Chief.
Seems like the work of pathological weirdos.
Representation being a double-edged sword.
I'm really getting scared.
I can't take back any movies I did,
and I don't want to.
I represent as far as I can what I look like
in the group of people I come from,
but I never pretended, and I don't say
I'm speaking for everybody.
I just have my little lane,
and I try to stick to my lane.
When you look at horror of the late 1970s,
early 1980s, we start to see
actual queer representation trickle in.
We see gay guys kicking ass in films like "Siege",
and "Savage Weekend".
That was getting way more normalized in the 70s,
and then when AIDS hit, they all got shoved
back in the closet pretty hard.
Suddenly, there is very much no longer an interest
in having queer characters normalized in those films.
It was a big elephant in the room,
and I think a lot of horror filmmakers
didn't want to bother navigating that.
It's part of the evolutionary process of horror.
For me, like it was such an educational process
to be able to go back and look at how
we've changed, and how our dialogue,
and how our discussion of these movies has changed.
Oh god, she's a boy.
It's hard to compare the 1980s
and representation in horror to what we have today.
Because what we have is a conversation happening
that's asking for what we want our future to look like.
I look at everything that happens in the past
as opportunities to do much, much better in the future.
It was once said to me that representation is a journey,
not a destination.
So to me, representation in the 80s
is a work in progress.
Representation now is a work in progress.
There's forward movement, and there's backward movement,
but you can't snapshot it and say this is what it was.
Because I think it's a more complicated
messier picture than that.
"Return of the Living Dead: Part II".
Just when you thought it was safe to be dead.
I love a good zany horror movie.
Zombie content right now is very serious.
It's all about society and humanity,
and what does humanity mean.
This movie, it's fun to watch zombies
just be ridiculous.
"Return of the Living Dead: Part 1"
is truly a dark comedy.
You're laughing at the situations
the kids get themselves into,
and "Part II" kind of went for the jokes.
It's less of a sequel, and more just kind of
a goofier remake of the first one.
"Return of the Living Dead II" shows that
even if you die in the first movie,
you can still come back for the sequel.
Not bad.
Nice bit of rump in her time, huh?
James Karen and Tom Matthews from the first movie
come back for this one.
They're kind of filling the same role,
and basically have the same arc as the first one,
so they sort of are playing the same characters.
We've been here before!
It's like a dream, this whole thing!
You, me!
"Return of the Living Dead" was a huge hit in Japan,
and they said if you can have Jimmy Karen
and Tom Matthews come back, we'd give you
a little bit more money.
So that's how Jimmy and I got involved
back in it again, was because of the Japanese.
Jimmy Karen, lot of people on the East Coast
call him the Pathmark man.
March rolls in with hundreds of price reductions
in this new Pathmark circular.
So he would give weekly specials every week
for 30 years.
24 hours a day, you'll save
with one stop shopping at Pathmark.
He was so infectious on the set.
Raised everybody's game up.
You laugh at the situations we get ourselves into.
You can't believe the shit that's going on.
Are you fucking kidding?
That's insane.
That's what you're responding to.
We're acting it for real, man.
It's the dead!
They've come back to life!
The dead?
Dead, dead what?
People!
We need your car!
Well it sounds to me like you need a hearse.
I had an issue with Jimmy Karen
eating brains, actually,
because the director wanted me to eat frickin' brains,
and I was like, that was just so over the line, I thought.
I got really upset about that on the set.
I had issues with him, Ken Wiederhorn.
It's like he lost a bet and had to do the movie.
Hemdale made him do it to do other movies
that he wanted to do.
It's a sad story of Ken Wiederhorn and his career.
He came right out of the gate with "Shock Waves",
he had "Dark Tower" that he wrote
that was completely butchered.
"Meatballs II" was never a "Meatballs" movie.
It was a movie that he made,
and the company was like, we need a sequel.
And they retitled it.
And this happens again.
I mean, Ken has the script,
and it's not really a zombie comedy,
but they want to make a "Return of the Living Dead II".
He just really wasn't interested
in doing the movie, but he did it
Oh, fuck this!
The strengths of "Part II" that people really enjoy,
I think the fact that the main character was a kid,
so they have an emotional connection to the movie.
Brains!
I've never heard anyone say
that they've hated "Part II",
except for me.
This is big fucking trouble!
I've changed my mind since then.
You've got to give the devil his due!
"Sorority Babes".
"Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama"
is about these kids that think, okay,
we're gonna break into a mall, in the bowling alley,
and steal a trophy.
Come on, man!
I'm working on it.
Will you cool your jets?
Things turn out really bad,
because they awaken this imp.
Such a sour face!
Stop it, you little prick!
Very funny imp, but very menacing,
and does bad things.
Have a nice trip!
See you next fall!
I crack me up!
It's that story of the monkey's paw.
Be careful what you wish for.
Gold!
Lots of it!
Then gold it is!
This isn't gold!
These people make these wishes,
and they go so bad, it's not even funny.
Oh perfect form!
Lovely form!
Now I come along, and my name is Spider in it,
and I save the day.
When I got the script, it wasn't called
"Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl O' Rama",
it was called "The Imp".
We had no idea what the imp would be like.
We didn't know what it would sound like,
we didn't know what it would look like,
because no one was there.
We just had to pretend we were looking at something.
We had no idea it would be a funny voice.
Uncle Imp is gonna get ya!
Fun, fun, fun!
Dukey Flyswatter was in a band
called The Haunted Garage.
He was a great guy and everything, to work with.
No, that's his real name.
I don't know what his real name is.
It's probably Howard, or something like that.
Would I lie to you?
"The Serpent and the Rainbow".
When I think of the movies that Wes Craven created
that really moved me and challenged me as a viewer,
"Serpent and the Rainbow" is definitely at the top
of that list.
I love "The Serpent and the Rainbow".
They have this dust that you can put into people's faces
and they become a zombie.
So you could bury them, they could come alive again.
It is Wes Craven's take on the zombie film.
Everybody was kind of trying to chase
what George Romero did with "Night of the Living Dead".
It wasn't until "Night of the Living Dead"
that people even started talking about ghouls as zombies.
Zombies were Caribbean.
Zombies were in "I Walked With a Zombie",
you know, "White Zombie".
That was kind of zombies.
But now, zombie became synonymous with living dead people.
The whole meaning of the word got screwed up.
Wes Craven is inviting us
to learn the history of these monsters
that we're fascinated with.
This comes from him being an academic.
He goes back to the root of the zombie,
and he goes back to Haitian folklore.
It's very much about the idea of wealthy white people
trying to steal cultural heritage
away from Haitians.
Now, if you don't like the word zombie,
you can choose another word,
but the fact is, somebody brought him
back from the grave, and I want to know
how they did it.
They send Bill Pullman's character there
to find out what is the secret
to immortality, essentially.
He thinks that he understands these rituals,
and that he is above them, he is a man of science,
but then he discovers that he doesn't really
know it at all.
Whatever happens, death is not the end.
Wes Craven is a great, great director,
and comes up with great ideas.
Really fantastic effects in that movie.
Some of the camera tricks that they're able to do,
especially in the sequences with the coffin,
when it fills with blood.
It's just phenomenal.
The dream sequence with the zombie bride,
a snake comes out of her skull.
I mean, that is incredible imagery.
You dreamt of me and of the grave.
I know because I was there.
Zakes Mokae in that movie is absolutely terrifying.
Bill Pullman really, he had to put up
with a lot for that movie.
I want to hear you scream.
Where he's basically in a chair, nude,
and a nine inch nail that changes a lot.
You see it once, you're never gonna forget that moment.
And get out!
"The Serpent and the Rainbow" feels the most
like who Wes Craven was as a person to me,
because he is interrogating the way
that our society functions, and our fear of death,
because I think ultimately, a fear of death
in this film is a fear of losing power and influence.
He has always reinvented horror
as a means to teach us either about ourselves,
broader society, or about the sins of America,
the way we extort other cultures for our own gain.
Don't let them bury me.
I'm not dead!
When I really think about all of my memories
on the set of "Sleepaway Camp",
we were just one big family.
One of the most magical times of my life.
I was a 13-year-old making this fun movie.
Spoiler alert, I mean the first penis I saw
was my own penis, you know?
It was like, this was a movie like none other.
Once you find out what the ending is,
you start to understand the deeper meaning.
And there's a lot going on.
Your gender identification, your sexual orientation.
It was never intended to have
any kind of negative connotation
on any aspect of life.
Goodnight, campers.
"Sleepaway Camp 2".
Michael Simpson called about portraying Angela
possibly in Parts 2 and 3.
It was the late 80s.
We were seeing more comedy.
And I just didn't take very well to that character.
Wake up, everybody!
Breakfast in half an hour!
I put it on hold.
I'm young, let me go to school.
Robert Hiltzik made this movie, and it was great.
So when Robert wrote the sequel,
he continued that dark movie that was made,
and the producers were like, nah.
We want to really play into Angela.
Fritz Gordon is actually Michael Hitchcock,
who wrote Glee.
He was brought in to write the horror comedy.
There's lots of good kids.
We just have to weed out the bad.
But it's mainly one liners,
and just kind of Pamela Springsteen
taking this Angela character,
and just amplifying it so much.
Say no to drugs.
She brought so much energy.
That was an Angela that was fun.
You talk too much.
Also, them playing with the transgender character,
fully a woman, has completely undergone everything.
A surgery and all.
You're Angela Baker, the angel of death!
They should have called you Peter!
My name is Angela Johnson.
A Bruce Springsteen sister.
She kept it secret.
She wanted to be an actress,
but I guess it wasn't for her.
She ended up doing photography instead.
Some of Bruce Springsteen's album covers
is Pamela Springsteen's photographs.
I was once a camper myself.
She's the boss' sister.
She was born cool.
Angela is killing because she's bullied.
She's weeding out all the bad kids,
and she's on top of it,
and she doesn't care what anyone thinks.
Please, don't!
Sorry!
Once I start a task, I always finish.
It has some kind of cruel deaths,
like shoving somebody down a Porta Potty.
What's down there?
The leeches attached to her face,
she's obviously covered in poop and pee,
and it's just like, ugh.
What a horrible way to die.
I love that outhouse scene.
That was disgusting!
It's a perfect, perfect, perfect blend
of horror and comedy.
A lot of people say "Part 2"'s my favorite,
and I think that's fantastic.
I do wish I had played those roles.
I do.
I always say I have no regrets in life.
None.
But I do regret that.
Even if you're sad, you gotta eat.
Isn't that right, Leah?
Just would have been super cool
to feel like I had done the entire franchise.
I think the series is empowering.
I've watched it over 40 years
grow into this, you know,
it has a life of its own.
"Sleepaway Camp" is so interesting to me.
I still have so many questions.
I'm completely cured.
If I wasn't, they wouldn't have let me out.
"Don't Panic" really feels like it was
made by a fan for fans.
One!
Two!
Three!
This 17-year-old boy has a party
where his friends surprise him with the Ouija board.
And if you thought this movie was about the Ouija board,
oh you thought wrong.
In Spanish, "Don't Panic" was called
"Dimensiones Ocultas", which means occult dimensions.
At that time, the only way was to shoot in English,
sell it in the international markets.
We tried to hire actors that were English fluent,
and that had an international look.
Let's look at the character Michael.
That's what I call a pullet.
You have a perm on your mullet.
And you're wearing dinosaur pajamas at 17 years old.
They're after me.
They're gonna get me.
Don't worry, baby.
I won't let anybody hurt you.
I always get questions about those pajamas.
They seem to be the most memorable aspect
of "Don't Panic".
Michael.
This time you have to stop him.
Don't fail.
What the fuck?
It almost felt like a medically induced dream fever.
It was just so out there.
Hurry!
Do you believe in Satan?
Roberto Palazuelos is playing
the character of a tough bully guy.
He goes inside the car, sticks his head out
from the window.
What Screaming Mad George did for us,
he made a piece of prosthetic,
like a retractable knife inside the mouth.
And then when he opened his mouth,
you could see the blade pop,
and the blood come out of the mouth.
I think it was a very good kill.
It really became a success
when video came out.
And then we started getting requests
from all the world.
We sold it in United Kingdom, Japan, China, Germany.
I've gotta save Christie!
Please listen to me!
It scared the shit out of the audience.
You want to play games?
Good.
I like games.
Say your prayers.
"Lady in White".
"Lady in White" is a particularly strong example
of gateway horror.
That was one of the scariest movies I saw as a kid,
because it's dealing with very, very dark material,
and it's stuff that could happen in real life.
The titular lady in white is a ghost,
but what this movie is really about
is a child killer.
It was seven years between "Fear No Evil"
and "Lady in White" before I got back
behind the camera again.
It was a remarkable experience,
such a far cry from "Fear No Evil".
What I wanted to do this time
was really try to make something
that was personal on an autobiographical level.
A beautiful story about what it was like
growing up in that era,
and combine it with this ghost story,
that drives it thematically,
and perhaps more so commercially.
It's like the most cinematic version of Halloween
that you can have.
It smells like Halloween,
like you watch that movie, and it tastes like candy corn.
The seasonal feel.
We began during the fall,
and the moved into the winter months.
I wanted a contrast between the darkness
that was going to happen in the film,
and these beautiful bucolic moments.
Hey!
The first image that came to mind
for "Lady in White" was this image of Frankie
being locked in the cloakroom.
Comforted by their ancient voices,
and I began to dream.
Lukas Haas plays Frankie in this.
I'd seen him in "Witness",
I'd seen him in "Testament",
and I knew that this kid was extraordinary.
He had an innate ability to express his feelings.
That's what acting's all about.
Mom used to say sometimes when someone dies violent,
they can't rest in peace.
The story is as much about a time and place
as anything else.
A key character is a black man
who gets caught in the madness of what's happening,
what's going on in that town.
Dealing with issues of race,
particular as it relates to the lady,
what was going on in that era,
and being truthful as to how people spoke,
how they reacted, how they dealt
with each other between races.
I wanted nothing but the truth.
Harold Williams is a perfect scapegoat.
He's black.
When it comes to pure cinematic drive and force,
I think the climax works beautifully.
I think that theme of loss
and coming to terms with loss
and dealing with loss is universal.
My mommy's lost and I can't find her.
The "Lady in White", it fucked me up.
Seeing it as a kid, in a way that it just becomes
like embedded in you, and become a core memory.
10-year-old Melissa N. Montgomery
was the first victim believed to have been murdered.
I'm glad that people are still discovering
"Lady in White".
It continues to remain somewhat hidden.
It's fun for me.
I already told him.
Her mother is the lady in white.
I'm awake!
"Dream Demon".
The movie was about the fine line
between dreams and reality.
I think I'm awake, and then I keep waking up.
This is crazy.
You better call that doctor friend of yours.
My character was like a punk rock chick
connected to this English girl.
Wake up, Diana!
Come on!
Wake up!
Diana, please!
Ultimately we realized that through our dreams
and in our ability to crawl into our dreams,
I think that we ended up bonding.
Cheers.
Now wake up!
Come on, wake up!
Wake up!
Stop!
I loved working with Gemma Redgrave.
She was like my best friend.
No that's, no that's, that's very good.
That's really very good.
Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail.
I remember having good laughs with them.
Hey come on, leave her alone.
What do you think she is, dog meat?
Piss off, darling.
We're the press!
Oh yeah, well print this, dickhead!
It was an adventure,
some groundbreaking special effects.
All of these art director types
that got to really stretch out their creativity
and just be as gross as possible.
So I'd be like, huh.
She's crawling through slime today.
The script was peculiar.
They had so many rewrites,
and the director was kind of a nut.
They wanted me to stand in front
of these six foot flames.
It's hot, right?
The director was like okay, you're gonna come in
in front of that flame, and I'm like,
how about this, fuck no I'm not gonna stand
in front of, and then he got really mad at me,
and I was like, I'm not standing in front of that.
That is dangerous.
Forget you.
You stand in front of it.
He's like, all right fine!
He stands in front of it,
and he singes the back of his hair.
I have not worked with Harley Cokeliss since.
I don't think I was his favorite actress.
Diana!
The most challenging aspect
of working on horror films,
it's me screaming and crying.
It's me bringing to life my own personal freaking fear,
so I guess bringing your own reality to the screen
is the trickiest bit.
But what a blast.
I'll do it any day of the week.
Pay me.
Where's my mark?
Anybody who thinks it's a good idea
to get shaved by a monkey
needs to reassess their life plan.
You're not gonna hurt me.
I'm part of you.
"Monkey Shines".
A leap into terror.
"Monkey Shines" is about a mind meld
between a man, who suffered a horrible injury,
and this monkey.
You're giving me a monkey?
How am I supposed to take care of it, Jeff?
The idea is that it's gonna take care of you.
He ends up becoming telepathic
with this monkey, and the monkey ends up
becoming kind of jealous of the people
that are close to our main dude.
Allan-
And the monkey starts to enact
a lot of the rage that the quadriplegic is experiencing,
and people start to be killed.
It sounds all very far-fetched,
but the way that Romero handles it
is completely expert, and a perfect example
of what a great filmmaker Romero was,
even out of the zone of zombies.
Yeah, yeah.
I made up a formulation based on human memory cells.
I've been injecting one of my monkeys.
George sets the tone.
Come on, give it right here.
Now, now.
- Thank you. - Good girl.
It was a fun set to be on.
Jason Beghe.
I liked Jason a lot.
He was a very intense guy.
Don't.
Do not.
Don't do it!
Goddam you, you-
I think it was a lot more pressure for him.
He was carrying that film, really.
I love monkeys!
Monkeys are awesome!
Well, not so much.
Kind of scary, really.
I really wanted to love the monkeys,
but truthfully, I had to really fake
not being scared.
Hey, company's here.
Come on.
They're very strong.
In the pivotal scene, monkey's trying to drug me
with this hypodermic needle.
I had to wrestle with the monkey.
And a lot of that was a puppet.
But there was one short time
where I was actually holding on
to a real monkey.
Ella, no!
I can't say I had a lot of affection for them.
But I faked it really well.
And we had that love scene
that was one of the more challenging scenes
I've ever had to do.
As a young boy, watching that sequence
and wondering about how this guy
was going to have an encounter with this woman
that we knew he liked,
and the way that happened,
the harness thing for his bed,
and this monkey's watching, like getting angry.
That movie's messed up, man.
We were in it together,
and we got through it.
I do believe we drank a little bit
of champagne during it to relax,
because it's so hard, these intimate scenes, you know?
With a crew.
It's a scene I'm actually pretty proud of.
"Monkey Shines" is George Romero's
first studio movie.
The movie was taken away from him and recut,
after he added things that they asked for.
The original ending was much darker,
and they hated that.
I wish we could see George's original vision.
It's what happens when you work for a studio.
The movie's not yours.
Even if it wasn't appreciated at the time,
I think anybody who appreciates George
is gonna take another look at any of his work.
It's an interesting story.
It has survived better than I would have thought
at the time, that's for sure.
"Black Roses".
The hottest band this side of hell.
A big heavy metal band is coming
to do a series of concerts,
and the parents in the town are very much against it,
because you know, rock and roll leads to the devil.
The fact that we had Julie Adams in the movie
was a thrill for all of us monster kids,
because she was in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon".
Their satanic music and subversive lyrics
threaten to undermine the very fabric of our society.
John Fasano.
We did four movies in four years.
John and I had known each other since elementary school.
And so now, here comes the biggest thing
to hit Mill Basin ever, and they try to stop it?
You call that good?
When the investors saw the first cut of the film,
they were like, it's a little short.
It needs more monsters, and more boobs.
So we shot these additional sequences.
I did do some special effects for the reshoot.
John wanted her hand to be starting to look
like it was changing, so I sculpted an appliance.
She's there, and she's sort of caressing herself like this,
and I'm just going like, nobody's looking at that hand.
Mike Maddi designed this creature.
It was like bald, and had these huge fangs,
and these long, sinewy arms, and talons.
And it took five of us to work that puppet.
It's definitely a major leap
from "Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" in terms of the effects.
The record starts bubbling up.
What the fuck?
And then it becomes this creature that attacks him.
Probably the best effect in the movie,
listening to metal, and metal inviting in this monster.
It's clearly playing on satanic panic.
Maybe the parents in the PTA have a point,
and this is Satan music.
So that's kind of funny.
Let's make blood city!
"Black Roses", yeah the band actually are from hell.
What do you know?
We are the Black Roses.
The flowers of evil!
You have been chosen.
"The Brain".
What I love about that title
is that nobody would second guess
that a movie called "The Brain"
is about a brain that kills people.
The plot revolves around this evil scientist
played by David Gale, who you might remember
as the professor in "Re-Animator".
I will be famous!
He runs this TV show that brainwashes people,
and gains control of their minds
with the help of this weird brain monster,
and then there's this rebel high school student,
who's the only one who can resist the brain's
mind controlling power, and save the day.
You can go now.
What the hell happened to me?
But not without some horrific hallucinations.
The protagonist, he's driving the car,
and the brain is sort of taking over his mind.
I mean, could you imagine that?
If you're driving a car,
and then you just see a video wipe transition
turn into a brain?
Holy shit.
Look at that brain.
You can't tell how it moves around.
All you see is this enormous face
coming after people.
It's kind of scary, but it's also really funny.
That's food for thought.
I mean, you just look at that thing,
and you gotta love it.
So there's this toy and a cartoon in the 80s
called Madballs.
Madballs, Madballs!
Gross for one, gross for all!
We play with a Madball!
They're gross!
That's what the brain looks like.
It's a giant Madball attacking.
I worked in Madrid on a wonderful film
called "Howl of the Devil".
I love Spain.
I've done quite a bit of work in Spain
with Sinbad, and various things.
Paul Naschy, both directing and as an actor
in his own right.
He had such presence on camera.
Menacing presence, but he was very charismatic.
And I'd be speaking English to him,
and in post, they'd dub him.
The plot basically was this man,
by day, he was quite normal, head of the house,
and he had his lovely son, Sergio.
And I was the maid that came to clean up,
and look after the son, basically.
But then by night, he would change
into these wonderful characters.
He became Frankenstein, he became the wolf man.
These very strange characters.
Some of the sequences we had to do
the man with a great big chainsaw
that came running after us.
No!
Carmen.
I liked her, because she was very proud.
Quite a holy Catholic lady.
And then the priest, who was a lovely
sweet, sweet actor.
Was trying to molest her, to attack her.
It was quite an emotional scene, actually, for me.
And for him, because he was so upset.
He spoke English, he said I'm so sorry,
he says, so sorry.
Paul want me to do this, and I don't want to do it.
I said, we'll make it look as good as we can,
but I might push you and punch you a bit.
He said, that's okay.
He said, I don't mind.
You do what you do.
So then we went for it,
and I managed to get away from him, basically.
It felt like one of my better scenes,
because she was in a really state of distress before it,
and this exacerbated it,
made it far worse for her.
Paul was, to me, the king of Spanish cinema.
He absolutely was.
People loved him.
When we talk about genre, and we try to put things
in boxes, one of the ways we got in trouble very early
was we conflated a setting with a feeling.
Horror is an emotion.
So you can have a horror in space.
You can horror in the old west.
You can have horror in a comedy.
It looked like this!
Horror is about a feeling that you evoke
in your audience.
Lollipops!
And all free today!
Horror is a more flexible genre
than people realize, and oftentimes it can be found
hiding within other genres, nested in there,
waiting to strike at any moment.
Fear is always there.
It's just one decision, or one thought,
or one perspective away from being right in your face.
Any movie could suddenly become a horror movie.
You're dead.
Horror is catching you off guard,
and taking you off your axis somewhat.
No!
The horror has been a part of our lives,
new just didn't know it.
It was dressed up in fairy tales.
But it's always been a part of us,
because fear and darkness
is always a part of your life.
It's part of life.
Disney goes very dark.
"Pinocchio", for instance.
The Pleasure Island scene.
Bad little boys doing bad little things,
smoking cigars, gambling,
until they turn into donkeys,
because it's a cautionary tale.
They're doing the shit they're not supposed to be doing,
and they just start transforming.
What do I do?
"Willy Wonka".
Not a horror movie, per se.
Does it have horror elements?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Round the world and home again!
That's the sailor's way!
The horrific nightmare boat sequence,
where he's just staring deadpan,
and starts singing that weird song.
♪ There's no earthly way of knowing ♪
He's singing.
And there's like, these horrible projection
that are happening.
As a child, I was sitting there watching this
thinking what the fuck is happening?
Now I am gonna be sick!
Never mind the fact that these children
are just getting offed, one by one.
It's kind of like a slasher movie.
She was a bad egg.
I seem to find horror in every film I see
at some point.
Any time you're writing interesting characters,
they're gonna have a dark side,
and so if you get some people with problems,
and issues, and anger, and stuff,
then you have a dangerous situation,
and that's scary.
We might not call "Blue Velvet" horror,
but I do know it was covered in Fangoria.
David Lynch is bouncing in and out of horror
throughout all of his films,
and I think horror fans,
our antenna perked up.
It delivers horror probably more effectively
than half the movies sitting in the horror section
at the video store.
The severed ear moment.
The camera moves in.
There's ants on it.
It's incredibly graphic.
That's a pure horror moment.
Don't you fucking look at me!
Frank Booth is one of the great horror villains.
He was terrifying, because he was unpredictable.
He was a madman, and it felt unsafe
in a way that by, say, 1986,
a lot of our movie slashers didn't.
Does horror even need to be scary?
It just has to disturb you in some kind of way.
What's cool about the 1980s
is horror was so big, that it actually
infiltrated other genres.
Ow!
I'm glad to see you finally made it
to the suburbs, bitch!
My first horror film, "Return to Oz".
It's like mombie taking her heads off,
screaming, the wheelers.
Come here!
It can be a character,
like one person in that film brings the horror.
The judge in "Roger Rabbit", right?
When I killed your brother,
I talked just like this!
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom",
looking as a human hand plunged into the chest
of a sacrificial victim, and the beating heart
was ripped out.
This horrifying ritual really held
all the elements of horror.
A movie that scared the crap out of me
when I was little was "The Wiz".
My favorite movie of all time was "Wizard of Oz",
which is also pretty scary.
You know, you get to those winged monkeys,
and it's like, terror.
Help, help!
Help!
"The Dark Crystal", "The Black Cauldron",
like animation, horror.
The field.
It's covered with blood.
These movies have elements of horror,
and that's what we grew up on.
The psyche can do crazy things to you, as well.
Your thoughts can turn dark on you,
and that's also scary, and a person that you know
can change on you, and that's scary.
Aging is scary.
Dreams are scary.
The dark is scary.
There's dark everyday.
It's gonna get dark everyday.
It's gonna get scary.
Wait!
Ow!
Get away!
Horror is everywhere.
It's everywhere.
"Things" a horrifying sensation
that'll rip apart your soul.
A lot of people know that Canadian horror movies
are Canadian just because they're in English,
so they get lumped in with American ones,
but don't be fooled.
Just because Canadians have a reputation
for being polite doesn't mean our horror movies are.
Canada actually made a lot of slasher movies
in the 80s, which is appropriate,
because we helped start the genre
with the original "Black Christmas" back in the 70s.
Why should America have all the fun?
In addition to all those great slasher movies,
Canada was also responsible for making this movie
called "Things", which has been called
one of the worst movies ever made.
Oh no!
What did I do?
These two idiots sit around and drink beer
for a little bit, and then all of a sudden,
these weird ant thingies invade their home.
Oh my god!
Susan!
It's not a horror comedy,
but I'd be hard pressed to find something funnier,
because it's fucking terrible.
The whole thing has a very home movie quality to it.
Everything looks homemade, like the little ants
looks like they're made out of paper mache,
the blood looks like they mixed food coloring
and corn syrup.
Mm, that's human blood, all right.
"Things" might just be the most Canadian
movie ever made, and I don't just mean
most Canadian horror movie,
I mean the most Canadian movie, period.
Oh thanks, man.
You can practically smell
the half empty Molson bottles,
watching this movie.
Blood is just dripping like maple syrup!
The big selling point for "Things"
is that Ginger Lynn is in it, the famous porn star.
But when you see the movie, she's not doing
anything porn related.
She's like a newscaster for, I don't know,
30 seconds at the beginning of the movie.
They probably took whatever budget they had
and gave her half of it,
so what, two grand maybe.
At the end of the movie, they start killing
these weird ant things with a chainsaw,
and spraying fake blood everywhere.
I really hope the guys who made it
got their damage deposit back on the place
they were staying.
But now that everyone seems
to be talking about it again,
do I dare subject myself to the ridiculosity of "Things"?
I'll be okay!
The situation in Venice is now critical.
A giant toxic cloud has settled over the city,
and is slowly destroying every form of life.
I'm in an infamous movie
that has several different titles.
"Shocking Dark", AKA "Terminator",
or da-da-da-da-da.
The movie originally was called "Shocking Magenta".
How are you gonna translate that?
That doesn't work in any language.
That's not the only name
it's called "Contaminator".
"The Killers of Venice Beach".
It has lots of names, and that has something
to do with distribution.
Venice before the year 2000.
"Shocking Dark" is a movie where the filmmakers
attempt to warn people of the hazards
of industrial pollution.
Fear fighting against the unknown.
Hurry!
They're coming, they're coming!
My character in "Shocking Dark"
is Lieutenant Koster,
and I'm telling all these guys what to do.
All right, you bunch of pussies!
I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!
And I'm not politically correct about it,
and I don't care, but it's because
they're my guys.
Careful, baby.
That thing just might go off!
They're sending us into the depths of Venice.
My impression is they're gonna find out
it's a creature from another planet.
I can't say that was exactly the plot
when I started the movie.
And they're waiting for you!
Who are they?
What are you talking about?
It's a sandwich that didn't even have
a whole loaf of bread.
So it starts out pumpernickel,
and then it ends up a brioche,
and then it's a slice of pizza.
Can't you smell that stink of shit?
The creatures in "Shocking Dark".
I have been told they remind people
of the creature from "Alien",
but when I was in the movie,
and as the movie was told to me,
by the director, Bruno Mattei,
he intended it to be more
of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon".
We're chemically dumping in the waters around Venice,
so originally the concept was this thing,
maybe it got radiated,
because that's what they were kind of thinking.
Something wraps around my neck.
Go back and watch carefully.
So this hand is going oh, oh,
and this hand from below is wrapping around
my own neck, and I'm going like that.
So every time somebody says to me
it's a ripoff of "Alien" and "Terminator",
I go not if you're holding the rubber mask
with your own hand
"Shocking Dark" is such a shameless ripoff
of so many other things that it was legally not
able to be released in the States for many years.
This is the end of the line.
You look at movies by guys
like Bruno Mattei, and you think it was
probably a pretty good party onset.
End of the line.
Maybe as long as the filmmakers are having
a great time, you hope it bleeds through
to the screen.
Bruno Mattei was by no means kidding himself
of where he was in the film industry.
And he's in on the joke.
I worked on two movies with him,
and he was always up against a budget,
and he never took it badly,
he was never in a bad mood,
and he was a lot of fun.
I miss him.
I miss him a great deal.
A new film by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
"Santa Sangre".
"Santa Sangre" is a Felini-esque kind of nightmare
from the perverted mind of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
It's just saturated with blood,
circus carnage, crazy cults, skin, surrealism,
and enough symbolism to send you to a shrink.
Now you're a man.
It is an absolute masterpiece.
Jodorowsky, he was approached by Dario Argento's brother,
Claudio, to make a movie.
It was essentially, I need you to make
a Dario Argento movie, but by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Well, he ended up taking it way further
into the direction of Jodorowsky,
and making something entirely unique.
Sure, it's painted in a horror movie,
but it's a coming of age story
about a boy growing up in a circus freak setting,
that really shows the streets of Mexico City
in a different light.
There's something so special about all these characters,
being in makeup, being in their costumes,
and that's how they are every day of their lives,
and actually also something very sad
about that, too.
That that is the identity of these characters.
That is the way that people see them as,
as clowns, as performers, as freaks.
It just shows such a truth,
not just in Mexico, but it shows a truth
of how easy we are judgmental.
There's so many scenes in that film
I did not expect to continue to escalate,
to go oh my god!
Oh my god!
Ugh!
The dad, the owner of this circus,
just has an affair, spoiler alert,
cuts this woman's arms off,
and it's like what the!
It's insane!
The wonderful character of Conchita,
and you just see how her arms
get completely cut off,
blood pouring out of her arms,
and how she's just looking at the sky, at us.
The one-two punch of attacking them
during sex and throwing acid on them,
and then getting both of her arms chopped off,
with beautiful Simon Boswell music
playing in the background.
That's hard to equal in cinema,
let alone in this movie.
And from that point on,
to see our main character
trying to find acceptance, love, and freedom
of his own demons, how he now is trapped
to be his own mother's arms,
speaks to such a sadness,
and such a truth of manipulation.
It just completely breaks my heart,
and grosses me out
"Santa Sangre" was not afraid to talk
about the problems of machismo,
the class system, and just the difference in cultures
with the Americanos and the Mexicans,
and all from the point of view
of an innocent child.
That corruption, that manipulation,
how sex and violence can really, really change
a child's life, that movie is true horror.
For "Fright Night", I had no sense
of what is was going to become.
I thought it was a fun movie,
it was creative, and it was gonna be
a little bitty horror movie for that summer.
Really special experience, and the longer I'm away from it,
the more I realize that.
"Fright Night 2".
♪ Take me baby
"Fright Night 2", Tommy Lee Wallace
did a terrific job.
I wasn't available.
Instead I did "Fatal Beauty" with Whoopi Goldberg.
I should have done "Fright Night 2".
Johnny.
Peter.
It's happening again.
"Fright Night 2" was really more about the modern
80s age, when people were really starting
to experiment and to be curious about cultures and people.
I give you the new host of Fright Night, Regine!
From Regine's point of view,
my only brother, the love of my life, was murdered.
And I am 2000 years old.
Uh, come in.
Thanks.
I find Charlie Brewster,
and I play with him like a cat playing with a mouse.
Julie as Regine was breaking the glass ceiling in a way.
This is not a dream.
"Fright Night Part 2" is a lot about inverting
the sexual and gender stereotypes
that had traditionally been part of the vampire genre.
She was taking ownership of lust and power
and hunger and all of that stuff,
and she feminized it.
I think Regine is empowering for women in general,
and for Latinas.
There's an eroticism that is beyond gender identification.
Regine Dandridge, it was very open to love and sensuality.
She's not just a stark, startling character.
She's cushy, and warm, and you know.
Is it hot in here?
You'll have to get closer than that.
Peter Vincent was Roddy McDowall's love letter
to the vampire hunters of the past.
Peter Cushing, Vincent Price.
Roddy was a photographer,
so he was always taking pictures.
He was into documenting stuff.
Encyclopedia of movie history.
He knew where the bodies were buried.
I kill vampires.
It was a different movie,
it was like an army of ghouls and vampires
and creatures that we were up against this time.
Russel Clark played Belle,
a wraith-like vampire on roller skates.
Those three characters, Jonathan Gries,
Brian Thompson, and Russel,
they're all so distinctive and unique
in the characters that they came up with.
I have an entourage of fabulous men.
Russel Clarke, he had choreographed Michael Jackson,
and Brian Thompson came up with the naming
all of these bugs with their Latin names.
There's just a scholarliness to this foursome.
Are you thirsty, Charlie?
Once I started transitioning into a vampire,
I enjoyed getting to fang up
and get pasty, and all that stuff.
I had my Christmas cards that year
were me in a vampire, sort of holiday vampire theme.
"Fright Night 2" resonates with people,
there's something for everyone in it.
And everyone's kind of represented, especially today.
You notice if someone's not represented now.
It shocked people that somebody
would break the rules as much as we did,
even though it made more money at the box office
than anything else that opened that weekend,
I think the whole distribution went into a tailspin,
and then you could hardly find it on VHS,
but people have unearthed it,
literally dug it up from the grave,
so I'm very grateful to the people
who've done that, because Regine was really fun.
Welcome to Fright Night.
I have such a specific memory
of begging my dad to take me to see "Relentless"
when I was too young to see it.
I was probably 12.
Judd Nelson is Buck Taylor.
And Buck Taylor is "Relentless".
This was a Hollywood maniac slasher,
so it was a well-produced film.
Cops chasing a serial killer in Los Angeles.
Well, who the fuck killed him?
Well how the fuck do I know?
It's my first day.
Judd Nelson is the product
of an abusive relationship with his father,
who was a police officer, who he both feared and idolized,
when he couldn't live up to his father's ideal
to also become a police officer,
he decides he's going to go out and kill people
with his father's name.
Leo Rossi and Robert Loggia,
they are investigating it.
Read this.
No clues, no nothing.
What is it?
The asshole left it.
John had seen "Maniac", and really liked it,
and came aboard wanting to play the role.
For me stylistically,
it was my Dario Argento film in daylight.
What really messed me up too with that film
is there's a pretty brutal
piano wire strangulation sequence.
It was intense for me to watch as a kid.
Isn't that better?
I like the scene where Judd is running
on the rooftop.
We did a little trick there.
We used a Louma crane,
and when he's hidden, the stunt guy
comes out the other end,
and we tried to make it as seamless as possible.
There was a moment that was cut from the script
that I really wish I had shot.
The scene that I had stolen from a Japanese movie
called "Vengeance is Mine".
Coming down the street was a patrol car,
and Judd looks down at his hands,
and there's blood on his hands,
so he goes in the bushes, and pees on his hands
to wash the blood off of them.
And I thought, wow.
That would really say a lot about a character.
It might have been a bit too much
for mainstream audience.
It's all right.
I had a great time with Judd Nelson.
Always joking around.
All the actors, all sweethearts.
It was a wonderful experience on that film.
Yo brothers, what's up?
I had no interference.
Everything that's in "Relentless" is mine,
for better or worse, it was the way
I made the film, and I'm quite proud of it.
I think it came out okay.
Please.
Don't hurt my son.
But it feels dated to me.
First is "Maniac Cop", which was made before that
doesn't feel dated to me.
Go figure.
Oh my god!
William Hickey as
"The Puppet Master".
One of my favorite franchises is "The Puppet Master".
And the first one was just so perfect to me.
And now they have 80 of them.
Every single one, I want.
It had Blade, Tunneler, Jester,
with his weird face stuff, and Leech Girl,
and lots, and lots, and lots of creepy ass puppets.
I have all those puppets as action figures.
They're some of my favorite collectibles to this day.
I just wanted to see the puppets fucking kill people.
You pair that with just this weird fucking story
about an undead dude who just wanted to get his,
gets his rivals together to kill them off one by one.
And using the old techniques of the old Puppet Master,
I brought myself back to life.
Why?
I want to live forever.
That is a piece of art that came to life as a movie.
Yeah, I'm a stop motion freak.
Dave Allen helped shape shift those characters
into what they are now, and gave them some
historical context, because it takes place in the 40s.
And next thing you know, we morph into a script,
and David Schmoeller did a great job with the script.
Charlie Band, he would give me a lot of creative freedom.
It's real easy to write these things.
You hope that this is gonna work.
It goes from effect to effect.
I mean, some of them work great,
and some of them are really stretches, you know.
You fucker!
I thought I could create magic,
and these really great things would happen.
These little dolls, they would find
all these sadistic ways to murder human beings.
It was diabolical.
Leech Woman, Lord she looks so cute
and pretty but then
and this nasty ass leech,
and it's just, no, why?
We actually used leeches.
The puppet with the tiniest little head,
and massive baby hands, just beating the crap out of people.
You're taking inanimate objects
and turning them into real things.
We would talk about it, and he would go off
and execute whatever I needed to have
these puppets doing.
There would always be some surprise
that was better than what we had talked about.
Low budget filmmaking is an art in itself.
It's such a crapshoot.
What's happening, Alice?
You're making movies for no money,
and then you're expecting a studio to pick it up.
The fact that Paramount released it
gave it a lot of cache.
Gave it a lot of credibility.
What the hell are you looking at?
The original idea of these characters
that all start off a little differently,
helped my business, my life, and my creativity.
We're about to shoot our 13th Puppet Master
32 years later.
"The Black Cat".
The last word in terror.
"The Black Cat", Luigi Cozzi,
or Lewis Coates, as he's known in America.
Black Cat, 1A, take one.
My lovely Luigi, who directed
and kind of created "Stellar Star Star Crash".
It was his baby.
He wanted to do this one for quite some time.
Well, we've already got the storyline blocked out,
but before we get down to writing the screenplay,
we'd like some pointers about reincarnation.
I read the script, and I thought yeah, it's interesting.
It's different.
Don't use that name.
Change it at once.
What name, Levana?
Yes.
Don't take the risk of summoning her.
Dario Argento had a hand in it.
Dario Argento directed it, "Suspiria",
and I must admit, it was very, very good.
Luigi worked very closely with Dario.
It was shot in Italy.
Not a lot of plot, but beautiful to look at.
Great performances from the actors.
They were all European.
I think I was the only English person in it.
We had a wonderful prince called Urbano Barberini
who was in it, and then you had Florence Guerin,
who was wonderful in the film.
She was fantastic.
You can never leave!
You'll never be Levana the witch!
Never, never!
She was an actress, I was an actress.
Cut.
Florence was the nice one.
I was just a bitch, I would say, really, basically.
Sorry.
So I have your permission to, uh,
put it to him?
But it was good character for me.
I liked it.
Quite dark, and she was all out for herself.
Everything was about her, really.
She was very jealous of Florence and the husband.
Why in god's name did you do it?
The same reason I took Mark away from you, Anne.
For Levana.
My character was capable of anything, really.
I liked that concept.
What is your command?
I ordered you to stop Anne.
It rolled along nicely.
Maybe not the best dialogue.
And you know what you must do with it.
The baby's in the other room.
Some of the scenes were quite heavy
with the special effects.
Very bloody.
It is a bit weird, isn't it?
They're quite gruesome effects.
Looking back on it, they were really, really good.
The Spanish title for "Grave Robbers"
is "Ladrones De Tumbas".
There's a lot of satanic rituals,
and a lot of killings.
A guy is persecuted by the Inquisition,
and he's tortured, and murdered,
and he promises to return for vengeance.
Our main characters, they go to the cemeteries,
dig up the graves, extract the bodies,
look for gold and valuable things,
and they sell them in the black market.
They go through a tunnel into the dungeons
of this old hacienda.
And strange things start happening.
By the time we shot "Grave Robbers",
I was a big expert in prosthetics
and special effects, cinematography.
I had learned a lot.
We didn't shoot it in English.
We shot it in Spanish.
We shot that film in Valle de Bravo.
It's about an hour and a half from Mexico City.
It's in the mountains.
There's woods all over.
One girl is kidnapped.
And the policemen go inside the dungeons,
and he finds his daughter tied up to the floor.
The demon walks in
and they engage in a fight.
When our hero comes in and saves the policeman
and saves the girl.
That's a memorable scene.
It had known actors for the domestic market.
It was aimed for the right target,
and it was a very big success in Mexico,
and then a big success when the video clubs
started renting it out.
No!
I wasn't aware how this film became
part of the cult 1980s horror films,
because my career has gone on.
I'm mostly known in Mexico for being
a reality show producer.
I'm proud of them because they were done
with no money, with no time,
with no technical resources.
I was in the process of learning
how to become a filmmaker.
We were just kids having fun.
I have no idea why people romanticize films
simply because they were made in the 80s.
Hi.
But because they were made in the 80s,
they develop a cult reputation.
I'm really thrilled that audiences now
really appreciate this stuff,
that back in the 80s, people were just like,
nah, you know, whatever.
Now there's a whole new renaissance,
if you will, and people are really getting into them,
and really loving them, and giving them
the kudos that they deserve.
They have a life today that's not the same
as their life in the 80s,
but let's get real about, you know
Orson Welles didn't make any of these films.
We need to reframe the way that we look
at good and bad movies.
Bad movies can be enjoyable.
You can find a different way to look at it.
I mean, no one's setting out to make a bad movie.
It doesn't really matter how great
or not great these movies were,
it's important to remember
how the cast, the crew, the producers,
the director, put all their love and energy
and money into these various films,
and really made them into something unique
that there was an audience for.
I think it's important for us to keep
these films in conversation.
Especially the ones that people think
maybe are not so great, because there's the obvious ones,
like "The Shining", "The Thing".
Those extend beyond horror audiences.
But then there's kind of like,
we have these in danger of being forgotten
or going extinct gems.
As we move from this media format
to this media format,
there's things that kind of get pushed to the wayside,
and we're leaving them behind.
Hide the body, and come back,
and clean up the blood.
People should champion anything that they enjoy,
because that's how you keep things alive.
Streaming is great.
I love that it makes things easily accessible
to the masses, but also it doesn't compare
to browsing and picking something up
and feeling it, smelling it,
holding it in your hands
is a special kind of experience.
Home video and cable meant that movies
didn't go away, and that meant that movies
found their audience.
And then word of mouth kicks in.
And to no small extent, creates horror fandom,
which has become this tidal wave
over the 30, 40 years since that technology arrived.
Of course it's not ideal to see a movie on tape
as opposed to seeing it on the big screen,
but as we see that the way that the world
has currently gone, many more people see movies
on their devices than they ever see
on a theater screen, and the trade off
is it isn't gonna be seen
by very many people in the theater.
It's mostly gonna be seen at home.
Today, there's a kind of casualness to it.
I'm still a child of the cinema.
I'm not crazy about people being introduced
to horror through digital.
The upside is that the screens are better,
they're bigger, the sound is better.
People are very serious about the way
they present their films,
and so it's a theater-like experience,
but it's not a theater experience,
because a theater experience is with a large
audience of people, who make the difference
between what you're watching, and what you're experiencing.
An experienced horror film with a big audience
that's enjoying it is completely different
and more fun experience than watching it
at home with two friends.
That's just night and day.
Part of the problem is our technology
is so magnificent now.
People think anything old is clunky.
This desire just to see the new,
the new, the new, the next, the next, the next,
sometimes prevents us from taking some time
out of our very busy lives
and realizing that there's some great stuff
from the past.
Maybe the movie itself isn't necessarily great,
but it's the experience of watching it
that makes it great, and then 20 years later,
you're telling people, no you have to watch "Motel Hell".
This is one of the greatest movies ever made.
They hold it near and dear to their heart
because they've seen it with their father who's passed,
or cousin made them watch it to scare them,
or whatever, however they saw it.
It holds good memories for people.
Horror is personal.
We can all agree on a good horror film.
It's like, ah "Psycho".
But nobody's defending "Psycho" to the death.
I think we have it all wrong when we talk about horror.
We're like, this is good, or this is bad.
No.
Something is entertaining or it's not entertaining,
and by putting everything on a good and bad dichotomy,
we ruin our experience of being able
to talk about a movie, like "Sleepaway Camp II",
that's just like a fucking good time.
"Sleepaway Camp II" doesn't have to be high art,
to be a social satire.
Howdy partner!
I actually think that you can find
more in our culture and history
and even just social context
in films that are labeled trash.
There's more there to actually pick from,
and shine a light on who we were as people.
Like, a popcorn film?
That's loaded with identity, and society, and culture.
I'm way more interested in the history I'm gonna get
from a movie that people cast aside
than the history I'm gonna get
and what I learn in a film school class.
Let's not get insanely academic about these films.
The people who watch these movies in the 80s
weren't watching them from an ironic point of view.
They were watching them because they enjoyed the mayhem.
The people who watch those same movies today
are watching them from an academic standpoint,
as though they're analyzing every little detail
of the film.
These films were made by guys
who wanted to make a fast buck.
These films were made for money.
They were not concerned with trying to impress anybody.
They were concerned with the largest audience possible.
They were filmmakers, but they were also businessmen.
These aren't big extravagant productions.
You crazy bastard.
Horror lets you be creative.
You can go outside the box.
You can go outside the scope.
Horror, it can look cheesy and bad,
and it's fun.
We love to be scared,
and we love to think we're in peril.
And we love to be at odds with each other.
Movies are so powerful, because it reminds us
of a simpler, more innocent time.
And that's where we all want to be.
God knows in this day and age.
That's where we all want to be.
So, before watching "In Search of Darkness",
I was definitely one of those guys
who was like, yeah man, I know 80s horror.
Freddie and Jason!
Sweet!
And then I watched "In Search of Darkness",
and I realized, you naive bastard,
you know nothing about 80s horror.
So now I actually know things,
and like, how had I lived my life
and missed "Sleepaway Camp"?
That is a fantastic movie.
So thank you for awakening me.
80s horror is very important to me
as I grew up in the early 80s,
and horror was embedded in our culture.
It was in our toys, in our cartoons.
It was everywhere.
We used to draw monsters in art class,
like the Monster Squad,
and that was acceptable back then.
You wouldn't get locked up for stuff like that.
I miss going into a video store
and grabbing a random VHS
and saying hey, this box art, it looks good.
Is it a curse, or is it great?
You never know.
And you watch it with your friends
in the middle of the night, enjoying it,
and it brings you back to a simpler time.
80s horror is so important to me
because it's an escape from reality.
Takes me back to a simpler time.
Gives me that nostalgia.
And these documentaries,
they help nail the fact home
that horror can be a cathartic way
to deal with fear and all the BS this world
has to throw at us.
80s horror, and all horror in general,
and I love that.
These documentaries are amazing for that.
Favorite movie of all time?
"Silver Bullet", 1985.
It is incredible.
Rock on.
Hey.
I just wanted to say thank you so, so much
to everybody involved with "In Search of Darkness".
It's been absolutely fantastic.
I've really, really enjoyed.
It's flooded back memories of going down
the video shop, the video store,
in the 80s, looking at the best horror films
that were released.
Absolutely fantastic.
And it's also introduced me
to some of the classics that I missed,
down the video shop, going back all those years.
80s horror happened to coincide
with the VHS era, and in my opinion,
the 80s horror was the prime attraction
of the VHS.
I mean, look at that.
How could you walk by that and not want to rent it?
Oh, hi.
I'm AJ Danna.
I played Tapehead at "Slashback Video".
The "In Search of Darkness" trilogy
has meant so much to dust off these old
classic horror tapes, and make sure each and every
actor and filmmaker involved in these movie making gems
did not pour their blood, sweat, and tears
into movies in vain.
So anyways, thanks.
I decided to back the "In Search of Darkness" series
for the tireless people behind Creator BC,
because you learn something interesting and significant
about the films from the people who worked on the films
that you can't find anywhere else.
To me, horror movies were a safe haven
growing up in the 80s.
I spent so many hours in the video store
browsing for titles to watch.
When "In Search of Darkness: Part One" ended,
the covers shown up with a key,
and a dark room, the TV, the characters.
It was like I was that same boy.
This documentary has been a door to go back
and complete that journey.
80s horror movies are important to me
because I was raised the right way,
and grew up watching them
ever since I was a wee little one,
despite not growing up in that generation.
But it was cool people from that generation
who showed me those movies, and gave us
something to bond over.
But my favorite horror movie has to be
John Carpenter's "The Thing".
The most amazing practical effects
to the gore, and of course starring
the absolute hunks Kurt Russel and Keith David,
what is there not to love?
So 80s horror rules,
and thanks to "In Search of Darkness"
for bringing it all back.
You know, growing up as a kid with not many friends,
actually I had none until I was 10.
Single father, worked nights, and slept all day.
Horror movies were my go-to,
and the monsters were my friends,
and it was just awesome.
With the "In Search of Darkness" trilogy,
I got to relive that past as a child,
and it just, it's perfect.
80s horror was the best.
It was imagination.
It was entertainment.
It was fun, it was gory, it was crazy,
it was the best.
80 horror rules!
I'm Matt Weinhold, and I love 80s horror
because it's scary, sexy, innovative,
indecent, unapologetic, and fun!
It's the punk rock of horror!
Having been a teenager in the 1980s,
I was able to experience most of these films
in a theatrical setting.
The 80s gave us the best of John Landis,
and John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg,
and we got to see the birth of franchises
of "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street",
and "Poltergeist", "Evil Dead",
and what "In Search of Darkness" has allowed me to do
is revisit those memories, and love these films
all over again.
In the 1980s, we gazed into the abyss,
and we smiled,
because it was filled with visceral practical effects,
intrepid heroes, garish demons,
and synth-laden nightmare schemes.
Thanks to "In Search of Darkness",
the abyss can finally gaze back at us, and smile.
My love of 80s horror films
started back when I was 11 years old.
I stayed up one night and watched "A Nightmare
"on Elm Street" with my mum.
Halfway through the film, I got so scared
that I went up to bed, and five minutes later,
I was back downstairs watching the rest
of the film with her.
That's where it started, and it's never stopped since.
Watching "In Search of Darkness" documentaries
takes me back to the best part of my childhood,
and also knowing that I'm watching these documentaries
with a community of people
that also share my love of 80s horror,
it is the best feeling.
The immense popularity of these movies
showed so many of us that we were part
of a global community, and so in a way,
the darkness became a place of comfort,
because we knew we weren't alone.
In a sense, it's more like it's our story,
and what these movies mean to us,
and I can't thank these documentaries enough for that.
Everything about it is so beautiful.
It's one of the best times of horror
and it makes me feel better about me and myself.
There's something for everyone in there,
whether you like slashers, comedies,
my personal favorite horror movie from the 1980s
is "Killer Klowns from Outer Space".
I saw that movie the first time
when I was maybe 10 years old,
and that's one of the movies that made me
fall in love with horror, and the reason I'm as big
of a horror fan as I am today.
When I wanted to get into horror,
and I was too scared to watch it by myself,
my friends would sit with me in my dark basement,
and we would watch 80s horror movies together.
And we started with the classics,
and slowly moved our way out to totally obscure titles,
but for me, those were really special times in my life.
And it really made horror, especially 80s horror,
something that brought people together in my life.
80s horror movies really had a style of their own
that make this particular decade of work
always so unique to look back on.
It was also a decade where it felt like special effects
were perfected in such a way, you could almost smell them
through your screen, something like "The Thing",
and speaking of "The Thing", you could have
hard horror subject like that,
but you could have also sillier stuff like "Vamp",
which makes this particular decade always so fun
to go back and discover new gems,
and I really am glad that these documentaries exist
to highlight all of that.
Best thing about 80s horror were the comedy movies,
like "The Burbs", and "Gremlins 2",
"House", "House 2", the "Ghostbusters",
all those movies made it so much easier
as a kid to then turn around and be able to watch
movies with this scary bastard in it,
and scare the shit out of you when you're a little kid.
John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper,
Tom Holland, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi,
Stewart Gordon, Don Coscarelli.
I just need an indestructible boogeyman
carving up annoying teenagers.
I don't need to know how or why.
It just has to show up every few years,
and do it again in creative ways.
Give me a monster with sharp teeth,
and gooey tentacles.
What I don't want is found footage,
and shaky cam and possessed dolls,
and cheesy ghosts, and spare me all the CGI blood.
I want Tom Savini, Screaming Mad George.
I want a Kurtzman Nicotero hamburger.
Hey guys.
My name is Jason.
And no surprise, my favorite horror franchise
of all time is "Friday the 13th".
I did a book report on Part 3 in grade six.
Yes, I was in grade six watching these movies,
and I absolutely loved them.
I think the 80s is absolutely the greatest decade
of horror films, and I grew up in the 90s.
There were so many great horror films made back then.
I can't even decide which one's my favorite.
I also think "In Search of Darkness" is the greatest
documentary ever made.
It introduced me to several horror films
I had never heard of, including "Sleepaway Camp",
"Fade to Black", "Motel Hell",
"American Werewolf in London",
"Society", "Scanners", "The Changeling",
"The Ghost Story", and so many more.
I don't think there will ever be anything
like 80s horror ever again
Hello, everyone.
What I've enjoyed most about the "In Search of Darkness"
documentary series would have to be
the behind the scenes information about the movies
I know and love, but also, and probably more importantly,
the vast amount of hidden gems
it has introduced me to.
It is mind-blowing how many entertaining horror movies
there are from that decade.
So thank you.
One of my favorite 1980s horror movies
would have to be "Night of the Demons".
Reason being, I was pretty young
when the movie first came out.
My older sister introduced me to the film
because she wanted to scare me.
It scared me pretty good.
I remember having a hard time going to sleep that night,
scared that the monster was gonna get me.
So I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about the movie.
That's why I like it so much.
My first and absolute favorite 80s horror movie
is "American Werewolf in London"
by John Landis.
Watching that movie sent me down a rabbit hole
of 80s horror movies that I'd never seen before,
and through that movie, I got introduced
to "In Search of Darkness",
and ever since, things have never been the same,
and it's been an amazing journey.
I thank you for it.
80s horror is incredibly important to me.
Horror slashed its way into my life
when I was a kid.
Myself and my buddies would stay up all night
watching horror movies, from horror icons
like Freddie, to "Killer Klowns from Outer Space".
The greatest times of my life
is due to the horror genre.
80s horror strapped me into my adult life
where I now collect 80s horror memorabilia,
plus I'm always on the hunt for 80s horror
that I'm yet to discover.
I have an insatiable thirst for blood in film.
Tom Savini's work in the genre
has my jaw dropped to the floor.
The realism of his work is something
that's gonna be admired long after I'm gone.
For me, he sets the bar for practical effects within horror.
I love "In Search of Darkness", as it's
a time capsule of horror, for us, the fans.
"In Search of Darkness" is also a love letter
to everyone that holds a special place
in their heart for horror.
I love how they use all practical effects,
for these, all the blood and guts,
all the rubber monsters that they used,
all the costume work is all hand made,
and all practically done.
It makes it look great.
The 80s was an era of DIY.
If you didn't have a passion for your craft,
or you didn't want your story to be told,
it simply wouldn't make it out there.
This is what showed in the films growing up,
which was hard.
It's difficult to articulate this feeling.
However, every fan or person contributing
to this series, will have moments which resonated
and impacted into their adult life.
What I love most about the 80s,
especially 80s horror movies,
is just how ridiculous the concepts are,
and just how well they're executed.
"In Search of Darkness" meant a lot to me
because it introduced me to a whole field,
a whole group of people,
that are so dedicated, and so motivated,
on trying to find a lot of 80s horror films
that not a lot of younger horror film fans even heard of.
Sometimes y'all have heard of "Halloween"
or "Friday the 13th", or "Nightmare on Elm Street",
but it's these small classic films
that really hold deep to my heart,
knowing that a lot of people have seen it
really brings joy to me.
That's why it meant a lot to me.
Hey, I'm Twisted Todd.
I'm a big fan of 80s horror films,
mainly because as a kid growing up in the 80s,
didn't get to watch a lot of horror movies,
but my parents rented a lot of them,
and I got to hear them from my bedroom,
which fed my curiosity,
so about the time I was in middle school
in the late 80s, finally got to watch horror films,
fell in love with the slasher genre,
love films like "Creepshow",
and then later on in my college days,
I really fell in love with the cinematic genius
of directors like John Carpenter,
and of course Sam Raimi,
because I'm a huge "Evil Dead" fan.
I grew up mesmerized by horror movies,
primarily throughout the 80s.
They were such an important part
of many of my formative years,
and contribute to so many of my young memories.
I've since come to embrace and enjoy
all cinema, having learned so much more
about all genres over the years,
but you never forget your first love.
Horror films of the 80s
were so imaginative, and so ambitious,
but they pull it off, and there's a real
charm to them, a levity that we didn't have
in the 70s, when everything was very real,
and very gritty, and then we lost it
somewhere in the 90s,
and then things got very cynical.
But there's a fun factor to the 80s,
and it's no surprise that it takes a project
three, four plus hour documentaries
to really do that decade justice.
Growing up in the 80s, horror movies
were a big part of my life.
Thanks to a video rentals shop,
I was able to watch as many as I want
when I wanted without issue on my edge,
that helped me get through the trauma of school,
and everything that came with it,
and this is why I'm passionate about them,
and in particular, "Nightmare on Elm Street"
is one I'm really passionate about.
80s horror movies were a big part of my childhood,
having grown up in the 80s,
I watched them all.
My favorite 80s horror movie of all time
is "A Nightmare on Elm Street".
It was the first horror movie I ever saw,
and it planted the seed for my love of horror.
These "Search for Darkness" documentaries
have been nostalgic, and brought back
all those happy memories of visiting video stores.
I was born in 1980,
so being a child of the 80s,
some of my best memories
were hanging out with my mom
on a Friday or Saturday night,
going down to the local video store,
getting some 80s horror on VHS tape,
and just making those memories
and being scared, laughing,
and getting all cringed up.
And the "In Search of Darkness" series
has brought those memories back to me,
and helped me discover all the horror films
I never knew existed!
Thank you for that.
Hi there.
I love watching horror movie documentaries
and anything regarding horror,
but one series I really love
is the "In Search of Darkness" series.
I love how all these people just show
how much they love and care for these movies,
especially for the movies I've never even heard before,
and I love this series, because it shows me
all different kinds of horror
that I haven't even heard before,
or even seen, or anything like that.
So I'm sad that it's ending,
but hey, gotta end sometimes, right?
I think most horror fans would agree
that the absolute best decade for horror
was the 1980s.
We got the best of the best,
the worst of the worst,
the best of the worst,
and everything in between.
I can't even pick a favorite,
because there's far too many to choose from,
but having something like the "In Search of Darkness"
trilogy has been an absolute dream come true.
Getting to sit there for hours and hours on end,
and watch my favorite filmmakers
talk about my favorite films has been great,
but it's also been great to be able to discover
new movies that I may not have even heard of before.
"Evil Dead II", "Re-Animator",
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2",
all of these great horror films,
with comedic timing, comedy inserted into it,
really affect me, shape me,
to such a degree that today I write about horror
and horror comedy for Pace Magazine and Vulture.
80s horror for me signifies complete nostalgia.
I clearly remember being a young boy
and seeing these wonderful and iconic 80s posters,
and being simultaneously scared and intrigued.
But now as an academic that writes about horror,
documentaries like "In Search of Darkness"
are highly important as they raise the profile
of horrors in that form.
These films are not only fun and super cool,
but they are significant cultural products,
well-deserving of academic analysis and study.
The 80s was a time when the horror genre exploded.
Big name horror icons like Jason, Freddie,
Chuckie, Pinhead, all got their start in the 80s.
And being a late 90s kid, these were names
that I grew up knowing to fear.
My girlfriend and I searched out
a lot of these films, and it was something
that we could always bond over.
And I think that "In Search of Darkness"
did something really great,
cataloging and celebrating all of these films.
They have inspired me to go to college
and learn how to write horror films.
I'm a future filmmaker
because of all the movies I've watched.
And I'm thankful that I was able
to be a part of this community.
Watching horror movies as a kid in the 80s
inspired me to get into the film industry,
especially to make horror movies of my own,
and so "In Search of Darkness" continues
to be that inspiration,
and I hope it does the same
for the next wave of horror creators,
for generations to come.
80s horror means a lot to me,
takes me back to when I was a kid
hanging out with my brothers and my friends,
staying up late, watching movies I know I should not
have been watching at the time,
and falling in love with stories and characters
created by Wes Craven, John Carpenter,
George Romero, and Charles Band.
I will always be in their debt
for providing me with hours of entertainment,
and with "In Search of Darkness",
it has provided me with even more hours
of 80s horror entertainment
that I will continue to watch to this day.
Long live 80s horror and "In Search of Darkness".
As an 80s kid, one of my favorite memories
are from video stores Friday night selecting movies.
The horror section always had the best films,
and the most amazing cover art.
The 80s horror basically has it all,
a great story, a good cast,
amazing special effects, and a cool soundtrack.
These documentaries have been life-changing for me.
They were films that I had forgotten about,
films that I had never seen,
and a love for a distinct period
of my early life that I oftentimes feel disconnected from,
and I'm so thankful to have found these projects,
and been able to back all of them.
Thank you.
All the best parts of nostalgia
in a pool of blood.
Love it.
Hey, this is Jacob.
And Angelica.
We're both fans of 80s horror movies.
That's why we own all three volumes
of "In Search of Darkness".
It's a dictionary, basically, of all the greatest
horror movies made from the 80s
that we've all grown to love.
"In Search of Darkness", you rock.
The "In Search of Darkness" documentaries
have allowed me to relive, year by year,
a truly golden age in horror cinema.
In the 80s, we had directors like Carpenter,
Romero, and Cronenberg in the peak of their career.
We had a new generation of practical special effects
in horror cinema, and video stores coming out
with a new horror title every week.
The fact that we're still talking about all these films
over 30 years later just shows how durable
the horror genre is.
So please, keep those documentaries coming.
Hi.
First of all, I want to thank you
for including us fans in so many ways,
and for the journey you've been taking us
for the three "In Search of Darkness" documentaries.
I love 80s horror so much because of the style,
the creativity, and the passion for each of the films.
But the most important part for me is
that every single film from this horror decade,
the good and the bad,
are so great because of the fun they make.
David, Robin.
You've created a monster.
A timeless milestone for every horror fan.
And I'm extremely thankful for being featured
in part one of the ultimate horror documentary experience.
It made me feel like I'm 15 again.
So for anyone who's "In Search of Darkness",
stop searching, because we found it.
80s horror is so important to me
because it gave me ideas to draw when I was younger,
and as my drawing ability progressed,
today I'm a tattoo artist,
so I guess you could say 80s horror helped shape my life.
Plus being Canadian, I want to give
a special thanks to David Cronenberg
for all the inspiration he gave me.
"In Search of Darkness", honestly,
greatest documentary I have ever watched.
It brought me straight back to some of the most
special times of my life.
As a kid in the 80s, I was constantly
in and out of hospitals.
Watching horror movies and playing video games
was a release for me.
Basically, I'm the kid on the box art,
and on the posters.
I'm so proud to be part of this incredible journey
through 80s horror that is the "In Search of Darkness"
trilogy, and I just had to immortalize it on my body.
I love it that we're done.
I love it.
Love it.
Enough is never enough
of the star.
Mm.