Masters of Horror

I cannot put into words just how much of an influence MASTERS OF HORROR was on me as a teenager who was starting to get serious about wanting to write and make films. Reading the coverage of this show in FANGORIA at the time was beyond inspiring. To watch these icons of the genre just get together and make something on the cheap, pretty quick, but turning out episodes that were bursting with creativity, that each had their own distinct flavor. It was incredible It felt like we were getting new John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Don Coscarelli, etc. movies every week, because we were. These episodes felt like feature films and only came up just a little shy of a feature runtime. Some of them are longer than some of the Universal classics.

I absolutely wrote my first feature screenplay and was inspired to start shooting short films with my friends at least partially because of reading interviews with these seasoned legends talking about how much fun it was to just get together and make things with friends. Many of these guys had whole careers since they started out doing just that, and the passion remained exactly the same.

Like TALES FROM THE CRYPT, MASTERS OF HORROR did not have to worry about standard cable censorship. It was on Showtime and it REALLY pushed some boundaries, most notably in Takashi Miike’s IMPRINT.

This show also had some of the all-time best DVD sets. Both the first season's mausoleum set and the second season's skull were positively inspired. In college, those were centerpieces of my dorm room physical media collection. I loved using this show to either introduce my friends to some of the greats, or prove that directors that many had begun to see as washed up or has-beens did, in fact, still have it.

HIGHLIGHT EPISODES:

• “Cigarette Burns”- John Carpenter’s first episode for the show feels so existentially dreadful, both exactly in keeping with the director’s sensibilities and intriguingly at odds with them at the same time. It’s similar to IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, but with a much more harrowing tone. Norman Reedus plays a collector of rare film prints who is hunting down the rarest one of all, a movie that screened only once because it was so grotesque it drove an entire audience to murder.
• “Jenifer”- Anyone who says Dario Argento never directed anything great after the late ‘80s/early ‘90s hasn’t seen Jenifer. It’s a gnarly, sometimes funny, often disturbing look at what men will do for a great body. Jenifer is a woman with a monstrous face and a gorgeous body and the story revolves around a man who is obviously not with her for her personality as she begins to destroy everything in his life and even then, he can’t give her up.
• “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”- Don Coscarelli directs from a Joe Lansdale story and the tone and style could not be more different t than their previous collaboration, BUBBA HO-TEP. This feels like a precursor to YOU’RE NEXT. A woman on an isolated mountain road finds herself targeted by a relentless killer, but uses survivalist training she never even wanted to turn the tables on her attacker. Ethan Embry gives an almost too chilling performance.
• “Pro-Life”- Unfortunately even more topical now than it was then, Carpenter’s second episode revolves around a hostage situation at an abortion clinic, as deranged, gun-toting redneck Ron Perlman and his posse are willing to kill anyone and everyone to make sure that absolutely nothing prevents his daughter from giving birth to a literal demon.
• “Imprint”- The aforementioned Takashi Miike episode that was pulled from air on an uncensored network. It’s an impressive claim to fame, but honestly, what did you expect from the director of AUDITION and ICHI THE KILLER? My favorite thing about this episode is that Miike reminds the viewer, even in the ultra-gory 2000s when HOSTEL and SAW were rising in popularity, that American audiences have a very different threshold for gore. Miike does not limit the extremes he goes to for that audience in this episode, and people were not ready for it.
• “Sick Girl”- It was so cool to see Lucky McKee join the ranks of the Masters of Horror, alongside Carpenter, Dante, Argento and the others, only a few short years into his career, coming off of the word-of-mouth success of the incredible and still underseen MAY. SICK GIRL features MAY star Angela Bettis, who is expectedly great. But the truly unhinged, captivating central performance comes from adult actress Erin Brown (AKA Misty Mundae) in this lesbian bug romance. Lucky McKee absolutely took the opportunity to just make a Lucky McKee film as he normally would and present it to a wider audience, and we were all better for it.
• “Valerie on the Stairs”- Clive Barker crafted the story for this episode directed by Mick Garris, about an apartment building that’s a commune for unsuccessful writers, where a new tenant is enchanted by the ghost of an unfinished idea, named Valerie. But this lover who can never have the companionship she seeks is likewise stalked by a beast whose hunger can never be sated. Absurdly inventive and creative. Pure Barker.