Original subtitles

Do you ever wonder about the different ways of dying?

You know, violently.

Brains.

Nostalgia plays such a heavy part

in, you know, what you grow up with.

The thing about horror that I really, really love --

It was this kind of counterculture,

"Fuck you" attitude,

and it was something that your parents hated.

Rusler: Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the '80s, right?

Well, it became a lot more than that.

We were rock stars in the '80s.

We were busier than we'd ever been.

The amount of horror movies that came out in the '80s

was enormous.

The output was insane worldwide.

Horror films really did open the floodgates.

Englund: Horror, splatter, gore.

Great Grand Guignol.

That horror stew.

Savini: Why did it affect me so strongly?

I mean, it really changed everything.

No! Allen: A good horror film can be scary,

but it can also make you laugh.

It just picked something in my brain.

You're taken on this wild ride emotionally.

You're being terrified, you're laughing,

they relax you, they make you laugh,

then they scare you again.

I'm a scaredy-cat.

Rusler: When I see a good horror movie,

the first thing I want to do when I get out of there

is I want to fight or fuck.

I look now at the '80s.

There's never gonna be another time like it.

That's for damn sure.

Hey kids, welcome to prime time!

The key to understanding

what made the films of the '80s so great

is to understand the influences

that all the filmmakers had as kids.

It was clear that these filmmakers were showing love

for the movies of the past.

There's a cycle.

People who grew up on something

relay that back for a younger generation.

So it's always this wheel turning of, like,

what's popular at one point comes back around again.

Good ones became all-time classics

while the bad ones became cult favorites.

Peterson: When I was doing "Movie Macabre,"

I saw myself as kind of a librarian...

...exposing a new generation of new people

to these horror films that I grew up with

and that I loved when I was young.

I think it was important

to curate these movies from the past for a new audience.

Unpleasant dreams.

I was 8 years old in 1954,

when "The Creature From the Black Lagoon"

hit the movie theaters, okay?

Announcer: A throwback to a creature

that had existed 100 million years ago.

In those days, I believed that monsters were real.

Frankenstein, the Wolf Man -- they were real.

It's not until I saw "Man of a Thousand Faces"

that that showed me, "Oh, somebody creates this stuff."

Announcer: Yes, Lon Chaney was all of these --

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Miracle Man,

the Phantom of the Opera.

Somebody says "Oh, that's an old movie."

Well, it's not old if you haven't seen it.

I fell in love with horror when I was a young kid.

"Bride of Frankenstein" was my favorite.

She's alive! Alive!

In the early '50s, I saw "Thing From Another World."

Howard Hawks.

Oh, my God. That -- Oh, geez. I loved that.

It was kind of serendipitous, my life in horror movies.

The very first horror movie that I remember seeing

was actually a science-fiction film

called "It Came From Outer Space" in 3-D.

And that meant a gigantic impression --

because of the 3-D process.

A meteor in the beginning came out of the screen

and blew up in my little face.

I ran screaming.

As a kid, I just couldn't get enough of it.

"Horror of Dracula"

with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

The iconic first reveal of Dracula,

with the bloodshot contact lenses

and the blood around his mouth

when he snarls at Jonathan Harker.

It's just -- I'll never forget that image.

Vampires, werewolves were always --

They're staples. They're the original movies

to show the manifestation of our monsters.

The film that gave me nightmares for several years --

and this is hard to admit --

was "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

That movie scared the crap out of me.

And, you know, it's funny when I look back at it.

I see elements of "Re-Animator" in that film.

You turn into Mr. Hyde by getting an injection.

So these guys with syringes are running around,

you know, in this movie, very much like "Re-Animator."

One more dose!

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die."

I was 8.

It's really sort of an early echo of "Re-Animator."

All she would say is...

Let me die.

Let me die.

But the idea was horrifying to me.

The first R-rated horror movie I ever saw was "The Omen."

It's all for you!

I was 13 years old.

My dad took me.

I was raised Catholic,

so that decapitation of David Warner

made a huge impression on me.

And I've decapitated many people in my movies over the years.

I think it's one of the finest ways of murdering someone.

I was a big horror guy.

In the '60s, we had "Chiller Theatre."

That was my Saturday night go-to.

I lovedthat stuff.

My mother let me watch "The Birds"

when it came on television.

I remember saying, "How could you let me watch that?"

But my mom was super cool.

"Psycho."

I was 10 years old. My parents took me.

I don't know if they had a clue what we were going to see,

but it certainly impacted mylife.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

We're all sitting there with our Chico Bon Bons

and our hot buttered popcorn and our Good & Plenty,

you know, waiting for the movie.

Announcer: Now all the images of horror,

the demons of your mind...

That was, like, this great fan-boy memory for me

of how important that was to us.

I'm a silly goose, ain't I?

I'm telling you. I love that old scary stuff.

Dario Argento kicked off the 1980s with "Inferno,"

which was a continuation of his "Mother of Tears" trilogy

after "Suspiria."

Basically took us into an apartment building

in New York City,

and I think shows how their sort of desire to infiltrate

into American cinema was very much there and prevalent.

It feels like an amalgamation of a lot of Argento movies.

For me, probably the biggest

and most impressive set piece in that film

is the underwater sequence that we see early on,

where it feels impossibly long.

You're kind of holding your breath with her.

And yet it's so beautiful and so tranquil,

and it's such a fun juxtaposition

against everything else in that movie.

And with "Inferno,"

you don't really get a full-on viewing of the witch.

You get sort of these glimpses of her and her hands

and the cauldron.

Argento, as opposed to just sort of showing his cards,

he still plays with viewers and kind of still holds back.

There's definitely moments of animal cruelty in "Inferno"

that I think makes it uncomfortable

for a lot of folks.

Ultimately, "Inferno" wraps up with the reveal of the witch...

...and then, basically, the building ends up in flames,

which is very similar to how "Suspiria" ends.

but then "Inferno" kind of takes it to another level

with sort of death incarnate making an appearance.

"Inferno" is Argento, like, really flexing his muscles.

He's got a couple hits under his belt,

he's got some money, and he's going for it in the early '80s.

"Inferno" is one of those films.

Announcer: "Humanoids From the Deep."

"Humanoids From the Deep."

This is top-notch exploitation from my buddy Roger Corman.

This one features fishy mutants trying to accost women

so that they can be fruitful and multiply.

Not very PC, is it?

Corman's mantra for the film was literally the monsters

need to kill all the men and rape all the women.

Oh! No!

It was actually directed by a woman, Barbara Peeters.

Now, whether or not Corman hired her

to deflect some of the criticism

from the movie's more exploitive elements, I don't know.

I do know that he requested that a bunch more violence

and nudity be added in postproduction,

which she was not happy with him about.

The humanoid costumes are actually pretty cool.

Rather than just the typical, you know,

"Creature From the Black Lagoon"-style fish man...

"Humanoids From the Deep" was done so quickly.

And it was a very low-budget film on the producers' part.

I ended up playing a humanoid.

Every time -- three hours to get into the suit

and three hours to get out of it,

because of all the -- you know, putting the slimy seaweed

to hide the unfinished parts on it.

Tenold: The finale of the movie

just goes completely balls to the wall.

It's fish men killing people.

They're ripping bikinis off of women.

Corman was like, "You know what? This movie's rated R.

We're gonna earn that rating."

Johnson: Barbara really liked the way I took bullet hits.

And so every time you see a humanoid get shot in that movie,

it's me.

Help!

"Humanoids From the Deep" is a better creature feature

than you'd expect from Roger Corman.

The end stinger

is pretty much an "Alien" chestburster rip-off...

...but it's still fun.

Announcer: No one can escape on Mother's Day, because...

Mother's Day never ends.

Two depraved brothers kidnap friends

who are on a camping trip and then torture and rape them.

This movie is very deranged.

It's very depraved.

It's very much something that you could never make

in this day and age.

Ike and Addley are just two filthy redneck --

just psycho monsters.

And, of course, all orchestrated by the mom.

Darlings, you have made your mother very proud.

Their house is just disgusting. It's cluttered.

They eat like pigs. They eat like slobs.

She thinks it's funny, 'cause she's the fucked-up mother.

It's just -- It's a real --

Ugh. it's a dirty movie.

One of the best deaths of all time

was when they finally do escape.

Pouring the Drano down his throat.

Then he's just vomiting up, like, red --

You would assume it's his entrails.

There's another amazing scene

where they're trying to escape down the side of the house

with a sleeping bag,

and the laces of the sleeping bag

are just cutting into her palms.

It just looks real. It looks gross.

Like, what would you do? You know, it's your friend.

It does have some humor in it,

but once again, it's very black, dark humor.

I swear sometimes you boys are just like lil' savages.

It's more of a social commentary.

Gore and comedy and -- But it's a masterpiece.

Charles Kaufman wrote it and directed it.

In the 1980s, when it came out,

it had a full-page ad in The New York Times.

Full page.

And was distributed as if it was, you know, an MGM movie.

It was distributed by an independent.

They put a lot of money into when it came out.

It would never happen today.

"Mother's Day" had at least 100 theaters when it opened.

Jericho: As horrific as it sounds, rape,

in the '70s and early '80s in horror movies

was used as a plot device,

specifically in "Last House on the Left."

I mean, that whole movie is based around that.

You would never see that now -- nor shouldyou see that now,

but "Mother's Day" is the same for that,

where it's just over-the-top, horrific things happening

to these poor women, who then have to go get their revenge

by murdering the people who did these horrible things to them.

Aah!

It's hard to watch.

Because yeah, they get their comeuppance in the end,

but was it worth it?

Like, these poor people.

You don't leave those movies going, "Enh, whatever."

You go, like, "Wow.

That really made you feel something

and made you leave a piece of yourself with that movie."

Dante: Once a picture like "Prom Night" came out

and made a lot of money, the genre of the slasher film,

which had really kind of started with "Halloween,"

but nobody really called it that --

but once "Prom Night" came out and was a big hit,

and the "Terror Trains"

and all the other following pictures that were made,

it became a viable genre unto itself.

Our next movie is an exercise in gruesome stupidity.

Now, you might ask, "What is gruesome stupidity?"

That's when everybody in the movie is stupid

and they're also either dead or covered in blood.

This next movie is a horrible example of that.

Williams: It was like "Murder on the Orient Express"

with teenagers.

And the movie itself,

it's almost structured like an anthology.

Everybody has their own little individual story line

until they all kind of start to collide together

and you finally get where the terror train was going.

No! No, no!

That's when I started recognizing Jamie Lee Curtis.

I was just like, "She's in everything."

Those few years after "Halloween," she was it.

You know, she was thefinal girl.

Jamie Lee Curtis -- She's a terrific everywoman.

She was an action figure.

Aah!

And what I do remember is how creepy the killer was.

There was this ambiguous, androgynous sense to him

that, as a young kid who was being picked on a lot,

I could see myself in that.

You didn't necessarily see yourself in the survivors.

Man: Shut up. Woman: Come on.

I said move off...sir.

You saw yourself in the people who were being antagonized.

The mask on the killer, just a see-through --

It was the same type of mask from "Sweet Alice," actually.

It was that kind of vibe.

If you like early '80s Jamie Lee Curtis --

and who doesn't? -- it's worth a watch.

Announcer: "Alligator."

The nature-run-amok movies of the '80s.

Donna!

Oh, fuck!

Probably my favorite subgenre of horror.

Taylor: As a kid, I remember all of my friends

telling the urban legend about this.

Nobody I knew wanted to go to New York City,

because to them,

the sewer system was just crawling with rogue pets.

I just love all the humor in "Alligator."

I mean, there are some outrageous moments,

like the alligator in the swimming pool

with the kid walking the plank...

the running joke about Robert Forster's thinning hair.

You need to see a hairstylist.

They let your hair grow down and whip the cross.

There are just so many little moments

that humanize the characters

and also provide a good counterpoint.

That's another movie that mixes horror and comedy really well.

The thing that I remember the most about this movie

was how realistic the gator looked.

I mean, the goddamn thing's mouth was enormous!

And then every time it would eat somebody,

it just felt like you could feelit.

I mean, just this slamming down.

And you're like, "Aah!"

It always made my skin crawl.

Robert Forster is, like --

He's up, trying to get out of the manhole cover,

and it's stuck, and he's just giving it as much as he can.

And then you see the gator coming up behind him.

Like, "Oh, okay. So they can just climb ladders now?

This is horseshit."

I can just remember the panic as a kid,

going, "Get out of there! Get out of there!"

No!

Gary?

Mm. Very tense moment for a 10-year-old.

Announcer: The most terrifying experiment

in the history of science is out of control.

Ken Russell just made the weirdest, greatest movies

in that time.

I think he's totally underrated.

I remember, in "Altered States" the big gag,

the really cool thing was with the sensory-deprivation tank.

The story line was really, I thought,

intellectually challenging.

And William Hurt will always be my favorite actor

from that period of time.

And then he did drugs in the sensory-deprivation tank.

Well, that sounded like a lot of fun, right?

That sounded like something you wanted to do.

He has these horrible contortions

that either is really happening to him

or he's imagining happening to him.

"Altered States" was one of the first movies I saw

that had, like, that crazy makeup effect

where the arm bubbles.

This whole bladder technology, I think it actually began

with "Altered States" in the '80s, Dick Smith's work.

And it was still, you know, a groundbreaking technique

to take skin and have that skin change and be able to swell

and do things that we hadn't seen before.

Emily: Defy it, Eddie.

Eddie transforms into some kind of a primal being

that only indulges his own elemental appetites.

There are things that happen

when you're exploring these altered states

that are unexplainable

and could be liberating, could be terrifying.

At the end, when he's slamming around the room,

changing from, you know, one state to another,

is he imagining it?

Is he actually becoming this creature?

It's a mind-blow in the best kind of way

but also a cautionary tale, right?

Which all great horror films are cautionary tales.

I recommend it.

I'm gonna go make my son sit through that,

'cause he's a senior in high school

and I want to make sure that he never does drugs.

If you, as I did in the '80s, walked into a movie theater

and didn't know you're walking into an Italian horror movie,

you were kind of caught wondering

what the hell you just walked into.

Because it's just a littledifferent.

I mean, they're truly foreign films, right?

It's foreign to our experience.

Don't act like that. Come out.

Englund: The Italian culture, they love horror.

They respect it much more than Americans.

They respect it as a genre, like the Western...

Get three coffins ready.

...or the gangster film or the film noir or the mystery.

I think there is a reaction to the inherent fascism

that was in or left over in those cultures at that time.

Italy was also sort of coming out

from under a conservative, authoritarian regime.

When it comes to Italian filmmakers during the 1980s,

I think the three titans of Italian cinema

were Lamberto Bava, Lucio Fulci, and, of course, Dario Argento.

Argento's is very operatic. It's very colorful.

It's a sensory experience, with sound and color and set pieces.

"Suspiria" is one of my favorite movies,

not only because of the story line,

but also because Dario Argento's color palette

is so amazing.

And the kills are amazing in it.

"Opera" to me is a classic. Dario Argento's "Opera."

He's a visual stylist, okay?

The shot through the peephole in the door,

when the guy gets the bullet and it takes out the phone --

That's incredible stuff, okay?

To me, Dario is a volcano of the mind.

Lamberto Bava was the wild card

of the Italian maestros of horror cinema in the 1980s.

He was the guy who was gonna take you

on some really crazy journeys

that you possibly could not have ever expected you would go on.

He would just take big swings

that would connect in very unique ways.

And then you have somebody like Lucio Fulci,

who was sort of the maestro

of these really over-the-top effects --

gooey, gory movies

where you could almost just feel the residue on your skin.

Fulci is the weirdest to me,

because he doesn't give a shit about reality.

He is creating a weird, surreal hallucination for you.

And Fulci clearly has some kind of eye fetish

where he needs to do eye trauma every time.

And it's horrible.

What's more horrifying than to be stabbed in the eye?

They're into eyeballs.

A lot of eyeballs.

The Italians just went there immediately.

You know, they just went, "Boom!"

Argento did a little bit of that too,

especially with "Opera,"

where you have a character who's completely defenseless

and is forced to watch these horrific, macabre events.

They have needles taped right underneath their eyes,

so if they close their eyes, they will shred their eyelids,

which to me -- I can't think of a more terrifying scenario

to be put in.

Italian directors were sort of challenging us as viewers

with the eye trauma,

being like, "Well, if you're gonna watch this,

you know, this is what you get."

Reflective of our willingness to sit there and bear witness

to a lot of this really crazy and over-the-top gore

that they were willing to put into their movies

for our entertainment.

Geretta: And the eyes are the window to the soul.

Bingo.

And you know those smart Italians had thought about that.

Englund: My heart with the Italians

is in the style, the stylized horror.

Not that I have anything against Italian cannibal horror,

because I know how influential it is

and I know how hard core it is,

and I know what it represents in the world of horror,

splatter, gore.

I just was so taken

with the sort of stylistics of the Italians.

I am totally in love with Italian giallo.

There's a different reality in Italian giallo films.

The reality doesn't have to be so airtight.

One of the things that fans say to me all the time

is they go, "I love those Italian movies.

They're just crazy. They don't make any sense."

Mm, sorry. Yeah, they do.

But it's based on theirculture, not ours.

They make perfect sense within their culture.

Wixson: Giallo really takes your expectations

and then completely obliterates them

and comes at you in a totally different way.

There's definitely motifs that we saw in giallo movies.

You'd have the mystery killer who was stalking somebody.

Most of the time, they were wearing gloves.

It was never usually a gun.

It was always something like a switchblade or a knife,

which gave these movies sort of a sense of intimacy.

Ultimately, like, having sort of a collection of victims as well.

Like, there is always a larger picture

in terms of sort of the body count

that they wanted to amass in giallo movies.

It's a celebration of horror, of bodies, of bleeding,

of screaming women.

It's also the appreciation of the kills --

the special-effects makeup, the supernatural.

You'll always get a payoff,

even if it takes a while to get there.

And it's gonna make you go, "Ugh!"

And it doesn't stop, so you can't just close your eyes.

No. It just goes and it goes and it goes.

You know, it's right down your throat.

"We are going to make you recoil in terror no matter what."

Fear is universal.

You know, it's another reason why horror does well

in distribution around the world.

You don't have to know the languages.

Everyone can recognize running.

Everyone can recognize fear.

When you went to see these movies,

you didn't go because you knew anything about them.

You went because of the poster, the newspaper ad, the title.

You went because of the titillation of the ad campaign.

All of the Italian horror films, for example,

came out during this period, but nobody knew they were Italian.

All the Italian names were changed to Anglicized names,

and they were dubbed, of course.

I'll kill you, you son of a --

Are you trying to say that those girls were killed

by someone you wouldn't define as a school friend?

Dubbing in Italian horror, I think,

takes a while to get used to.

Because if you're not expecting it,

it can be very off-putting.

Best, best bad overdubs, for sure.

The worstoverdubs.

Worse than then, you know, old kung fu movies.

Listen to me, young lady. We're in this situation --

Youlisten, you gang of bloodthirsty bastard!

"Hey, what's going on here?

What's in that closet?"

"Don't open it."

"Why not? Oh, it's a zombie. Shoot it."

"Aah!"

That's the inherent charm of it.

Like, that's the rough edges that I love about it.

Because it doesn't feel super polished.

When we laugh at dubbing and we go, "The lips don't match,"

and for the rest of the world, that doesn't matter.

Smoking is not allowed in here.

Excuse us.Geretta: I've dubbed.

I've dubbed myself. I've dubbed other people.

It isan art form, and it takes a while to get good at it.

Huh. What I think doesn't matter anymore.

Bitch.

I think Italian horror filmmakers are fans

of American horror and American dollars.

That heightened Italian flavor gets into America,

gets into theaters, gets into video stores.

That lurid box art starts to show up on the shelves.

The Italians were churning out splatter movies --

must have been like 20 a week or something.

So every week, there was something new.

They all have a very special place in my heart.

They're not all necessarily great films.

They were just doing what they wanted to do

and telling these really crazy stories.

Honestly, when you would pick up a movie at the video store,

you never knew what experience you were in for.

And that was the fun of it.

Nobile: I think what's interesting

about Italian exploitation in general

is that it all starts as a rip-off.

You'll get one hit, and then you'll get 30 copies.

Going back to, like, a Hercules movie in the '50s.

They've got a hit Hercules movie,

and then there's all these sword-and-sandal movies.

You've got "Fistful of Dollars"

and then the whole spaghetti-Western genre.

And the horror genre is no different.

They picked up on what was happening in America

and copied it and then perverted it --

I say that as a compliment --

and made it gaudy and loud and funky...

...and naked.

There's so much American DNA in Italian horror,

but it's all just cranked up to this insane level.

So a lot of times what you may have seen

is people doing the best they can

with the financial choices they were given,

people still wanting to make their movie.

And like anything else, artistry is on a scale.

So thanks to the Italians

and thanks to "Suspiria" and everything that came after,

suddenly '80s horror is very colorful --

in a way that '70s horror was not.

And I think you can tie that directly to the Italians.

Announcer: "The Funhouse" --

coming soon from Universal Pictures.

"The Funhouse" is a movie that kind of gets lost

in Tobe Hooper's filmography

because it's between "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"

and then those crazy movies he made for Cannon Films

in the mid-'80s,

which is a shame, because it's actually, like,

a solid little haunted-house slasher movie.

Moseley: Well, it was funny,

because I was actually dating Elizabeth Berridge

for a while there, so it was great to see her work.

Joey!

I think that's one of my favorite Tobe movies.

I certainly loved the monster. I thought that was fantastic.

I loved that whole movie.

The monster in "The Funhouse,"

a guy named Gunther, wears this Frankenstein mask

because his actual face is also really horrendous.

And the effects on his face are really memorable.

You got, like, red eyes and fangs

and this stringy white hair.

You tell me who got it! Come on!

Just this kind of harelip, fanged mouth

with drool coming out of it.

This sort of bastard son of the carnival guy.

Just the way he's treated and the way he's deformed and --

You almost feel for him,

but yet he's going around killing people.

This has got to be the only movie

where the inciting incident is a guy in a Frankenstein mask

getting some happy service by a psychic.

Nothing to be ashamed of.

It happens to the best of us.

What's interesting about this movie

is that it's a lot more graphic than "Texas Chain Saw Massacre,"

where all the gore is implied and you don't really see it.

You get to see all the backstage parts

of the funhouse in a carnival -- all the whirring mechanics

and the trap doors and the track.

It's great to see that space explored.

Jericho: "Funhouse," to me, is a movie

that was completely made by Fangoria

and talking about the influence of the magazines at that time.

I remember when I saw that on the cover,

I was like, "That's disgusting."

It's one of those things where when you're in a funhouse

ever since then, I always wonder,

"What if this guy is an actual killer?"

All right. Here we go!

Announcer: Prepare for "The Final Conflict,"

the concluding chapter of the "Omen" trilogy.

"Omen III" was 1981.

That picked up Damien as an adult.

He's a thirtyish politician played by Sam Neill.

I think that was the first time I had ever seen Sam Neill,

probably same for American audiences in general.

Take him.

As the movie begins, he has the post that his father,

Gregory Peck, had a mere five years before him

in the, you know, twisted chronology of the "Omen" series,

where they would, you know, fast-forward

with soap-opera speed.

"Omen II," Damien was 13.

Suddenly, he's 30 years old.

Anyway, he is the ambassador to Great Britain

at the beginning of the story, as is the wont

of all of the devil worshippers who surround Damien.

And they're grooming him for his, you know,

ultimate world power.

Do you hear me?

Group: We hear and obey.

We hear and obey.

One of the weird things about that movie

is that it really is all structured around

a series of murders of babies.

Because in the story,

the rebirth of Christ has also happened.

And now Damien feels threatened by this,

so he dispatches all of his devil-worshipping minions

to kill all the babies.

Slay the Nazarene,

and you will know the violent raptures of my father's kingdom.

Which is kind of hilarious,

because it's just, like, something you could not do

in movies anymore.

Liquidate the Nazarene.

There's a woman who --

She just, like, somehow has this weird hallucination

of her baby as a monster.

And so she takes a hot iron to the baby and goes "Chh!"

It's -- It's really kind of unspeakable.

Scrivens: "Friday the 13th Part II" --

I'd seen the end of that movie so many times

because it was tacked on to the beginning

of "Friday the 13th Part III," which I rented a lot as a kid.

There's something really charming

about the characters in that film.

Jeff, the women are showing you up.

What's the matter with ya?

Hey.

The second one, to me,

is the only true definition of a sequel.

Bigger story, bigger budget, bigger scares.

Massive twist because now you're going,

"This is the first appearance of Jason as the killer."

It was the first one that Steve Miner directed.

The way he paced it was that you didn't know who was gonna die.

Manfredini: Jason, he's the shark.

You're gonna do something and Jason's gonna knock you off.

You know.

I loved Amy Steel as the lead heroine.

You're such a suck-up, Mark.

She is just awesome and badass.

I love the way Jason and her interact with each other

at the end.

The chase at the end, to me,

is one of my favorite final moments --

the rat going under the bed and peeing underneath it.

There's moments in there that are almost a little quirky

that I don't feel happened in other films like that.

She psychs out Jason.

I love that scene,

where they're in what we call the Chez Jason,

with the head there and all the candles and stuff,

and she puts on the sweater,

and Jason's, like, got the sack thing

and freaking out and stuff.

I wish they had never abandoned the burlap sack.

And that's what a lot of people don't realize,

is that he doesn't get the hockey mask until number three.

But it's just overall, to me, so much scarier

than any of the other ones.

I think that's probably why it's my favorite.

Announcer: "Graduation Day."

"Graduation Day" is a movie

that has a killer who is killing people

specifically who were on the high school track team.

It stars Linnea Quigley,

but originally, it didn't have Linnea Quigley.

They had another actress in the place

who they filmed some scenes with her,

but then she wouldn't do the nudity

that was required with the role.

So they fired her and brought in Linnea Quigley

to play the same part.

Now there's a blonde, but she's different

but she's playing the same character.

Your ass is mine.

Ooh! Tough guy!Oh, no!

Quigley: It was just, like, a fun film.

It was light, and it's got all these great kills in it.

Like, my boyfriend,

Billy Hufsey, who teaches acting classes now

and I don't think wants to talk about it

was like, going to -- Of course, "I'll be right back,"

and goes and pees in the woods and gets his head chopped off.

I remember doing the running,

and I made a mistake -- which I'll never do again --

and I ate lunch -- a lot.

I remember having to throw up because I was running so much.

I was just like...

I'm like, "Oh, my God. My stomach."

So that was a fun fact too -- that I threw up after running.

When they were doing the effects,

they had cast the head of the original girl.

So you see Linnea Quigley through most of the film,

and then in the end, when she gets killed,

they're using the head of the girl

from the beginning of the movie...

It's not my head, but it's supposed to be.

...which has confused a few people.

Vanna White also appears in the movie,

but she doesn't turn letters.

Fuck. It's blood.

It's another example of how popular horror films were.

You had this movie that cost around $250,000.

They put it out there. It made almost $24 million.

Those old trailers from the '80s,

they just had a certain magic to them,

where you'd have the voice

of something as silly as "The Boogens,"

but they deliver it in... "The Boogens."

And that sets off something in your head

where you need to see this movie to see what arethe boogens.

Announcer: There is no escape.

"The Boogens."

And the people involved with the production,

they didn't know what the boogens was going to look like.

They hired a special-effects guy and they said, "Okay.

Here's the ideas that we have."

And he came back with this idea of a little monster

with, like, crab claws.

And they were like, "Well, that's really cool,

but that's not what a boogens looks like."

And they were like, "Well, what does a boogens look like?"

They're like, "We don't know."

And he went and eventually designed this monster.

It was like a turtle.

But the turtle shell

was supposed to look like the brain of a sheep

that he saw in a medical catalog.

It had tentacles, and its head could come out and retract,

and it had teeth,

and it was just the most ridiculous hodgepodge of ideas

that could all come together

and somehow be thrown into a horror film.

Strangest damn thing I ever saw.

Announcer: "Dead & Buried."

It will take your breath away.

Englund: That's my second horror film.

There's some great sequences and great images in it.

We were all up in this great little town

in Northern California called Mendocino.

And you don't have to dress it. It's just there.

It looks like Stephen King's gonna walk out of every door.

It looks exactly like what you think Maine should look like.

And it's James Farentino, the late, great Jack Albertson,

and Lisa Blount.

Wonderful, extraordinary actress.

Most people know her from "Officer and a Gentleman."

It's actually an effective little movie.

That's it! No! No! Don't do that!

What are you doing, Nurse --

It turns out that the mortician has been behind

killing the townspeople and reanimating them,

basically creating an army of undead puppets.

Stan Winston did the makeup on that film.

And there was a lot of us.

He had to make a lot of people the undead.

Stan -- not yet the legend he would become, but a player.

Stan was beginning to push more into puppetry

with some of the effects he created for that film.

There are two that stand out to me

as being the most "Oh, that's cool."

One is the burn victim.

He created this shoulders-up puppet

of this terribly burned character,

where you're seeing the muscles and the ligaments.

It was a hand puppet, and it was highly effective.

And I remember seeing that come together in his shop

and thinking that was the grossest thing he'd ever made.

Another sequence that really works

is when the evil mortician is reconstructing

this hitchhiker, played by Lisa Marie.

And she starts out horribly injured and disfigured.

It's a dummy, a re-creation of the actress.

I will make you beautiful again...

even more beautiful than before.

Using a series of wipes and dissolves,

you slowly see her being reconstructed by the mortician

until she's finally back, intact and pretty, and sits up.

And there she is.

And she's actually undead, but she looks pretty hot.

I also remember being freaked out by the burn-victim character

who's completely covered in gauze --

all you see is one eye and his mouth --

and this nurse just plunges a needle right in his eyeball.

And that was just -- aah! -- a cringe moment.

For me, Lisa was the first sort of nurse angel of death.

Embodies that cold, hard, blond sexuality

that Hitchcock was so intrigued by.

"We're dead, but we're not buried!"

Smile.

Woman: Oh! No!

Announcer: "Nightmare."

"Nightmare" is a movie told

from the point of view of a serial killer

who goes up and down the East Coast of the United States.

And when I say told from his point of view,

I mean told with a point-of-view camera --

"You are the killer!" -- as he wreaks mayhem

all up and down the East Coast of the United States.

People hated the film.

People pelted the screen in Times Square with objects.

People walked out.

People demanded their money back.

The eternal principles of a good cinematic story

still must be observed,

and there must be a sympathetic protagonist in your story.

Otherwise, the audience will turn against you.

There's a myth, and we should destroy this myth,

because censors use it to censor movies.

And the myth is that all we want to see is blood and gore.

That's not true.

If you look at the movies made in the '80s

made by clueless idiots who thought

that that wasthe secret to making a great horror movie,

you end up with films like "Nightmare."

Man: No!

Oh, my God!

Announcer: Be sure to see it before sunrise.

"Saturday the 14th"!

Every time I think of "Saturday the 14th,"

I think of sitting at my mom's old apartment and watching HBO.

There was, like, this handful of fairly risqué movies

with weird content,

but they would just show them during the day

for any 8- to 10-year-old to kind of catch up on.

You've got Jeffrey Tambor as Dracula-ish --

a Dracula-type person.

Well, if you don't trust me after 311 years of marriage...

Three hundred and twelve.

You've got Richard Benjamin running around,

basically tormenting his family.

Take this coffee. I can't stand the sight of it.

But just remember how goofy that movie was.

And then the guy who played the Van Helsing-type character

was sosketch,

and he scared me more than the monsters did.

If someone should open that book,

his soul would be doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation!

Damned.

So many weird things were okay back then, man.

The bathtub moment, to me,

reminds me of the Freddy moment, when the glove comes up.

But this, being before that, was like the "Jaws" take.

So who influenced who?

But then you see the teenage daughter running around

being chased by, you know, the fish man, you know?

What the -- Jesus Christ.

Hastag MeToo Fish, you know?

I mean, this is a kids' movie. What the hell's going on?

You're watching it as a kid.

You don't realize the dark undertone of it.

Will I show that to my kids? No, I will not be showing it.

Do you see a monster in this room?

I can't believe that I'm standing here

in the middle of the night arguing with a 10-year-old kid

about the existence of monsters.

As an actor, I get to bring a little joy into someone's life

every time I get -- no matter what the genre is --

every time I have an opportunity to work.

It's a great charge, you know, to do the best I can

because, you know, somebody's going to enjoy this.

They're killing everybody.I got to find her.

Wait a minute, man. Are you crazy?

I got to see if she's all right.Just stand back!

There's nothing you can do out there!

I didn't think I was going to be an actress.

Actually, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

I always thought that would be an interesting thing to be.

So I went to Carnegie Mellon,

which is a really good theater school here in Pittsburgh.

There's different techniques that we were trained,

but one of them was the whole Method movement

of bringing, you know, your experiences to the moment.

And I remember using it

especially after Sarah cuts off Miguel's arm.

She has a moment where she just...has had it.

She actually breaks down,

which, to me, was like the arc of the character.

She's actually very strong in that moment

because she was able to be very real in that moment.

Working that with myself and my thoughts and my technique.

Acting is the art of not acting, right?

Acting is being.

Acting class 101, right?

Before I made any movies, I was a stage actor.

I was King Arthur. I was Ben Franklin.

When I did effects on a film,

I always tried to play a part of it --

you know, some little part.

And that just led to more and more parts

and then, suddenly, with George Romero, justparts.

Don't forget. Some of us are wearing tinfoil.

That's yourproblem.

I really wanted to be, you know, an actor.

Makeup effects was kind of what got me in the door.

You get in the door so you can prove yourself,

let people know who you are, you know?

And who knows where that could lead?

I used to want to be a minister.

Well, the acting is my ministry.

You know, that's how I get to...

...you know, how my soul gets to speak to your soul

about our commonality,

above the oneness that we share as human beings.

You rarely thought about it in the '80s.

There was no, really, Asian representation.

We were all kind of stereotypical,

and it was a difficult time.

It also made me feel like, "Hmm.

Maybe I should do something else."

I kept at it only because of the theater.

Something like Kelly Hu in "Jason Takes Manhattan."

That was pretty extraordinary, where she didn't have an accent.

Look. I think I'll pass, okay?

What? I'll see you later.

My first moviemovie was "Sixteen Candles."

What's happenin', hot stuff?

The controversy was good,

because I also think that it startedto change things

and make people aware.

If anything, it made the Asian community

come out and try to express themselves

about why they disagreed with this character.

And what they failed to do, I thought,

was we weren't coalesced together

to try to figure out what to do about it, unlike today.

It's much better today.

I've never been so happy in my whole life

You maniac.

There was no ethnicity mentioned in "Vamp."

So I thought that was kind of cool.

I thought that was a good step.

What time do you get off?Two-thirty.

Can I watch?

The better your actors are, the better shape you're in.

Hire people that bring a certain kind of credibility

and naturalness to the performance.

And then at least you're a step ahead.

Give me a script,

let me break this character down, make some choices,

and hopefully I buoy what you're doing here.

Hopefully, I kind of put some wind and some sails here.

He's dead?

Not anymore.

It's what I'm in control of.

If somebody offered me a job, and I liked the script

and the story and the character, I'm in.

I'm all in.

And that's how I started doing horror movies.

John invited me to be in "The Fog," and we were off.

I don't believe in luck, good or bad.

Allen: I hated acting class.

It just was torture for me.

But, you know, you have to get some tools.

A director told me once,

"The best thing an actor can do is give me choices."

Trusting my instincts when I read something

and trusting my instincts about a character

generally ends up being the right way to go.

I've studied a lot of different styles.

I've worked with different coaches.

So I've used some stuff from the Method.

I've used the old James Cagney

"Plant your feet in the ground and tell the truth" method.

The funny thing about it is that if something is written well,

you don't have to do a lot of work with it.

That's what I always want to know --

"Let me see the script. Let's see how it is."

And if you have trouble getting lines out, it's like,

it's not written well.

That's the problem. And I used to think it was me.

Come on, you little bastard!

Maroney: What we had back then

was people who were learning their craft.

But now we have people that are, yes, learning their craft,

but also passionate about the genre

and purposefully going into it.

I mean, you'll talk to people in the '80s,

and they'll say, "You know, that's just what I got."

But now these people are coming up

very focused on doing horror because they love horror

and that's what they intend to do.

You have to be as honest as you can be with your character

and your story and your -- the truth of what you're saying.

It's up to them to make it scary for the audience.

And my job is just to tell the truth.

The shit is getting old real fast.

You know, I was awakened out of a real pleasant dream

to come down here.

Are you gonna straighten it out, Raimi,

or am I gonna play poo patrol with your nightstick?

I received a thoroughgoing

acting-for-the-camera education from Dennis Hopper.

Thatwas an experience not to be missed.

And as time goes on, I cherish it more,

I appreciate it more, and I apply it more.

Dennis encouraged me to look through the lens.

"This is what it looks like.

This is where your light is.

This is the side that's best for you.

When you deliver that line, do this.

Make that gesture. It's a visual medium."

You said you were gonna do this alone.

I need your help, missy.

That was a takeaway

that continues to provide extraordinary benefits for me.

When I hear "cut," I'm Doug.

I'm Doug in a skirt and a very constricting leather jacket

with my face covered in leather and pins,

but I'm Doug.

I don't carry the character through the day,

and I don't take him home with me.

Before I ever started thinking about doing crazy stuff,

I was very interested in mapmaking.

I've been playing the bad characters for so long

but always knew that I had other things I could do.

So Charlie's Farm, huh? Somebody's feelin' brave.

It's important as an actor to show versatility, right?

I'm cuttin' over to Pinewood to pick up Barnes.

Not only have I done some emotional stuff...

...but also recently, in the past couple years,

done some comedy.

I never thought somebody would be interested

in me trying to be funny.

As an actor, you have your facial expressions

and your voice to add to your performance.

It's, like, wayeasier.

When you have to look scary and intimidating

without either one of those two things,

with a hockey mask on -- way harder.

And that's why everybody overacts.

People, they think, "Oh, I can do that.

You don't even have to show your face or say anything."

You know what? You can'tdo it.

You thinkyou can,

but you try too hard, and then it looks phony.

I've worked pretty consistently in the '80s.

I did a lot of soap-opera work and a lot of horror movies.

And at the time that I did "Castle Freak,"

which was in 1995, I felt like for the first time

I really understood what I was doing.

I got it. I know how to act on film.

I know what I'm doing.

So I was about 35.

And then, all of a sudden, people stopped calling me.

I wasn't working.

And at that time, I feel like I had aged out a little bit.

I just wasn't getting any calls.

And I was mad.

At the time, I thought, "Well, I'll go back to school.

I'll get a degree in gardening." I loved gardening.

And then I met my husband, Bob.

And he said, "Well,

I have to move up to San Francisco for my job.

Do you want to come with me?"

And I thought, "Yeah. F Hollywood.

I'm just gonna go and do something else!"

And then I became a mom, and I was busy with that.

I took a break because I aged out a little bit,

but now, thank God, I'm playing these older women

and moms and mentors and evil people and caretakers.

I'm glad that the producers from "You're Next"

took a chance on me and said, "Yeah.

We want to see Barbara Crampton again.

We want to see her,"

because I'm having a lot of fun working again.

Announcer: "The Beast Within."

Even you may not survive.

You have been warned.

"The Beast Within" is another one

of these low-budget '80s movies

that is super rapey at the crux of it.

You've got character actors in there

who have been in Oscar-nominated films.

You've got Ronny Cox in there. You've got Bibi Besch in there.

It's a pretty trashy movie

for the caliber of actors that are in it.

R.G. Armstrong -- no slouch.

Really qualified character actor.

Lord save us.

He's been embalmed...

...alive.

Bladder effects are front and center

in the '80s horror movies in the transformation scenes.

You see them in "The Howling,"

and you see it in "American Werewolf in London."

Anytime something's changing, that's a bladder effect.

And "Beast Within" is like a script

written around a bladder effect.

Holland: "Beast Within."

Philippe Mora, whom I dearly love, directed it.

All they had at the time were bladder effects,

so all you could do was blow up --

you know, under the latex, the skin.

"The Beast Within" is a very comical version of it.

Tom Burman did the effects, and I love Tom.

He's got an excuse for that transformation scene.

"The Beast Within" is the nadir of bladder effects

in which the lead monster's head explodes to a point

where he looks like Charlie Brown.

Johnson: And it just goes and goes and goes

and goes and goes and goes and goes, and it's so silly-looking.

Tom says, in his own defense,

they had already gotten the scenes for the transformation

that he felt were good and then they said,

"Let's just have fun and let's just pop it.

Let's just film it until it won't go anymore."

And the director used that.

A friend of mine who said, "Testing something's limits

usually results in finding them."

Bladder effects can be awesome,

and sometimes they can be "The Beast Within."

Oh, my God.

Announcer: "Evilspeak."

"Evilspeak" is a movie that's starring

the outstanding Clint Howard, Ron Howard's brother.

And he is a guy who's bullied at school

and figures out the perfect way to get revenge.

He uses his computer to summon the devil.

I conjure and command thee, prince of darkness!

This is one of those magical movies from the early '80s

where they were trying to capitalize

on the explosion of computers.

"Well, what can we do to put computers into movies?"

And especially into horror movies.

"I got it.

Let's have a kid who can summon the devil with the computer."

Satan!

Even though there are kids being killed,

...you side with the killer

because he's a guy who has been bullied

and he's really just out getting revenge

for all the stuff that people have done to him.

Makes you wish we allhad a Commodore 64 for revenge,

doesn't it?

Announcer: "The Slumber Party Massacre."

Close your eyes for a second and sleep...forever.

The story revolves around a slumber party

and a driller killer...

...coming to kill said slumber party,

hence the "massacre" in the title.

The thing that people forget about this movie

is how funny it is.

]

It was originally written as a spoof lampooning the genre,

but I don't think the people who bought the script

really had any sense of irony, 'cause they mainlined it

and basically made it this fairly ingenious movie.

No!

I love the dynamic between the girls.

Oh.

Even in the beginning,

when, like, they don't realize anything's going on,

but people around them are just dying.

He's just kind of this weird, standard, J-11 killer,

you know, just running around

with this incredibly impressive drill.

Chock full of really benign monotony...

What do you say we order a pizza?Girl: No anchovies.

...punctuated by savage, masculine kills.

It's really a dissertation on the fact

that any male serial killer is just basically using his...

you know.

How pretty.

The symbolism in the movie

when they basically chop that off and go after him --

I mean, it makes "Death Ride" look like a cakewalk.

It's pretty funny.

Announcer: "Alone in the Dark," from New Line Cinema.

Nobile: I love "Alone in the Dark."

It's a weird little "What if" movie.

If we didn't fall into

the slasher-summer-camp thing in the '80s,

and something like "Alone in the Dark" had a chance to shine,

where you're using A-list actors

in, like, a weird home-invasion plot...

Jack Palance is amazing in it. Martin Landau is amazing in it.

Here's Donald Pleasence.

"Alone in the Dark"'s poster

makes you think you're going to see another slasher movie

and not a bananas home-invasion movie

by a group of escaped mental patients

that are all middle- to late-aged white men

played by some of the best actors of their generation.

What are you, some kind of asshole?

That opening has no reason to be in the film.

It's just a crazy,

grab-you-by-the-lapels dream sequence

that goes berserk right out of the gate.

I think it's interesting that "Alone in the Dark"

is made by New Line and it's got a very "Elm Street" opening

two years before "Elm Street" happened.

And then Jack Sholder,

who directed it, ended up doing "Elm Street 2."

I really wish that there was more of that flavor

in the '80s horror.

"Alone in the Dark" is a weird little movie

that's kind of its own thing.

"'Vengeance is mine,' sayeth the Lord."

Announcer: "Nightbeast."

Terror from beyond.

"Nightbeast." Oh, boy.

"Nightbeast" is a gem right here.

I mean, it's a low-budget film,

but it did an incredible job on the effects.

This alien is here for the body count.

I mean, it just kills people in all kinds of gory ways.

The alien has this very funny facial expression.

I don't know what it is,

but there's something very funny about that alien's face.

You don't really understand what the alien's motive is.

It kind of seems like a child that just got a new toy.

Like, "Oh, what's this button do?

Oh, wow!"

And he's just killing people for fun the whole movie.

Guess who did the music.

J.J. Abrams.

J.J. Abrams, who was credited as Jeffrey Abrams,

did the music in "Nightbeast."

If you want a body count, I mean, this movie has it.

They got to bring back the nightbeast in some way.

I do enjoy horror, but only if it's really good.

I've tended to like darker films, even as a child --

film noir, you know, for instance.

I like that genre.

It just is my favorite form of escape.

It's like, just take me away.

I'm a willing participant, you know?

I really want you to change my world right now.

Today, I think of '80s movies

and I think of really big hair, to start with.

That's pretty scary now.

I love movies.

I would always look at who directed it,

who wrote it, who's in it, what's it about.

All of the above, really.

You know, I started out to be a dancer.

That was my first love.

And film really found me, oddly enough.

It wasn't like I was in search of.

Even the first time I walked on the sound stage,

I felt like, "Oh. It's like home."

You know, it felt like I was in the right place.

Before I did film in New York, I did a number of commercials.

Pants!

Wow! A car with pants!

And I was very shy,

so it was at that point that I got into acting classes.

And then when I started making movies in the '70s,

and I found myself in a crowd of people like Brian De Palma,

Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese,

Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Bob Zemeckis,

who I met as well,

you're sitting there, and you're hearing this conversation.

They're deconstructing these films

and talking about filmmakers.

And now all of a sudden, I'm looking at it

from a different perspective.

I really like good directors.

They know what they're gonna do, they have a plan,

and they will collaborate.

You know, they're interested in your perspective as well.

Honestly, I spend much more time

on enriching the character's inner life and life

and making it as real as possible.

I really throw caution to the wind

and leave it to the director to get the tone

and the balance correct between all the performers,

and, you know, delivering a film that makes sense tonally.

But I've worked with great directors.

Now you have a problem, which I've experienced,

where you work with a director who you can't really trust.

And that's very difficult.

Unfortunately, with women, a lot of the roles that I played

and a lot of the films that I was in,

there wasn't a lot of background about who this character is,

so I had to fill in those blanks.

Starting with "Carrie," I just literally I wrote a biography.

What do they eat in the morning? What do they dress?

What do they like to do?

It just informs me.

It makes it fuller and richer for me,

because there's often not a lot on the page.

You'll get canned for this, you bitch!

One more word from you and I'm gonna knock you down,

do you understand me?!

I did not see Chris Hargenson as a bitch.

Let's start with that.

I thought that Chris Hargenson was a pretty cool girl.

And this gal Carrie, that I wouldn't even hang out with,

has just screwed things up for me.

So there.

Look at her.

You eat shit.

You have to find why you like a character

and teenagers are so black and white.

That's what's interesting about having people

in their 20s play that role.

You have a little distance on it, a little perspective.

What I had to wrap myself around

was the, you know, what's driving her?

Why is she doing this? Why is she so hurt?

What's going on at home?

And, you know, why does she feel so entitled to behave this way?

And I would have to say that the crew really helped me

because whenever John and I, Travolta,

were on the set, everybody laughed,

so I just thought we were really funny.

I thought we were comic relief.

I didn't realize everyone was gonna despise me.

I think "Dressed to Kill" is, first of all,

it's visually stunning.

It's an emotional dance, it's a visual dance.

The film worked on paper, it just did.

It was -- You could see it.

I personally wasn't a fan of the slasher aspect of it,

and I always felt that the elevator scene,

you didn't even have to see anything.

My preference would have been to just see this character

being backed into the co-- That was enough for me.

I didn't need the blood, but I guess people like that.

The psychological aspects of it

rather than the thriller aspects of it are what I prefer.

This character that I play, the Liz Blake character,

is a very strong woman.

You can say whatever you want about her.

She knows what she wants.

And that's what she gets.

Well...what do you think?

Shooting the last scene in "Dressed to Kill,"

first of all, you're in a sound stage,

tiny, little corner of a space.

The water's running.

They're trying to get it a little warmer

so that I don't freeze to death.

It's the dead of winter.

I remember the cold, I remember the wet,

I remember the naked.

That's what I remember.

There was a mirror. It opened up.

That's when the razor comes out.

Even though someone's lying on the floor,

they're pumping the blood,

is it coming through with the razor on my throat...

...there is something --

even though it's all make believe --

that's traumatizing when you see blood gushing out of you.

It does end in a nightmare for her,

so you wonder how much more she's gonna be going on

in her life with all of that.

The big hullabaloo when the film came out

had nothing to do with transgender at all.

It was all about the misogyny. That's what I remember.

Let's face it, you're a whore, eh?

You're a Park Avenue whore, but you're still a whore.

Fuck you.

No, fuck you.

That bothered me because I-I felt like

Liz Blake was a pretty tough cookie.

She was nobody's fool.

And unlike Angie Dickinson character who had to be punished

for her sexuality, she had real sexual energy.

She was real comfortable with her sexuality.

In fact, it was a business for her.

Do you want to fuck me?

Oh, yes.

I think it would be very hard to get that film made today

with that script, with that transgender character

being the killer, maybe impossible.

What's important about that film is what we didn't know

and how unconscious we were at that time.

For better or for worse, we're more conscious now,

or self-conscious in a way now.

Everybody seems very self-conscious

to me about everything.

We're still understanding and still trying to understand

some of the complications of a character

like the Michael Caine character.

I do not gravitate to scary films,

but I'm not afraid of them either.

I like suspense.

I like jeopardy in films, I do.

So I guess I like feeling a little bit out of control

or whatever, but I don't like slasher films.

Don't like just blood and guts.

I'd like to be a little bit smarter than that.

Announcer: "The Entity."

Barbara Hershey in "The Entity" is attacked

by a sexual being of some sort,

and it's very realistic and very disturbing.

It was apparently based on a true story

that had happened seven, eight years previous

to the making of the film,

about this woman who was terrorized,

and, you know, raped sexually by this -- this ghost.

Barbara Hershey gives an excellent performance

in the lead role.

Ron Silver's in it.

It's a small film.

It's actually quite effective.

You think I'm insane.

Insane?

That means different things to different people, Carla.

It was so realistic,

because of all the things she was doing and the bruises.

That would have been a hard role.

You'll wait till I'm alone, won't you?

Then you'll come forth to hurt me, to hurt my children!

Stan Winston was responsible for this moment

where you see Barbara Hershey's character nude in bed,

and you see the entity fondling her.

It's an excellent effect,

he and his team created a fake body for Barbara

and she was underneath the bed on a slant board.

Stan was underneath her reaching up past her

to manipulate the -- the breasts.

So he had cups on the interior of the breast

and when he pulled his fingers in, from the outside,

it would look as if invisible fingers were pressing.

And his other crew were gently manipulating the fake arms

and legs of this body.

Barbara Hershey was exhausted by doing "The Entity"

because first of all, she had to be naked.

She had to act like somebody was having sex with her.

She's got all these people on set.

With me, when I'm acting, like, possessed or something,

I feel ridiculous.

I'm sure all that was running

through her head when she was doing it.

But when you see the final movie, it's very realistic.

And she did a great job.

That had to have been so hard to do.

It's All Saints' Day.

Woman: A demanding, implacable enemy

whose search for blood is never satiated.

The goriest, nastiest thing that kind of stuck with me growing up

wasn't anything that Jason did

or Freddy Krueger did or Michael Myers did.

It was Lucio Fulci's "City of the Living Dead."

The living dead part kind of throws you off.

It's a more supernatural movie.

Almost like it was tacked on to kind of ride the Romero train.

The original title was "City of the Living Dead."

But when they brought it over to America,

they changed it to "The Gates of Hell."

Nobile Jr.: "The Gates of Hell" ad

seemed like it was just warning you to not watch this movie.

It had, like, a long explanation about why it wasn't rated,

but you can't come see this movie.

I remember the image of "The Gates of Hell" thing,

thinking it was gonna be the most terrifying thing

I've ever seen.

Just a really effective marketing campaign...

to a 12-year-old.

I saw a priest who, by hanging himself,

opened the gates of Hell.

It was almost like this gothic-zombie tale

surrounding this priest trying to bring about the apocalypse

in this small town, the protagonists

basically trying to shut the portal to Hell.

A dude is sitting in his pickup truck with his lady.

And she turns and looks at him

after seeing this priest flash before her eyes,

and she just starts puking her own guts out.

And it goes on a lot longer than you would expect.

It's super gnarly.

And that always stuck with me.

Jericho: And there's some kind of a kidney-looking thing,

and then here comes some sausage intestines,

and then there's a heart-like thing,

and it's just like -- It just doesn't stop.

It has, to me, the best kill.

The father holding homeboy's head down

and the drill coming in,

and just giving him the full-on Black & Decker lobotomy.

It's so sick.

To this day, it's one of my favorite Fulci movies.

"Pieces" is, as the tagline says,

"exactly what you think it is."

This is a movie they were trying to capitalize

on the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

A maniac killer going around a college,

chopping up a bevy of beautiful women

to basically create one perfect, beautiful woman.

And the fact that this is still such an underground movie

is criminal.

The gore is insane.

There's so much blood everywhere,

it's almost like you can just smell the guts.

George: Help!

I would have to turn in my horror card

if I didn't say that the greatest scene

in almost any '80s horror film

was not Linda George shouting, "Bastard!"

Bastard!

Bastard!

There was a major red herring in the film.

There's a guy who's the groundskeeper,

walking around with a chainsaw, played by Paul Smith,

who was Bluto in the "Popeye" movie,

and also in "Dune."

You think that he is gonna be the killer.

It's one of the most blatantly obvious not red herrings ever.

He's walking around, he's got the chainsaw,

he loves his chainsaw,

and people are dying by chainsaw.

If anything, you have to see it for the ending.

You will not see this one coming.

Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond" is a fantastic movie

that I think, one, not only captures the essence

of who he was as a filmmaker,

but I also think, in a really great way,

it's really a fantastic sort of celebration of the weirdness

that is New Orleans, specifically in the early 1980s.

The movie is centered on a young woman

who inherits mysteriously a hotel,

and then ultimately finds out that the hotel is centered

over one of the gates of Hell, darn.

This hotel is one of the seven gateways of Hell.

And I think in the first 30 seconds,

we've already got flesh ripping,

really ghastly, gruesome effects,

which were the work of Giannetto De Rossi,

who is one of the greatest sort of Italian

special effects artists over there,

and it just never stops from there.

It's just a constant barrage of horribleness.

He also taps into my fear of big spiders as well.

In Fulci's world, tarantulas are gonna come for you

and they're going to eat your face.

You have, like, these little munching spiders coming through,

eating the guy's flesh and tearing it away.

Basically, it sounds, you know, like,

there's like a bunch of people at a buffet.

There's a great set piece at the hospital.

It's just like a constant barrage of reanimated corpses.

They're trying to fight their way out,

and it just, like, it doesn't stop.

Eyes were definitely a motif in "The Beyond"

that we saw sort of utilized again and again.

We have Joe the handyman who basically finds himself

being blinded in both eyes after being attacked.

And then you have a housekeeper

who ends up getting sort of pushed

onto a large spike, and her eye pops out as well.

And then you have characters in the movie who also go blind.

It's a really weird and wild movie,

but you wouldn't expect anything less from Fulci.

I wanted to make a monster movie.

I wrote "The Being" when I was 23.

I was fascinated by the idea of horror,

because I love eliciting a reaction.

A nuclear waste dump produces a monster

that wreaks havoc on a small town

while he's looking for his mom.

Okay? Alright?

There's always a human element there.

My sort of weird sense of humor.

I think that is the thread you see in all my films.

I went over to Martin Landau's acting studio

because I wanted Martin Landau in my film.

And I said, "You know, Mr. Landau,

I really don't want to be in your acting class, no offense.

I'm a director,

and I want you to be in my film."

And he was so wonderful.

I pulled the script out of my bag

and gave it to him, and he goes, "I'll read it."

And he read it that night and he said he'd do it.

And he was instrumental in getting José Ferrer,

who was a friend of his, and Dorothy Malone.

I had two Academy Award-winning actors in my first horror film.

I even spent so much time trying to design the monster,

and finally everyone said, "Stop designing the monster.

Start making the movie."

I may have been heavy-handed with it, but it still works,

of this denial about environmental disasters.

I mean, Martin Landau says with dead seriousness

that dumping nuclear waste into the aquifer

will not affect the drinking water.

He even does the demonstration --

Pouring the water, drinking the water,

"Mmmmmm, delicious."

This goes on today.

It was chilling, unpredictable,

and a slice of Americana.

I learned a lot making that movie.

It wasn't a perfect film, but I have to say, you know,

I have certain fans that come to me

and tell me it's their favorite film that I've made.

Announcer: "The Keep."

Coming soon from Paramount Pictures.

Michael Mann directs "The Keep,"

which I think is one of his best movies.

That's a Pandora's Box movie. It's like "The Mummy."

We don't want to let whatever's in the keep out.

The reason it's in the keep, it's supposed to stay in there.

Never touch the crosses.

Never!

And the Nazis have to control this keep.

And, of course, they can't not open up the keep

and find out what is in it.

What we find out is inside is Scott Glenn.

You don't want to let Scott Glenn out on the world.

Don't...touch that.

The reason why "The Keep" has a cult following

is that it is both very '80s and very unique.

The sound design, the look of it, the music.

It's all very unlike what you would see

in a World War II movie where a monster kills people.

Michael Mann, just like on his previous movie "Thief,"

he used Tangerine Dream for the soundtrack,

and it's these moody, synthesized soundscapes,

which is again something you don't normally hear

in a World War II movie.

The villain of the movie, Molasar,

has a really interesting look.

When he first appears, he's this giant mass of muscle

and sinew with a skull for a head.

It almost looks like somebody's skinned the Incredible Hulk.

The soldiers are back.

I will destroy them!

And then later, he gets more complete,

and he takes on almost this Gollum-like appearance,

which is pretty appropriate considering the Gollum

is a creature from Jewish mythology

and he's killing Nazis.

The movie had a very troubled production.

Michael Mann's original cut was supposed to be

three and a half hours long, but they forced him

to cut it down to a little over an hour and a half.

So as a result, in the final movie,

there's a lot of elements that aren't really explained.

For example, Scott Glenn's character,

you're not exactly sure what his connection to the villain is

or why he's got these -- these supernatural powers.

Michael Mann was very disappointed in the movie

and has basically tried to bury it ever since it was released.

Aah!

Michael, if you're watching this,

I know you don't like this movie,

but there are people out there who do.

So, you know, maybe consider giving it a high-def release.

Gower: In the '80s, having the kids be part of the story

and an integral part of the story,

instead of just someone's offspring, became more popular.

And it became more part of the story engine

than just on the side.

We progressed out of that as just a cutesy little kind of,

"I'm the kid with the freckles," on an episode of "The Love Boat"

into being chased by guys with axes

and monsters with dynamite, and cars that come alive.

Stuff that can really get you.

Anytime you put a young kid in a -- in a scary story,

it really brings it home.

You put them in groups, you put kids in peril,

you put them in adventures, it becomes this whole thing,

and you're just wrapped up in emotion

because these are kids, you want them to succeed.

So you go all the way back to the original kid

in a horror story,

is when Frankenstein's monster kills a little girl by the pond.

That had to have been absolutely astonishing

to people at that time,

that really punches you right in the chest,

where it's like, "Wow, some harm came to this kid."

There was a rule for a while that you cannot kill off a kid.

And I don't think I do except for in "The Being."

I think I cross the line on that one.

But I love working with kids.

They love that role playing.

They know how to react to what's happening

and get totally immersed in the scene...

There she is.

...without being self-conscious.

I have always loved watching young performers anyway.

Because it's amazing to me

that someone can have that kind of ability.

Sometimes they grow up to be tremendous actors

because of that, and other times, they're fuck-ups.

Gower: But working with kids is a whole other thing

that a lot of people don't understand

if they've never been in production with younger actors,

because there's restraints on time.

They can, you know, depending on how old you are,

there's different levels of how long you can actually be on set.

There's even minimums or maximums

of how long you can be in front of the camera,

which adds into how long you can be on set.

You have to go to school every day.

There's a reason why they say don't work with kids.

It really is a pain in the ass for a production.

"Halloween III" and on Halloween night,

all these masks are gonna eat the kids' faces

and brains and kill them.

It gives me chills thinking about it.

I want everybody to be reassured,

when I'm standing there on the phone screaming,

"Please stop it, stop it, turn it off,

stop it, turn off the final channel.

Stop it, stop it," all the children were saved.

You can take that to the bank.

Dante: When you're a kid,

other kids getting killed on screen

is much more affecting than if you see their, you know,

somebody's grandfather getting killed.

It became very trendy to have at least one or two kids

or a group of kids going against the antagonist.

They would assemble this group of --

of plucky kids to try and take down,

you know, this incredibly disturbing force.

As a kid growing up in the '80s,

it was cool to kind of be able to see myself reflected in that.

It was empowering to see that, especially as a poor kid.

Burn rubber!

Aaaaahh!

Christ!

I think a lot of it

came from the writings of Stephen King.

I mean, "Cujo" has the kid. "It" has a group of kids.

I mean, he was kind of the inventor of that subgenre,

if you want to call it that.

Stephen King certainly has exploited Children as --

children as victims, children as evil, you know,

and -- and done it really quite well.

I think it's an interesting tool

because I think we become, as the audience,

very conflicted, because right away, it's a child.

So you have all of these mixed -- mixed emotions

about how you're supposed to feel about it.

One of Stephen's tricks is to put kids in jeopardy.

It's a little bit too effective, I think,

because it gets mimicked all the time.

And it's one of those things that I resent.

It becomes a trope.

Now the kid is being victimized,

so our heroes are justified in doing anything they want.

They're morally excused, ethically excused from anything

because there's a child involved.

Gage in "Pet Cemetery" is interesting,

because in the beginning,

he is just an innocent little kid...Bye-bye.

...and he gets killed devastatingly.

After I became a father,

that scene had so much more weight than it did

when I was younger.

But it's interesting because he is the poster child

for innocence in the beginning.

Hi, Daddy, I love you.

And then after he gets buried in the pet cemetery,

he comes back as the villain.

Gage 2.0 comes in

and cuts Fred Gwynne's Achilles tendon.

It's such a simple move, but it's so cruel

and it's so effective and it's so horrifying.

I don't scare easily.

The moment that is iconic for me out of the 1980s,

is the twins from "The Shining."

They bothered me.

And they stayed with me.

Featherston: The twins at the end of the hallway,

every time I'm in a hotel, and I'm in a hallway alone,

that comes back for me and I have this moment of like,

"Please don't let the hallway feel longer than it is."

That is just a spooky-ass thing.

And the kid is wonderful in it.

There's just such a sadness about that.

It's a lot of responsibility to have that awareness,

to have that knowing, to have that power.

It's a lot of responsibility for a child.

That was the slow kill for me, too, was the kid

'cause he would sit there and you knew he knew.

There's nothing worse for a child to know.

Adults, it's okay.

But when a child embraces,

"I know something that they don't know,"

then it becomes really terrifying.

Redrum.

Redrum.

And as a child, of course, you tend to feel powerless.

And the fantasy of being able to telekinetically punish

one's enemies was really intoxicating.

It just appealed to my,

you know, frustrated powerlessness

that I felt as a child, that I think most children feel.

Just for a moment in our lives when we felt that powerless,

the, you know, the bully

or the cruelty that we've experienced,

I'm wishing I had a little of that power myself

right now in the world.

"The Black Cat" by Lucio Fulci.

Many times the Edgar Allan Poe story was adapted into film.

There was a 1934 film with Karloff and Lugosi.

There was the 1940s film with Lugosi also.

And then there was the '60s,

which had Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.

All of them were very loose adaptations, and so is this one.

This one is nothing subtle at all.

This is about a killer cat.

Aah! Aah!

It doesn't just murder people, it murders the shit out of them.

This cat could take on Michael Myers.

It's a beast.

There's horror movies where people burn to death.

And then there's horror movies

where people get thrown out of windows.

Well, in "Black Cat," you get both at the same time.

Holy shit.

Some of the other movies kind of use the black cat

as a symbol, like a metaphor for evil or something,

but this one is just going right for the jugular.

The cat is gonna leap out

and tear your fucking face off.

"Suspiria" gets all the love,

but "Tenebrae" is my favorite Argento.

There's something about the way Argento paces a scene

where you know something's coming,

because you're watching a horror movie

and you've seen horror movies.

So you know that's -- that's the deal,

but he waits just a little too long,

so that when he finally delivers it,

it's a different kind of catharsis

than your average slasher movie.

I love stories about writers.

For me, that's just one of my sort of cinematic catnips.

Tony Franciosa, in this movie, he's playing an author

who basically there's a killer out there

who's mimicking things from his book,

and then he's sort of dealing with the ramifications of that,

in Italy, while he's on a book tour.

And his manager in the movie is John Saxon, who is a delight.

It's such a complete departure for him

from being Lieutenant Thompson

in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies.

Doesn't it drop off? Drop off?

Yeah, I mean, if you make a quick movement,

won't it slip off?

Look...

I really love Daria Nicolodi in it,

who was a frequent collaborator with Dario Argento,

and I don't think she gets enough credit

for the writing that she did with him.

Some of the camerawork in that movie is absolutely,

like, just astonishingly great.

The way that that camera moves is so fluid and so wonderful.

There is this huge switch that happens in the movie.

You think you know the game that's being played,

and then ultimately, halfway through the movie,

it takes a completely different direction.

A woman is sitting in her house,

and she's sitting there with a gun in her hand,

and the killer, out of nowhere, just kind of comes to the window

and chops her hand off with the gun in it.

And then she gets up,

and there's just this crimson spray of blood everywhere,

and, of course, everything has white walls.

So it looks amazing.

It's beautiful.

Like it shouldn't be beautiful, this should be horrifying.

But yet there's something so stunning about the way

that that blood would hit, and especially Italian blood

was always notoriously much more red and much more vibrant

than the blood we were using here in the States.

It really captures everything that you love about

Giallo movies, but does it in a different way

that we really hadn't seen from him before.

It's one of the standouts amongst Argento's filmography,

specifically during the 1980s.

Announcer: "C.H.U.D." --

cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.

Janisse: "C.H.U.D." stars John Hurt and Daniel Stern.

It's got early appearances by Coen brothers mainstays

like Jon Polito as a newscaster,

and John Goodman, who alongside Jay Thomas, are cops in a diner.

Ah.

The concept of going underground and mutant homeless people

that are mutated through the nuclear waste

that was being stored underground

in New York, and it was great.

So it certainly had that "Death Wish,"

dirty New York setting

with the isolation of the underground tunnels,

and then the mutant monsters.

Shit!

So it had a great mixture of elements.

The idea of cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers

is a brilliant one, really.

And then obviously the bit at the start,

where the puppy and the woman get pulled out

from the underground manhole.

Announcer: It's only a movie,

but it's more than enough.

"Terror in the Aisles" is a great compilation film

and it really does explore the thoughts,

the feelings, the how and the why of it all.

Say, how'd they do that?

That's the trick, isn't it?

Once the lights go down.

You're only watching clips of these movies,

but somehow, all put together like that,

it was absolutely terrifying.

And unfortunately, in these movies,

the victim is almost always a woman.

And I watched it on a VHS, and I remember having to stop it

because I was getting so rattled by it.

Get him!

It certainly packs a very different punch.

It's -- it's pretty frightening.

Why make up horrible things

when there is so much... real terror?

We can enjoy the jeopardy, we can have a good scream,

a good laugh, and laugh at ourselves

for having been tricked the way we have.

It's just fun. You know, it's just a fun thing.

And you're sitting in a theater, which is...relatively safe.

There are two reasons that I wanted to do

"Terror in the Aisles."

I love the idea of it, I love those movies, you know,

and I think those genres are really great and...

but I also wanted to meet Donald Pleasence,

who I was a great fan of,

and I didn't get to meet him, so I was devastated.

That was shocking...

wasn't it?

Announcer: You've made it through Halloween.

Now try and survive Christmas.

"Silent Night, Deadly Night" is about Catholic guilt,

I think.

I didn't really even know the controversy until years later,

when it came to pass that, like, this was the harsh, black mark

on Christmas of '84.

There was a big hue and cry about turning Santa Claus

into a serial killer.

This scared people and made it want to be banned.

Punishment is necessary, Pamela.

It is...No!

...good!

"Silent Night, Deadly Night" tells the story of Billy,

who, as a child,

witnesses his family get murdered

by someone dressed as Santa Claus.

Flash-forward to when Billy becomes 18,

and he is now a strapping young lad.

Merry Christmas, everyone, ho ho ho!

Merry Christmas.

One thing leads to another,

and Billy is completely triggered

and goes on a massive killing spree dressed as Santa.

The trigger, when that happens,

you can totally understand it.

There's a death involving antlers on a wall,

which is -- which is great.

Punish! No!

Quigley: He impales me on antlers,

so never answer the door to strangers.

Punish! Aah!

I had a talk with the director.

I said, "She wouldn't be topless.

A woman would, you know, put on a top,

maybe not her bottoms to go upstairs.

That's just what a woman would do."

And he's like, "Well, we have to have you topless,

because the antlers are gonna come out."

I think there was another reason behind it.

I had to be lifted up a billion times

to get on the antlers by a stunt man.

I don't know how he did it, but he's like

again and again and having blood capsules

come out my mouth and doing it at the right time.

It was -- it was an ordeal.

It's crazy how two-dimensional most of these movies are,

and yet you have a movie

like "Silent Night, Deadly Night,"

that gives character development and depth

and reasons why this guy is wreaking havoc on people.

And yet people wanted to shut this down.

I was like, "Are you kidding?"

Quigley: I'm so glad that the mothers wanted it banned,

because it made a lot of money

and it got a lot of attention because of that.

Announcer: Dangerous or dead.

"Razorback."

"Razorback" is a beautiful film,

and I don't throw that term around lightly.

I mean, it is an absolutely gorgeous film.

It's directed by Russell Mulcahy,

who is an Australian director

who shortly after this, would go off to direct "Highlander."

It's one of the best

of the "nature run amok" subgenre horror.

It's a movie about a giant boar,

a boar that is three times larger

than any of the boars that anyone there has ever seen.

As you know, everything in Australia wants to kill you.

So this is the perfect setting for that.

It starts off with this giant boar

that rips through a house and kills a child,

while his grandfather's watching it.

Oh, God, Scotty!

Everyone in the town

thinks that the grandfather has killed this kid.

So he's spending the rest of his life hunting this razorback.

Aaah!

The movie shifts because you initially think

it's gonna be about the grandfather,

then you think it's gonna be about the woman

who is the reporter who's going to Australia

to investigate this.

But then she ends up getting killed by the razorback.

And then her husband flies out to Australia

to find out what happened to his wife.

So the movie then shifts again, to be about the husband.

The giant razorback is incredible.

You don't see it very much, but you see it enough,

and it's terrifying.

It is still legitimately scary.

The color palette that they use is just gorgeous.

It is not something you would expect to see

in a movie called "Razorback."

You're expecting blood and guts and violence.

You wouldn't really expect to see

this stunningly beautiful film.

It's okay, it's okay.

Well, the big rock star in terms of makeup effects

in the '80s was undeniably Tom Savini.

He kind of cornered the market in gore for the early '80s

and did it better than anybody else.

The '80s was the splatter decade.

That was my decade, you know.

I was called the Sultan of Splatter, the Wizard of Gore.

And it was the one-two punch of "Dawn of the Dead"

and then "Friday the 13th" that catapulted my career.

In fact, "Friday the 13th" wouldn't exist

if George hadn't done and hired me

for "Dawn of the Dead."

One movie after another got me work with other directors

who saw those movies.

So Sean Cunningham saw "Dawn" and said,

"We got to get this guy."

Tom Savini came to us and said, "You know what I want to do?"

I said, "What do you want to do?"

He said, "I want to cut somebody's head off...

on screen. It's never been done."

I said, "Really?"

He said, "No, it's never been done, and it could be great."

I said, "How are we gonna do it?"

He said, "Well, we have to figure it out."

Aah!

I always feel that Tom Savini is the godfather of all of this,

and in a lot of ways, of sheer invention.

You know, the script says this happens.

How the fuck does that happen?

When I was growing up trying to learn makeup,

there was no place to learn.

Nobody wanted to share their secrets.

Limitations make you more creative.

Limitations -- not enough time, not enough people,

not enough materials, not enough money.

Now, Robo Chimp could, um...

you know, he could open his mouth

and make his head move left and right.

And then "Martin," there was a stake

that goes through a guy's neck, you know?

So George said, "We're gonna go to a slaughterhouse

and maybe get a lamb neck and stick a stick in a lamb neck."

I said, "No, no,

you need to see the guy's face when that happens."

"Well, how are you gonna do that?"

"I don't know. I'll figure it out, okay?"

And it wound up being exactly how I killed Kevin Bacon

in "Friday the 13th."

In "Martin," the stake went in the front.

In "Friday the 13th," I brought the arrow

from behind the fake neck appliance.

But it's the same kind of an appliance

that Kevin Bacon stuck his head into,

that the guy in "Martin" stuck his head into,

that Ned Eisenberg, in "The Burning,"

stuck his head into.

I did that effect over and over again.

Usually if there's a rubber weapon involved,

we try to establish the real weapon,

taking a chunk out of the wall or in "Friday the 13th,"

the hatchet taking out the light bulb

before the rubber axe goes into the girl's head.

So in your mind, there's no separation.

My books are called "Grand Illusions."

My books about special makeup effects,

because that's how I think of them, as magic tricks.

Because it may surprise you to hear from me

that I believe the less you show,

the more effective stuff is, you know.

I'm the guy that showed everything.

But on "Creepshow," I had never done anything

like Fluffy before, an animatronic creature/monster.

So I called Rob Bottin, and he taught me

how to do it over the phone.

"Creepshow" was five movies, you know,

with monsters and Nate's corpse, which to me was --

was an exciting thing to do.

I want my cake.

The first thing you see is Raul's corpse,

the thing in the window, you know,

so it was a real skeleton that I animated with all these,

you know, he could smile, his fingers could do this.

He did a bunch of stuff.

I did not turn Stephen King into the plant,

but I did blow the top of his head off.

I was up in the ceiling pulling stuff out of him

while hitting blood explosions.

It was pretty complicated stuff.

And the cockroaches -- Oh, my God, the cockroaches.

I was never in the same room with those cockroaches.

I would be outside a sealed room,

looking through glass.

"Okay, cue the blood," you know?

Alright, pump the roaches."

Because there were two entomologists

with huge syringes full with roaches.

We pumped blood on them

so they would leave little bloody footprints.

Man: Mr. Pratt!

"Creepshow" was my opportunity

to create monsters and characters,

you know, not just cutting throats and blowing heads off.

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" was another --

an opportunity like that,

you know, creating the old-age makeup.

"Xiao Sheng Pa Pa" is a horror movie I did in Hong Kong,

a horror-comedy movie I did in Hong Kong.

And all I did was use stuff from,

well, some stuff from "Creepshow."

Raul, he's in the movie.

He's just a ghost apparition at the window.

But I had to build lots of monsters and things.

And the two leads, they were like

the Abbott and Costello of Hong Kong.

I didn't understand a word of what was going on.

But, you know, but I built some elaborate effects

for that movie.

Listen, don't talk to me about interpreters.

We sent him out for Super Glue,

and he came back with a case of condoms, you know.

And he's the interpreter, okay?

Williams: I met Tom.

He opened up the dictionary of forensic pathology.

And I saw genuine photos of murder victims,

drowning victims, accident victims, you name it,

every variety of death that the human body can endure

was in those pages.

And then I went through his lab,

and I looked at what people were creating.

The reality of it was extraordinary.

I'm the only makeup artist that has seen the real stuff.

I was a combat photographer in Vietnam.

I saw horrible stuff, okay?

You know, if you see a movie, a guy's wearing a white shirt,

and there's blood on it,

and the blood looks like strawberry Kool-Aid,

the makeup artist didn't add green to the blood

because it's going on something white.

You have to do that.

In fact, here's the formula --

a gallon of blood, 32 drops of green,

and that blood can go on something light

and still look deep red like blood.

A little helpful hint for you here.

Everything that we do today,

as special makeup effect artists,

was invented by Dick Smith.

We enhance it, elaborate, make it better, you know,

but he invented all the stuff that we -- that we do today.

If you've seen "Dawn of the Dead,"

the blood is atrocious.

The blood looks like melted crayons.

So on the way to "Friday the 13th,"

driving to Connecticut, we went to Dick Smith's house.

And he gave us the blood formula, his blood formula,

which is theblood formula.

The blood in "Friday the 13th" is the first time

the blood looked real to me.

I wish I had my school growing up,

where you could go and learn all this stuff, you know.

It's important for film students, let's say,

to study films from the past.

If you're surrounded by people,

like I am with students coming into my school,

and they don't know who Boris Karloff is,

you're deprived.

I mean, if you're gonna be a makeup artist, you know,

do some research on some of the greatest monsters or creatures

or makeups that were ever created, you know.

The first sentence in my book on makeup effects is,

"The more you do, the more you get to do."

That's the thrill of creativity,

that idea of taking a blob of clay or taking a blank page,

you're giving life to something that never existed

and that -- that's thrilling.

Announcer: "Ghoulies"

They'll get you in the end!

"Ghoulies."

Well, first there was "Gremlins,"

then there was "Ghoulies."

And then there was "Munchies," and then there was "Hobgoblins."

When you have a picture that's successful,

people might want to immediately rush out an imitation.

The fact that the ad has the ghoulie coming out of a toilet,

I think probably expresses my feelings about the whole series.

I did enjoy the "Ghoulies" movies.

In fact, I did one of them, "Ghoulies Go to College."

I'm hungry again.

I was stunt coordinator on it

and played the character falling in a mop bucket, ass first.

Get out of the way!

Whoa!

Ohhh!

The greatest thing about "Ghoulies" is something

that almost didn't make it into the movie.

They watched it and said, "Where's the scene

with the Ghoulie coming out of the toilet?"

They said, "Well, we just did that for the poster."

"No, you need to put this scene in the movie."

So they went back and reshot the scene,

the Ghoulie coming out of the toilet.

And whenever somebody says Ghoulies, they always love that.

And, of course, that ties in with the tagline.

Ghoulies. They'll get you in the end!

Literally.

So if I had to give my blessing to any of the rip-offs,

I would definitely choose the "Critters" series.

However, I feel remiss in criticizing anybody's rip-offs

when my first picture was "Piranha,"

which is a rip-off of "Jaws."

You know so I'm not -

just, you know, walk around and tinkle a bell

and yell "unclean" and all of that.

Go back home!

During the heyday of the video boom, early '80s,

there were so many videos on the shelves

that you had to do something to grab people's attention.

I used to love all those painted covers, you know,

like "Cannibal Holocaust," "Cannibal Ferox."

As the years went on, they became more and more lurid

because they had to compete and threw was so much in there.

"Cannibal Holocaust" is interesting

because it is the first

in a whole kind of wave of found-footage movies,

where you didn't know if it was real or not.

Of course, by the time I saw it, you knew that it wasn't real.

Much like "The Blair Witch Project"

when it first came out, people weren't sure.

Deodato even was brought up in criminal charges

of filming actual murders.

There's phases that take place in -- in horror movies,

the found footage, Amazon jungle, torture porn,

"Cannibal Holocaust" and "Cannibal Ferox."

For a time, I thought they were the same movie

with different titles.

One would kind of look like the other,

which would look like the other.

"Cannibal Holocaust" has a couple scenes in it

that you just don't forget,

the guy getting his cock chopped off.

Don't ever go to the Amazon jungle

and that way you won't get your cock chopped off

by a bunch of Cannibal Holocaust feroxes.

The real issue that everybody talks about, though,

with "Cannibal Holocaust"

is not the apparent deaths of the people.

It's the deaths of the animals on screen,

and that's hard to watch because that's real.

Big sea turtle getting cut up for dinner.

Fuck, really?!

So that, I think, is why some people

thought that it could be real because the animal deaths are.

You're watching literal animal-snuff films.

The most popular nasty of them all

is a piece of trash called "Faces of Death,"

which purports to be a professor's investigation

of death worldwide.

And his effort, he says, is to gain knowledge

about the fragility of man.

Sure, and I'm the Easter Bunny.

"Faces of Death."

Somebody's brother's sister's brother

had it on some kind of fifth-, sixth-edition VHS,

and what it was, was apparent real-life snuff films

put together on this documentary.

And there was like "Faces of Death 1"

through, you know, 27, or something along those lines,

and you could never really find it,

which made the legend of it so much more mysterious.

Man: I find this to be

a particularly unusual face of death.

And that's why you thought, "Maybe this is real."

Until you actually saw one and then you realize,

"This might not be as real as you think."

The Satanic cult, you know, sacrificing somebody.

Who's taping this? Where's this from?

What's -- What is this?

Why is no one getting arrested from this?

But what a strange phase to go through,

a fake snuff-film phase.

Man: His mutilated body represented

a violent retaliation from a creature

which has suffered continual abuse from mankind.

We were fucking weird as teenagers, man.

Who would ever want to watch that?

Announcer: "The Bride."

It was a love story about two people

that were literally made for each other,

but that were separated.

You fool!

Imbecile!

It was a lyrical, beautiful script.

You're safe now.

Safe?

Frankenstein says that he wants to create a woman

who is his equal,

and, of course, doing exactly the opposite.

He's trying to make her into the image

of a woman that he wants.

And Jennifer Beals, she was the big get

because she had just come off of "Flashdance."

Jennifer, I think, is sublimely good.

I don't think anybody gives her enough credit for the work

that she did in that movie.

She's looks magnificent in the costumes and on the sets.

I thought she was terrific.

I thought Sting was terrific, too.

There was me and Rappaport, David.

We got to be quite good friends.

Friend?

Yes.

Good health.

Good health.

Boy, playing the creature,

it's so rich.

Of course, the creature in Shelley's book

is articulate and sophisticated

and is the truth seeker and the truth teller in the movie.

The popular iteration of it of Karloff

and the subsequent Karloff-esque versions

of that Universal creature just make him a brute.

This was clearly a romantic version of it.

He gets more and more handsome

as the movie goes on,

which just meant that the prosthetics got more

and more handsome. They did, you know...

If the script had a flaw, it's that the two main stars

had to carry the portion of the film

that was the darkest and the coldest.

Where have you been all day?

Riding.

The job that Sting and Jennifer had to do

was to show how things fall apart.

They weren't supposed to have any chemistry.

Off screen, they actually did have chemistry.

I mean, we're all kind of liked each other.

On screen, they had to miss.

I made you out of ashes.

I can always reduce you to ashes again.

You can do what you like!

I think people miss the point of that, yeah.

It's a hopeful message of how we can, you know,

we can all get better from our --

from even the most miserable beginnings.

And we can all find true love.

That's not really the story.

It's not Mary Shelley's story, but that's okay.

Announcer: "Nightmare on Elm Street:

Part 2."

"Nightmare 1" was a huge, huge, off-the-charts hit.

They couldn't believe it.

"Nightmare 2" -- it has some of the most classic moments

of the franchise.

"Nightmare on Elm Street 2" is about relationships,

perspectives, and stereotypes that all get smashed

once Freddy Krueger gets his claws in them.

What we did is utilize the truth between Mark Patton,

Jesse Walsh, and I, Robert Rusler,

Ron Grady, and we utilized our own truths.

And we put it in the circumstances of the film.

I didn't have a judgment about sexuality.

And that's what I loved about Grady and Jesse,

there was no ulterior motive there.

There was a sexual tension between them.

I don't know why you're wasting your time with this guy,

he's a basket case.Shut up, Grady.

But it depends who's looking.

See you around, buddy.

We were playing with this idea

that Freddy was exploiting the subconscious

of Mark's character, Jesse,

and was maybe opening the closet door.

And we had beaucoup hints of Freddy

manipulating the boy's sexuality,

prompted both by the original screenplay,

the staging, the casting, and by sets, whole sequences.

No one said, "We're making a gay horror film,"

but we were toying with that.

Not nailing it down rigidly

but certainly exploring it.

And I loved what was going on with Freddy

being in the middle of it.

Divisive, calculating, darker than any of the other

"Nightmare on Elm Street" movies.

That scene comes up.

Krueger comes out of Jesse's body...

Dad!

...and I'm yelling for my dad.

Dad!

When I saw the movie with my dad at the screening,

my dad was crying, you know.

And I looked back in the audience,

and people were affected.

-Ron!

They did break one rule.

They took Freddy out of the dream.

He's dead, he's burned alive.

He doesn't even show up at the pool party.

Yet, there's some great stuff at the pool party,

"You're all my children now."

You are all my children now.

You know, "Help yourself, fucker."

Help yourself, fucker!

Aah!

And I love the idea that it's the rich girl's party,

and Freddy ruins it for all the rich kids.

Aah!

All they had to do -- just get a pickup shot

of Jesse or Jesse and Kim asleep in the pool house taking a nap,

and then that whole party crash by Freddy works.

Daddy can't help you now!

I mean, I remember asking Mark

in a sequence with Freddy and Jesse,

if I could touch him like I was gonna kiss him,

"Can I put a blade in your mouth?

Or could I just circle your mouth?

Can I caress your eyes?"

That's a real scary, strange moment.

I said, "Mark, do you think it should be sexual

or maybe the kiss of death?"

So I thought there might be a great

male-on-male kiss there.

That could be erotic and then -- and then death kiss.

Aaaahh!

There is a lot of people that watch that movie,

and it made them uncomfortable.

There were a lot of people that watched that movie

and it empowered them.

There were a lot of people that watched that movie,

and they made fun of or judged or poked.

Most of the people that judge and poke,

eh, what are you hiding, you know what I mean?

People were talking about this from the get-go,

and there was an increased and an enhanced fan base

within the gay community, because of this, immediately.

A lot of young gay men were heavily, heavily influenced

by that movie, to be truthful and honest with themselves

and -- and really flourish

into who they wanted to be from the inside.

I-I think that's fantastic.

As far as Freddy goes,

and as far as the depth of truth between characters,

nobody else touches "Nightmare 2."

I'm very proud of that movie.

And when people go, "Hey, what's it like to be

in the gayest horror movie ever made?"

I go, "It was fucking awesome."

It's okay, it's all over.

Man: Spooky.

I was a big Wes Craven fan.

I was also a huge fan of "The Hills Have Eyes."

That movie was freaky, man.

I'll come back for you later, girlie.

Another example of a situation that you could relate to

as, "This can really happen to me."

It was sort of like, "I take the wrong turn,

and I wind up in, you know, Hell."

"Hills Have Eyes II" is a weird one

because it comes on the heels of Craven

having maybe the biggest hit of his career

with "Nightmare on Elm Street."

And suddenly, he's kind of going back to the bottom of the barrel

and delivering a sequel to a movie

some eight years earlier.

There's a lot of flashbacks.

If you ever want to see a dog have a flashback in a movie,

I can name one and it's "Hills Have Eyes II."

In the first film,

this civilized, soft, suburban family

finds itself in the wilderness,

facing off against the sort of feral mutants,

I guess you would say.

Ohh!

And in the second one, it's kind of the mutants

bringing the fight to civilization a little bit

because one of their own has dared to try to cross over.

Rusler: I love Michael Berryman, you know,

working with him in "Weird Science,"

he was such the antithesis of what he comes off as on screen,

you know, because he's always playing

these really freaky, creepy, like super sadistic,

like, scary roles.

And in person, he's a super pleasant,

super educated, sweet man.

Can we keep this between us?

I'd hate to lose my teaching job.

What resonates with me about "Hills Have Eyes II"

compared to "Hills Have Eyes I"

was more the clarity

on what the fear was.

I want you to stay together and stay alert.

This place might look deserted,

but it's been used for something

right up to the time that we got here.

They got to expound upon the characters, the situation.

What's at stake you know? My life.

And what are the odds of me making out of here?

You know, slim and none.

I think Wes Craven was very good about capturing a perspective,

really taking you to that world in the desert.

That's one of those movies, like "Dawn of the Dead,"

where you come out hitting each other, being super mischievous.

For some reason, that's how some of those

horror movies affect me.

I want to get into trouble after I see 'em.

Horror movies are essentially absurd,

and the comedy just it's already in there.

And if you don't find it, someone else is gonna find it

because sometimes some of the things

that are happening are just preposterous.

Many of the pictures in the '80s,

like "Return of the Living Dead" and "The Stuff," are not afraid

to embrace the fact that they're silly.

I mean, in fact, I would almost think

that silly is kind of the -- the byword for horror comedies,

beginning with "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,"

which is everybody's favorite, because of the fact

that the horror-movie stuff is played straight.

It just all meshes together so perfectly,

and it looks terrific.

And it's, you know, I think, the best movie

that Abbott and Costello ever made.

And it's also the best

of the later Universal horror pictures.

Open sesame!

In black and white, the comedy was funnier.

In black and white, the horror was scarier.

It's almost like horror of the absurd.

Like, this is not even in the realm of probable.

And so there's a great sort of communal delight.

There's something endearing about that.

Dante: "Re-Animator" is -- is a very funny movie.

It's also pretty gruesome.

It's in the mind of the filmmaker.

You can't all be Takashi Miike

and have it be unrelentingly grim.

There's got to be some moments where the graph goes up and down

instead of just all the way across.

In my movies, I've always approached the horror aspects

along with a sense of the absurd.

My mechanism of dealing with fear is -- is -- is laughter,

especially in the movies, you know,

because then you realize that you're not in the movie.

Maroney: They call it comic relief,

a little space to stand still for a second

and catch your breath before you kick --

before you get chased around again,

or whatever it is.

You have to have that.

Otherwise, it's just relentless,

and it becomes unintentionally funny,

which you really don't want.

I couldn't think of a more horrible job if I wanted to.

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" has many comic elements in it,

but people don't think of it as a comedy until much later.

And then they have to invent fancy terms

like Gran Guignol

to describe what's going on in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Garris: "The Howling" is a really powerful horror movie,

but it's funny as hell,

and "An American Werewolf in London."

Both of them take their horror seriously,

and they take the comedy seriously.

And both of them are made by filmmakers who've embraced both

and have made comedies and have made horror movies.

They have such glee and relish.

A good horror movie makes you feel really excited

and like you're having a good time,

and certainly a good comedy, you ride that wave of laughter.

And when you can melt them together like John Landis

and Joe Dante can do...

Excuse me.

When it works, it's really great,

and that's what I was hoping for doing "Critters 2"

was that the comedy would be funny

and the horror would be scary.

I love that -- when you have a humorous movie

that also has scares,

because what it does for me is takes the edge off.

It's even more of a roller-coaster ride

than just scary, scary, scary, scary,

aah, scary, scary, aah, scary.

It's more like, "I'm totally relaxed because I was laughing.

Oh, my God!"

Now this big thing happens. You know?

Holy shit! I don't believe it.

Some of the things I kind of gravitate towards in horror

are the comedy horror.

Garbage day!

No!

I do love the wink of the eye.

Maybe because I hate to be scared, actually.

I like to get a little bit of a step backwards.

Can I have a piece of toast?

There are a lot of really successful horror films

with comedic elements in the '80s.

but there are a lot of movies that didn't get it right.

There was a short trend of movies

that were overall comedies but dealt with horror subjects.

You had "Teen Wolf" and "Transylvania 6-5000"

and "Once Bitten."

Oh, shit!

It's a tough balance to pull off,

but you really have to get the tone just right

so that the comedy doesn't really infringe

on the horror and vice versa.

Horror and comedy can go hand in hand

or they can be each other's worst enemy.

Most horror comedies are neither scary nor funny.

But when it works together,

they both aim for the same thing.

Horror and comedy both go for a physical reaction,

a scream, a jump, tension

gripping the arms of your seat for horror,

and comedy, the laughter.

If you go into a horror movie, or a comedy,

and it's quiet all the way through,

it ain't working.

Kong: A laugh is very difficult to get.

How do you get the laugh?

You get the laugh by surprising people.

If they can see the punch line coming, you're sunk.

The key to making a great horror comedy

is it's got to be 80% horror and 20% comedy.

If you try to do 80% comedy and 20% horror,

then what you're doing is you're attempting

to make a cult film in advance and that never works.

It always falls on its face.

Winter: Horror obviously crosses genres anyway,

but I would argue that '80s horror does that more than most.

It's like, you've got Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

It's gonna work great.

Hey! Oh!

Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter.

You've got peanut butter on my chocolate.

What? What?

So the '80s, I would argue, actually defined the --

and created this idea of kind of multi-genre horror

that absolutely gets away with high art and low art...

...make you laugh and -- and have visceral drama

and gross you out.

I said, "Shut up, butthole!"

That is really, I'd say,

the definition of '80s horror in a way, is --

is the people who grew out of those eras

and are slamming all of these genres together.

I never thought in a million years

when I was growing up in Davenport, lowa,

that I would be acting,

because I was probably the shyest person

on the face of the Earth.

I remember my first role that I got that was a speaking role,

even though it wasn't a lot of speaking, was "Fairy Tales."

And that was with Charlie Band.

I was so proud, I remember writing in my diary,

"I'm a big star."

I think I found my niche in doing the ones

that were more independent, I hate to say low budget.

What is this, midnight wimp bowling league?

What are you, the bride of Dracula?

I think there was a lot more freedom in doing things then,

and I just liked it.

It was a lot more fun.

The first time I had to take off my clothes,

which was in "Fairy Tales," I was terrified.

I was so scared.

I actually did push-ups to get my adrenaline going

so I wouldn't think about it.

It was a formula.

Shower scene, getting killed topless.

It became redundant.

I knew the formula.

I know they needed it to sell the film.

I think if you feel comfortable doing nudity, it's no big deal.

I made up in my mind, "If I have to show my breasts,

I'm gonna get more money."

So I was the go-to girl.

The more you draw attention to being naked, the worse it is.

If you just take it very casually, people don't notice.

It's like when -- It's the person that's like going,

"Oh, don't look. Oh, you can't see me.

Oh, I'm so embarrassed" that you want to look at.

So I would just be, like, very casual about it

and people didn't make a big deal.

You know, so it's like, it's not a big thing.

"Savage Streets" is about this badass Linda Blair going

and getting these guys who raped me,

which was a hard scene to do.

The director wanted mucus coming out my nose

and blood running down my leg.

I said, "I don't think that's necessary.

I think it's pretty creepy the way it is gonna be depicted."

I was so happy at that point to be playing opposite

Linda Blair and playing her sister.

And it was a different role for me

because I was just so innocent.

You're real pretty. You know that?

From "Savage Streets," I got both negative

and positive comments.

Like, the negative ones were,

"Oh, you didn't have to remember any lines.

You didn't have any lines in the movie."

But then I got the others

that are more into film that would say,

"Wow, that must have been hard not to say things and do things

and pretend that you can't understand."

I remember on "Return of the Living Dead,"

I don't usually say no,

but there were things like shave my eyebrows off.

Well, everybody was like,

"Don't do it because they might not grow back."

And I thought, "I don't want to go without eyebrows."

And then they wanted me to cut my hair.

I didn't do that, so they had to get a wig.

But I did agree to dance nude on a tombstone.

And talk about nude, it was really nude.

Getting away from zombies, I was terrified

because the zombies were extras.

And extras get very zealous

and they want to be seen in the camera

and I'm like, "Oh, my God, they're gonna really attack me."

I was -- I was actually very, like,

"Oh, no, what's gonna happen when they yell 'action'?"

And I'm, like, surrounded by the zombies,

and that's the end of me.

Being buried in mud, there is an art to holding your breath.

They dug a hole, then they're covering me up and I'm like,

"Oh, my God. I can't tell --

I can't hear when they call 'action.'

I can't tell when the rain machine's going."

So I had to kind of, like, time it,

and it was, like, kind of creepy to be under there.

So I did it on the first take, thank goodness.

I was so happy.

That's kind of dangerous because you can inhale the mud.

So I didn't know if anybody really knew what they were doing

or if I was just, like, a guinea pig on it.

When I turned into a zombie, I'm nude --

cold and nude.

It was horrible to have the special effects makeup done.

I didn't know what I was getting into,

but it was, like, all glued on me,

and they had the mouth at one point down here.

And I couldn't drink anything or really eat anything

because it was, like, so low.

It was pretty miserable.

I decided to do this workout,

"The Linnea Quigley Horror Workout."

Everybody was doing it.

So we decided to do a campy version with zombies

and with girls at a slumber party

and, you know, just throwing everything,

throw it into the mix.

I know what you're doing when you're watching my movies.

Just how many calories do you think that burns?

We had a really fun time doing it

because it was so tongue in cheek.

It's supposed to be taking place on the mountain with gravestones

and this whole dramatic thing.

Well, the fire marshals decided to do,

like, a fire test up there.

So we got kicked out of there and went to my parents' house

and decided to film by the pool,

and then have the zombies jump in the pool.

Okay! Everybody into the pool!

Cynthia Garris, Mick Garris's wife,

choreographed the whole thing, so she was across the pool,

because I'm not a great, you know, dancer.

I wasn't aerobically trained.

So she was helping me out with that.

And she was actually one of the slumber party girls, too.

I think when they label you, like, scream queen, to me,

it's an honor.

It's taken like a flip-flop.

So I don't think it's limiting now, but it was limiting then.

I would say advice for screaming on camera

would be just go all out and do it.

Also, know that you're gonna get a headache

after doing it a lot.

So bring some aspirin.

I think horror changed a lot

when we were in people's living rooms.

I think that people got to know you better.

They could go seek you out in a video store and say,

"Oh, you know, I really liked that person.

Do you have another movie by her or him?"

Or, you know, "Is there another part two or part three?"

It's a way to really get into someone's heart.

Announcer: "House."

Enter at your own risk.

After "Friday the 13th" and then a couple of more sequels

and then "Nightmare on Elm Street,"

we knew the genre was changing.

And one of the pitfalls in horror films in general,

is that you think it's a compounding of grim scenes

and suspense and desperation.

No!

But it isn't that way.

It has to have hills and valleys,

and lots of times, some kind of comic relief

really, really helps.

Sandy. Aah!

You have a man who's writing and who's isolated from his family,

dealing with sort of these Vietnam flashbacks.

You're dealing with, like, the death of a kid

at certain points.

And there's definitely some trauma issues

that they're exploring in that movie.

Cunningham: Bill Katt was just terrific casting.

And then Steve Miner is the one who really believed in that

and really thought that he could bring it off

and he did a great job.

You've been in Vietnam,

lost your only child, your wife divorced you.

I mean, you've got a few marbles running around,

but right now, you seem fine.

You have crazy characters popping in.

You have Richard Moll as Big Ben.

Big Ben?

No, it's your fairy godmother.

Our hope initially was that Big Ben was gonna become iconic,

but he didn't.

Oh!

You're pissing me off, Roger.

This notion of -- of a zombie G.I. rotting off the bone,

that he would come back and really raise hell.

Roger, you hit like a little girl!

For some magical reason,

people didn't buy into him as being a super villain

the way they bought into other characters at the time.

You can't get rid of me, Roger.

You can't and you never will!

A good poster will tell the audience

what it's going to see.

"House" had that great line

and an image of, like, a zombie finger

that goes, "Ding Dong. You're dead."

It's like...

I just thought that was delightful because it suggested

that we weren't taking it completely seriously,

but that it was a haunted house and that people were at risk.

That was kind of inspired.

Our original twist love affair

started with the unmasking of who a killer was

or who the bad guy was.

And that goes all the way back to "Scooby-Doo."

"Scooby-Doo" is just a horror movie

in animated segments of a killer or a bad guy,

and that sort of that gateway into watching the real movies

where you wanted the unmasking of who the killer is

or who the bad guy is.

Everybody always references, "Ooh, Freddy" or "Jason."

And they go, "What's your favorite movie?"

and I go, "April Fool's Day."

Announcer: "April Fool's Day."

Get ready to party... till you drop.

And it blows their mind. They're like, "Why?"

And I was like, "Well, if you actually watch

'April Fool's Day,' it's a great slasher movie

with a fantastic performance,"

because if you actually watch her in that movie,

Foreman is -- she's creepy.

Criminally under-looked.

It tells the story of a bunch of friends

who were invited to their friend's house for a weekend.

They all just start dropping like flies.

Come on!

My favorite kill is probably the first one

where the guy has his face chopped up with the boat motor.

You talk about roast beef, it is just a shredder.

Oh! Geez!

The kills are great.

The comedy is off the charts.

It's smart, it's funny.

I think it's probably my all-time favorite horror movie

just because of the twist.

Blew my mind at the end of the movie.

It's not just about, "I thought the killer was somebody else,"

because you always try to figure out the mystery.

Yeah, having twists in --

especially in '80s horror movies,

whether they're the big movies or the obscure ones,

those always get you a little bit.

April fool.

Announcer: Will you survive it?

Ahhh!

"Demons."

The construct of the story for "Demons"

is a group of people are watching a movie.

We're watching the people watch the movie,

as they're watching a movie.

So I am a working girl

on a day off with my best friend

and the fellow who, let's say, collects the money for us.

And we get a free ticket.

I pick up the mask and something inside the mask

scratches my face.

Ow! What was that?

There's three levels of demons.

And by the way it's demone.

That's how we say "demons" in Italy. It's demone.

So there's three different levels,

and the first level is infection.

That's when hell will open

because the demons are gonna come onto Earth

and try to take over the dominion of Earth.

Dario Argento and Sacchetti and Ferrini and Lamberto Bava,

the four authors of the script, they knew the story.

"Yeah, we're gonna do this.

It's gonna be a film and a film of some kids in a film."

But it took them two years to make the rules.

What were the rules of hell?

What were the rules of demons?

And what is a demon?

It can come through the screen, it can come around you,

and it can get into your blood system.

My face exploding was my first day on the set.

In the ladies' room, I look in the mirror,

and the audience sees the pulse get bigger and bigger

and bigger and explode.

No!

And from that moment on, we're running.

The movie never slows down again.

Then you can't get out.

Isn't that everyone's fear?

You're in a box, you're in a group,

you're with a gang, you don't know anybody,

and now you can't get out.

There's not any, "You're bad, you had sex so you must die."

It really is the larger concept of how much can you stay human,

your humanity

within a bad situation that you can't get out of?

That's the real message.

And it's a movie with this amazing soundtrack.

I mean, Billy Idol, Go West,

and then you have Claudio Simonetti.

There's something about metal, that to them,

it's the standout loner against society.

There's so many great effects and demone-- demons.

-Help!

The eyeball gauge, it's a real man.

And they put padding on there.

So they had a system that when I put my hands in the pad,

there was gel, and I knew don't go past the gel

because his real eyes are in there.

The birth of the demon that comes out of Paola's back,

that was a mechanical thing

that Sergio Stivaletti created.

Just look at that doll.

Look at that creature that comes out.

Excellently done.

They love that!

They love the -- the guts of it.

The helicopter.

It was a technical way

of how the helicopter got through the roof.

It's not magic.

It's the mechanics of movie making.

So as everyone's running toward the camera, I'm hiding.

I'm hiding. I'm hiding behind pillars.

I'm hiding behind things because I want to be sure

I don't get killed on scene.

I want to be sure my head

doesn't go flying with that helicopter blade.

The humanity of it is the secret of the movie.

Watch all these people doing the best they can

in the worst circumstances.

And not everyone's going to win.

Announcer: "Vamp" -- a comedy with bite,

and, of course, Grace Jones.

"Vamp" is the story of three kids

who go downtown to a strip club

to procure some unappareled refreshment,

I guess, is what you want to call it,

and end up running into a nest of vampires.

Richard Wenk, the writer/director,

had a terrific vision of what he wanted.

He wanted to make a horror movie that utilized humor.

"Vamp," for me, was trying to fit in.

Take me with you and just pretend

to be my friends for a week.

Hey, guys, I'm psyched.

Let's party.

At what cost?

I was so stoked to meet Grace Jones.

She was perfectly cast to play Katrina.

We were all worried if Grace Jones was gonna show up

on the set or not.

She surprised us in a lot, a lot of ways, I have to say.

I think all of us were kind of, like, vamping

so you know, in some way.

When Grace Jones came on the set, the air would change.

I do remember one incident where I had opened the door,

and there was Grace Jones and she was stark naked.

And underneath her this man was painting her,

turned out to be Keith Haring.

Keith was just slowly drawing white lines

on her beautiful ebony body.

It was just unbelievable to watch.

I give you...Katrina.

Watanabe: The dance -- that was pretty cool.

None of us knew what to expect.

The red wig that she had on, at first,

I kept thinking it looked like Ronald McDonald.

I said, "How in the hell is this gonna work?"

But it worked!

I sat there and went, "Oh, my God. She looks great."

Grace Jones is so charismatic and her character was so strong

that she didn't need to talk.

She was all action.

You like to play rough, huh?

When we were filming the death scene,

Grace was just so wild.

You know, she came onto set nine hours late one night,

howling, saying, "Where's my man?"

And the whole crew just went...

She had attacked my neck like a Pit Bull,

like a shark on a fish

and didn't realize that the teeth actually penetrated

the latex and went into my jugular.

And I was writhing in pain, screaming in agony,

and she didn't realize how badly I was hurt.

And it could have been a lot worse than how it turned out.

How you're doing back there, Duncan?

I'm hungry.

He's okay.

It was the first time I ever was transformed into a vampire,

so it was pretty exciting for me.

They started to proceed to put on the prosthetics on my face.

I watched myself turn into my grandfather.

It was a little scary.

There's a certain kind of empowerment

that you feel when you're put into a costume,

and this one was kind of like, "Okay,

I got the teeth, I got power," which really surprised me,

because I think my character was -- was empowered.

Now all of a sudden, he had this power even though

he eventually was gonna die, but still, you know,

why not go out in a flame if you have to?

Literally.

"The Seventh Curse" came out in 1986.

It's a hidden gem, I would say.

Hong Kong cinema was very much like two-fold --

you had action and comedy.

Then the other side, we were incorporating a lot of fantasy

and horror as well.

Directed by Simon Nam.

He went on to direct "The Story of Ricky,"

which is kind of a very over-the-top action movie

with lots of blood and gore.

The plot revolves around Dr. Yuan, played by Chin Siu-ho,

who's a fantastic martial artist.

Dr. Yuan is warned of a curse

after being attacked in his apartment.

The film flashes back,

where we see him saving a girl called Betsy

from an evil tribe called the Worm Tribe.

Aah!

After saving her from being sacrificed, he is cursed.

Aah!

He decides to head back to Thailand

to get rid of this tribe,

so he can live forever without having to look over his shoulder

thinking he's gonna die in a year's time.

He gets the advice by Wisely played by Chow Yun-Fat,

who is barely in the movie, he's --

He pops up in the beginning.

He's in a little bit near the sort of middle act.

And he pops up at the end with a rocket launcher,

which is a great sequence.

When it comes to the action, the film completely delivers.

They try and push the gore as much as possible.

They actually quite -- It's quite sprinkled throughout.

You see someone's stomach get ripped apart,

all these worms fall out of it.

A guy's head gets ripped off, blood gets drained from him.

They give it a go, and it does work to a certain degree,

but it does provide some unintentional laughs.

Watching this movie, I had a huge smile on my face.

If you love your Hong Kong action,

if you love your fantasy and you love horror

thrown into that with elements of Indiana Jones,

it's a movie you've got to watch

because it's so bonkers and silly.

Uh!

There. Now, isn't that the best song?

What kind of a weird plant is that, Seymour?

Announcer: "Little Shop of Horrors."

Rolfe: The original "Little Shop of Horrors"

by Roger Corman is about a florist,

Seymour, whose shop is struggling,

until he grows this amazing Venus fly trap,

but the problem is, it only eats human flesh.

The 1982 musical stage production

was adapted into the 1986 film

directed by Frank Oz and starring Rick Moranis.

It seems like the whole world's gone crazy.

At least we got each other, right?

Audrey II is incredible.

These practical effects were outstanding.

They look so good.

Does it have to be human?

Does it have to be mine?!

In order to get the lip sync perfect,

they had to slow down the frame rate of the plant.

But it works fantastic.

You sure do drive a hard bargain.

Ellen Greene is great.

I mean, she has this funny, squeaky voice.

I call it an Audrey II.

After me?

I hope you don't mind.

But then when she sings, it's -- it's gorgeous.

The songs are wonderful.

Also, you have this great cameo by Steve Martin,

who plays this deranged dentist

who likes to inflict pain on people.

But then he meets his match with Bill Murray,

who's this patient who doesn't want any Novocaine or anything.

Say "Ah." Ahhhhh!

And Bill Murray is actually filling in the role

that Jack Nicholson played in the original.

No Novocaine. It dulls the senses.

The original ending was not a happy one.

In fact, it's relentlessly dark and morbid.

Seymour's girlfriend, Audrey, is fatally wounded by the plant,

and then he sacrifices her corpse to the plant.

He slowly carries her up,

like it's some kind of ceremony.

It's tragic, yet somehow beautiful at the same time.

He confronts the original plant, only to be eaten himself.

The plants attack the city.

And it's a full-on destruction sequence,

where the plants destroy everything.

And it's some of the best miniature-model work

I've ever seen.

Everybody in the whole world dies.

It's so insanely depressing that it's no wonder they cut it.

I mean, that was pretty crazy.

The allure of horror isn't just watching other people in terror,

it's identifying with the people who are in terror.

Crampton: People in life naturally walk away from fear.

But in watching a horror movie, it allows you to confront that

while someone else is going through it.

It doesn't have to be you.

And usually there's somebody in the film that is victorious,

and, by osmosis, it makes you feel more confident.

The whole idea behind living our lives

is having enough ordinary care

to see whatever threats may materialize over the horizon.

That's what's basic to horror.

If I am that person, how do I get out of that situation?

How do I live through this moment?

We can experience that horror and that terror

through somebody else's eyes.

And there's also a giant sense of catharsis

and kind of a projection of, "What if that was me?

Are they making the right decisions that I would make?"

Dennis! Dennis!

Sometimes you end up rooting more for the monster

than for the kids.

Now, in the traditional horror movie,

we often saw things from the victim's point of view,

but that's no longer.

Now we look through the killer's eyes.

It's almost as if the audience is being asked

to identify with the attackers in these movies,

and that really bothers me.

Cunningham: Jason was meant to be kind of a shark.

And he made this transition from being a shark

to being, somehow or other, a hero.

There's this tiny little backstory about Jason

being picked on as a kid,

tormented, and then finally drowned.

And ever since he came back, he's been kicking ass.

And it's sort of like "Revenge of the Nerds" on steroids.

There's a certain kind of identification

with Jason being the super ego of the depressed kid.

You get to have your fantasy that you're the killer.

You're ripping out hearts, you're ripping out throats,

"You know what, boss? I'll tell you what I'd like to do."

Rrrr-rrrr-rrr.

You could be the little person

that finally got to beat up the meanies.

You could be the girl that nobody liked,

and you're gonna get them in the end.

I think it's more like vicariousness.

I don't think it's catharsis.

I think people maybe are curious about how it would feel to be

in a power position, or curious about the rush

that you would get out of executing somebody.

You watch people, how much they love video games, too.

Like, it's not catharsis.

I think it's -- it's more than that.

It depends on what world you want to escape into.

And I think if you watch the -- "Hey, I'm watching the kids

run through the woods to get their heads cut off,"

you feel good because you're not in the woods.

You -- You live in a world that, you know, doesn't --

that doesn't actually hopefully happen to you.

And then in that fantasy world,

or that spy-adventure-movie world,

you want to be one of those characters.

So they're two completely different things.

The categorical difference between a horror movie

and a -- a -- a violent action movie

has to do with the experience.

On "Death Wish," you are Paul.

You get the gun, you go out

and you shoot these sort of faceless victims.

In a horror movie, you're the victim.

The whole experience is completely flipped.

That is a significant difference on a cinematic level,

on a political level,

on what it has to say about society,

but it's also a difference critically in terms

of how it's getting at your subconscious.

An action movie of that type,

it has a kind of wish-fulfillment aspect to it.

Every time he goes out and shoots one of these,

like, hoodlums, you get a dopamine hit.

It's like a video game. Like, "Oh, I got another one."

In a horror movie, you know, it's --

it's more like a nightmare.

You're put in this position of kind of existential dread

or threat that is pursuing you in some way,

which gets into much, much deeper aspects of human nature.

Horror movies have a much more complicated

and I would say deeper level that they're getting at.

I was never really a video-game guy.

I was more of a pinball guy.

Nowadays there's an Elvira pinball machine.

There's a Rob Zombie pinball machine.

I'm pinball, man.

Today you have a lot of great horror games,

especially with the -- the VR.

I mean, there's all kinds of things they can do now.

Even now, you have some that are based on '80s horror films

like the recent "Friday the 13th video" game,

which is connected with Tom Savini and Kane Hodder,

but we didn't always have that.

Back then, video-game technology wasn't as advanced.

Wizard Video was releasing these games like

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Halloween."

In "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," you're the bad guy.

You are Leatherface, and you're killing people.

Like, there's no morals in this game.

It's sort of like one of the first real sadistic games

where you control the killer.

You basically get points for chopping people up.

One thing that's funny about the chainsaw

is that it's the same color as the body.

It's sort of like an extension of his body,

and you get stuck on everything.

Then there was "Halloween," also on Atari.

You're running from Michael Myers.

You have to get the kids

and move them to a corner of the house.

And every time you do that, you get 675 points.

Very specific.

It also has what might be the first head decapitation

in a video game.

I mean, I can't think of any games before that

where a head gets cut off, and you see blood spurting out.

And it also has the "Halloween" theme song in it.

They were super, super cheesy, just little pixels,

So bad.

So the Atari version of "Alien" basically took Pac-Man

and then just turned it into "Alien."

"Frankenstein's Monster" on Atari,

it had this great moment

where the Frankenstein monster would approach the screen.

If you played in the dark at night,

the whole room would just flash green.

I did a few games.

One was "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark."

One was "The Jaws of Cerberus."

I don't know what I had to do with that.

And one was "Elvira: The Arcade Game."

They kind of got better as time went on.

Everybody was grabbing their joystick

and having a really good time.

There was this one game called "Monster Party" for the NES.

And I can remember renting it as a kid

and being really excited because the box art was great on it.

It had all these different monsters on it,

and I popped the game in and was kind of disappointed

because it wasn't as good as the box art.

It was an important lesson I learned about

never judge a game by its cover.

The interesting thing about horror video games

is that I've watched the graphics progress

to a point where they are able to get more graphic,

and as a result, the games became more controversial.

I remember hearing controversies about "Doom,"

about "Resident Evil,"

even something like "Mortal Kombat"

was a big deal when I was a kid.

And it was all because the graphics had progressed

to a point where you could show all these sort of graphic things

that you previously would have only been able to see in movies,

that you could now see in these games.

And a lot of parents groups and politicians

did not like that.

You're engaged now as the aggressor.

You're engaged as the person who commits the violence

and not just someone who watches the violence.

Trachenburg: "The Ghostbusters" game for the Commodore 64,

you are the Ghostbusters and you start off a lot like the movie.

You have to go and buy all your different equipment.

You put it together, and then you go out

and you hunt ghosts in order to get enough money

to be able to get to the finale of the game.

You would get in the Ecto-1, you would drive to the location.

And there would be a ghost

that looked like Slimer that's flying around.

And you have to position your two Ghostbusters together

to trap the ghosts in between the streams.

And then you can suck them up in the trap.

Not really challenging, but fun.

Ghostbusters!

"Nightmare on Elm Street" was one of the few NES games

where you could play four players

using the NES Four Score.

You're running around Elm Street,

which happens to be the longest street

in the world in this game,

but the idea is to collect all of Freddy's bones.

You have all these stock villains like lollipop ghosts

with stick arms, bats,

skeletons, Frankenstein monsters.

It's so generic.

Every once in a while, Freddy would appear,

and it would say "Freddy's coming,"

but it would be a "Freddy's -- trademark -- "coming."

"Friday the 13th" on NES

might have been one of the first horror games I've ever played.

And there's a bunch of items you have to collect

but you'll never have time because this Jason alarm

keeps going off and you have to keep on top

of he's out there killing the camp counselors.

Then you go inside the house and it switches to 3D,

which was kind of cool at that time.

It was one of the first horror games

that really made an impression on me.

"You and your friends are dead. Game over."

" That's kind of rough, you know?

A lot of these games don't really hold up,

but back then you used your imagination.

And you made the best of it, because that's all we had.

But we would have never imagined that, you know,

all these decades later, you get a real

"Friday the 13th" game that definitely feels more official

than, you know, the type of games

they would usually put out in the '80s.

The "Friday the 13th" game,

as a player, you can play as Jason, which is fun,

or as any of the victims,

trying to get away from Jason or defeat Jason.

So I thought that was an ingenious way

of building a video game.

In this video game, you can play as

several different versions of Jason.

I was honored that they wanted me to be a part of it,

because this is animation, basically,

so they could have used anyone.

But it was in their minds I was the person to do it,

because they liked how I moved as the character.

Savini: "Friday the 13th" video game,

I essentially did what I did on the movie,

except not physically, right.

My job was to sit down and create kills.

On paper, they didn't seem so horrible and grisly,

but then seeing him in a game I was like

"Oh, God, you know, I wrote that."

I created them on paper,

and then Kane Hodder donned the suit

and did the motion capture for all the kills.

You're wearing spandex, which is scary to think of me

in spandex anyway, with sensors everywhere.

So I'll look at the monitor, I see Jason.

Whenever I would move I would see exactly what the character

is gonna look like in the game.

By the way, Kane Hodder plays the game,

but he plays it as a camp counselor

trying to outwit himself.

Is it's not as easy as you would think.

And I played as a counselor, trying to defeat Jason,

and I just got my ass whooped.

Eh, it's more fun to be the bad guy.

Announcer: Harry Angel has been hired to search for the truth.

Pray he doesn't find it.

"Angel Heart" was another one of those "Exorcist,"

"Rosemary's Baby" kind of movies.

I think it's completely underrated.

I think it's one of Alan Parker's,

who directed, I think it's one of his best ever.

A guy making a deal

with the devil not really knowing it's the devil.

It's funny I have a feeling I've met you before.

I don't know, I don't think so.

Mickey Rourke is terrific in it, De Niro is terrific in it,

and it's great to see them operating together.

How terrible is wisdom

when it brings no profit to the wise, Johnny.

That was one of the attractions of it, was we get to see

Lisa Bonet, the Cosby kid as a little sexpot.

So, the gods got you pregnant?

-Yeah. -I understand that.

-Sorry.

I'm not, it was the best fuck I ever had.

Very much about the '80s,

very much about behaving yourself

and not being as decadent and horrible and cruel

and awful to people as --

as the '80s allowed you to be, seemed to be in fashion then.

De Niro has this spectacular moment.

He's talking about the an egg as sort of a metaphor for the soul.

You know, some religions think that the egg

is the symbol of the soul. Did you know that?

And at the end of this beautiful speech,

takes a big honkin' bite out of the egg,

just big teeth and everything right into it.

It's De Niro as you've never seen him,

or seen him before since.

He's going down the elevator at the end

and descending into hell

and not having any choice about it.

It's a great horrible cautionary tale as well.

But boy, oh boy.

Only the soul is immortal.

Yours belongs to me.

Announcer: The scares comes twice as quickly in...

I...beat...you.

Announcer: ..."Creepshow 2."

"Creepshow 1" was such a success

that they of course had to put out a sequel,

"Creepshow 2" was not as memorable as the first

but it did have some very memorable segments.

So here we were, you know, in Arizona, you know,

doing another "Creepshow."

Mike Gornick directed it.

I love being with Mike Gornick.

I might have been a little miffed

that I wasn't asked to do the effects on it,

and I think their intention was to save money or something,

then they offered me the role of the creep.

Okay, great, you know, so.

And I, you know, I just mimed that whole thing,

the dialogue was recorded.

I never seen anyone so impatient, Billy.

In fact, when I played the creep,

I insisted that when my scene was over,

I must immediately have the makeup removed

and walk into a shower.

Hey, kids.

My nightmares involve being sticky.

I can't be sticky.

So wearing that makeup is the stickiest feel.

I hate wearing it, but it's good that I have worn it

because I know what I'm doing to people

when I put it on them, okay.

I never seen anyone so impatient, Billy.

Anthologies are hard. They're a hard sell.

Because if you had a story that was good enough for a movie,

you'd make a whole movie about it.

Starts off with of course, the wooden Indian,

the old trope of the kind store owners

that are elderly get, you know, beat up

and killed by these creeps that are robbing the store.

And then of course, the wooden Indian outside turns

real and murders these three kids.

Then we get to "The Raft," which is great.

They did a great job of it.

It's a creepy story about four friends who swim out to a raft

and then this giant oil slick that's living

and has magical powers that can mesmerize you, kills them all.

It's one of my wife's favorite movies

but when I say to her, "you know that was just a big garbage"

but no, no, no, no, she doesn't want to hear

about the effects, okay.

The creature in the lake, using ultra slime and tinted metacil

and all this kind of stuff.

This sequence where Page Hannah is --

is attacked by the creature,

we had a bunch of different gags.

we had an arm prosthetic that I sculpted

with bladders underneath it,

and then we built these different versions of her

sort of melted as the blob is kind of enveloping her.

One of the funniest moments of that

was we were prepping for Chief Wooden Head,

and Howard Berger had called and said, "We need slime.

We were shooting another shot and we're out of slime."

I was like driving like 50 miles an hour,

60 miles an hour on these side streets.

And I turned a corner and one of the buckets in the back seat

spilled .

And I looked at down at my feet

and this black sludge went up underneath the seat,

my foot's now stuck to the gas pedal and the brake.

So we were literally scooping it out

and running to dress the set.

I beat you!

It's always tough to do a sequel

I think, and particularly an anthological sequel

because the expectations are already high,

because of how well the first "Creepshow" did

and how much it connected with fans.

It was missing that spark.

It tries, but I don't think it nearly reaches the heights

that "Creepshow 1" did.

No.

Announcer: The "Blood Diner."

First they greet you...

then they eat you.

No one under 17 admitted.

And what's great about horror is you can make social commentary

while entertaining people on this roller coaster ride.

You're not gonna sit there passively

in a Jackie Kong movie, for sure.

What's the story of "Blood Diner"?

Blood Diner is family loyalty gone wrong.

They love their uncle.

The problem is the uncle is a psychopath serial killer.

The script was serious as a heart attack.

From what I understood, it was a scene by scene rip-off

of "Blood Feast."

Herschel Gordon Lewis's execution

is a completely different execution of what I did.

"Blood Diner" transcends the genre.

Ah.

I had the killers being extremely likable guys.

It was not scripted that way.

It was scripted they were supposed to be

these ghoulish brothers that go around,

you could see them a mile away coming,

and they kill people and stitch together this female

Frankenstein in the back of their popular

restaurant

The idea of reanimating family members brain and having

that brain tell you to commit mass homicide, was so out there.

You, my nephews, must construct Sheetar from the body parts

of many immoral girls.

It's really misguided family loyalty at its extreme.

I wanted to shock people.

Am I doing this right, Uncle Anwar?

I was just having fun.

It doesn't bother me to have a naked woman

doing nude aerobics because I'm a woman.

A nude kung fu scene?

No one had ever done that.

I had to do that.

And why did I do that?

She's completely nude, full bush.

I wanted her to be naked because I wanted her to look vulnerable.

You think it's an easy kill for sure, and that's when the --

where the surprise comes in.

And my job as the director is to throw them off

in the head another direction.

The people that I work with, my actors

and my crew don't have a problem at all working with a woman.

Where you run into the problems are with the executives,

there was a disconnect.

How could this little Asian young woman

direct this outrageous off the hook,

violent movie, right?

Funny, ridiculous absurdist piece.

Hey, hey!

Things haven't changed that much.

It's not a contest.

It's really isn't, it just is who's qualified to do it,

and I bring attention to that.

Bastards! You goddamn fickle bastards!

You'll pay for this!

My sets look like the United Nations

Okay.

You've got every possible nationality working,

and you've got half of the crew, if not more, women.

And that's why you see a big representation

of different ethnicities,

because that's the way I saw the world.

Jesus fucking Christ, what am I paying you two for?

The way I saw that finale was like a war scene.

It was an insane undertaking,

but Sheetar bites that head off of a virgin

with her giant vagina

with teeth in a ritual that brings her to life, how absurd.

Censors were shutting it down.

They said it had no socially redeeming values whatsoever.

It just was misunderstood, the film,

and it was way ahead of its time.

Yet I found my followers.

Right before I stick my big sausage in you,

what do they call 'ya?

They call me Sheetar .

Announcer: "Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II."

"Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II"

is about this really awesome chick living in the '50s

who is ahead of her time.

She loves to party and have sex with many, many boys

and finds herself murdered

as she's supposed to be coronated

by one of those boys that she had scorned.

And she comes back to wreak havoc

and take her revenge and get her crown back.

Nobile: She's presented as this sort of slutty character.

In the '80s, we would say slutty,

but really what that means

is that she sort of owns her sexuality.

It's not who you come with, it's who takes you home.

Scram.

Mary Lou Maloney is my favorite,

I literally have the poster hanging over my bed.

She just was definitely somebody I looked up to

when I was little, like she's just sexually open

and not apologizing for it.

And I don't know, and then her kills were really cool.

It was a Canadian film that has nothing to do

with the original "Prom Night."

The queer audience has gotten really,

really excited about "Hello Mary Lou."

It resonates for them in a way

that a lot of other '80s Films don't.

It's got a sort of a coding that they have

embraced and mapped to.

We've come a very long way

in how we think about that kind of agency

and about how we judge that kind of behavior.

I think her whole situation is absorbed

by a contemporary audience in a way

that '80s audiences weren't ready to do, or willing.

See you later, alligator.

"Prince of Darkness" is a movie that shows what happens

when John Carpenter gets experimental.

Jesus Christ!

It goes straight for the cerebral

but then it goes for a lot of the traditional blood and guts

that you would expect in a Carpenter film.

I decided I wanted to make some low budget movies again

after "Big Trouble Little China."

"Prince of Darkness" was the first one.

It was inspired by Dario Argento's "Inferno,"

because he just did things crazy --

these crazy batshit things, and I thought, "Let's go.

Let's try it."

The cast in this is one of the most diverse casts of the '80s,

but Carpenter has said he didn't cast them to be diverse.

He cast them because they were the best choices for the roles.

Is there some reason why you're not telling us

what we're going to be doing?

In time.

I wanted to work with Victor Wong

and Dennis Dun again,

and I cast Donald Pleasance.

I thought what a really interesting cast in this.

What is it?

A secret that can no longer be kept.

"Prince of Darkness" features Alice Cooper

as one of the controlled homeless people,

and Alice was a nice guy.

He brought along the gag where he stabs the guy.

It was from his stage show.

He just kind of wanders up on him, very unassuming.

And then all of a sudden .

He is a member of the homeless community.

He has been possessed by the devil's particle,

whatever you want to call it, the evil.

And he is now the goalie.

He's keeping people in

or killing them as they come out.

Carpenter, as he does, masterfully balanced two things.

In this, it was the war of science and religion.

You have science where they're talking about

black holes and particles,

and you have religion where the son of the anti-God

is being held in a chamber in a church.

Every particle has an anti-particle,

its mirror image.

Maybe he's anti-God.

The fact that they never really come out

and say it's the devil is genius.

They found the God Particle.

Where's the devil's particle?

And that I think is where Prince of Darkness comes in.

That tells you how relevant that movie is today.

No person can hold him now.

I am...

eternal.

Freddie's personality was being quoted by Johnny Carson.

It was in Mad Magazine, it was in the funny papers,

it was being merchandised.

When you become that part of the culture,

you follow it a little bit.

So the franchise exploited Freddie's sense of humor,

This- isn't helping.

And a kind of almost surreal, subconscious,

dreamlike sense of fun and revenge

that Freddy was going through with the culture

at the same time.

The Freddy merchandising now it --

there's something new every week.

Literally.

It's just amazing, the amount of stuff,

from pencil sharpeners to squirt guns.

There's silly stuff, there's corny stuff.

I love finding old, like, board games from Europe,

you know, and things like that are fun for me to see them.

I love the foreign posters,

like the one over my shoulder here, that's from Thailand.

Because they're more lurid.

I didn't suffer the curse of typecasting or and -- and --

and when I did, I was prepared for it.

I wasn't going to be surprised by it,

and I'd already proved myself.

Let me go! .

Hey, hands on the counter, asshole!

It was a big deal to decide to be an actor

or a musician back when I was a kid.

It was like a big deal.

My generation, God, you know, you can be an engineer,

or you can be a doctor or a lawyer,

but that was it.

That's what you're supposed to be.

I did Shakespeare, was paid for it professionally, union.

Moliere.

I did George Bernard Shaw.

I did Arthur Miller.

I just love doing it.

I was trained to do that,

and I was getting good parts,

and I was predominantly doing comedy.

So most of my memory of theaters about getting that laugh.

1973 till 1983 I was not only an established

Hollywood character actor, sidekick, co-star,

I side kicked all of the big stars,

and then I moved into television.

And I played bad guys, and I played --

I've been playing a lot of Southerners.

I don't know why.

I guess I'd learned something doing "Tennessee Williams,"

but that's how Hollywood saw me.

Hey, quit stalling, will 'ya!

Just because you know you've got a great hand.

.

I was on "Manimal."

I do know that for the fan boys

it did become, like, a kind of suspension bridge of obsession.

You know, with werewolf effects.

A show like "Manimal" is a link in that genre,

and it deserves its asterisk, you know,

and I deserve my residual check .

And then "V."

I am just...

Just what? Yes.

Oh, get out of the way, damn stupid alien.

I do "V," and I've tapped into the great science fiction

Zeitgeist of the world, not just America.

Then our movie became a big hit,

and I was off.

This is God.

Our budgets are getting a little bit bigger for each movie,

but time got precious.

Not shooting.

We never were rush shooting, but post.

We would be shooting a movie,

and they would rely too much on the Freddy jokes.

I could -- I would have an option sometimes.

A scene would end with me doing a joke

or a wisecrack or a kind of Dirty Harry

make my day line.

Sorry, kid.

I don't believe in fairy tales.

And sometimes I would just do it without the line.

And sometimes I do it and just do it a little darker.

But when you're editing,

that line becomes your punctuation point,

it becomes your button that can, you know, button up the scene

and give it a little percussive rimshot.

So they erred in that direction a bit.

Krueger!

Well, it ain't Dr. Seuss.

"Wes Craven's New Nightmare" is a great film,

and the most popular of all the nightmare films

in the franchise is "Nightmare 3."

There's room for more.

Gaston Leroux, "Phantom of the Opera""

was the Stephen King cheap thrill story of its time.

A Penny Dreadful.

"Give me a penny mate.

I'll give you something dreadful."

Still hungry for an introduction?

We delivered the goods on our "Phantom of the Opera."

The director Dwight Little and I

were kind of simultaneously inspiring each other

to be on the same page, with this sort of homage,

to the Hammer film,

which is why we transported our "Phantom of the Opera""

from the Paris Opera of the 1890s

to the 1890s of London of "Jack the Ripper,"

and the sets are scrumptious and romantic,

and Stephanie Lawrence,

from Evita on the West End playing our diva.

Bill Nighy.

"A bit of blood and guts here."

But we're also doing the romantics

sumptuous on location richness.

So it was great fun.

But the other real selling point for me

on "Phantom of the Opera" was there was two scripts.

There was this second script called

"The Phantom of Manhattan,"

and it's ultra romantic.

And of course that attracted me to play the romance of it.

The fans of not only "Phantom of Opera,"

but my fans from Freddy,

there's a huge kind of strange goth, romantic contingent.

There are girls that have a kind of "Beauty and the Beast"

attraction with Freddy.

I mean, to this day, I'm so disappointed

that we never got to do that second film,

you know, "Phantom of Manhattan."

Well, here's the thing with "976-Evil."

Nobody held a gun to my head.

They made me a nice offer.

I was allowed to direct,

but I love the idea of "976-Evil."

It seems gimmicky now, in hindsight,

but the body of it I liked,

and I had this great cast assembled.

I got Stephen Geoffreys fresh off "Fright Night."

Steven, his look and his haircut and his sense --

fashion sense, he embodied the '80s.

Kevin Yagher, you know, did me a big favor

and designed this strange, wonderful makeup.

It's a great makeup.

As he transforms into evil as the devil

gets his hooks into him.

Bye-bye.

I had great scenes with Robert Picardo as the devil.

The devil who runs the 976-Evil phone call site

because that's how he recruits people to the dark side.

I used to live in Radio Shack when I was in high school.

.

But it didn't work out.

And he had some great comedy.

They cut that stuff out.

A guy can't make a buck anymore.

And one over my -- my female producer,

Lisa Hansen, she was seeing the movie through my eyes.

She saw where I was going.

She got ill in post production,

and the other producer came in.

He was just -- he had read some how to make

a horror movie book, you know,

sold at Larry Edmunds for $1.99

remaindered in a paperback with a cigarette burn on it.

And he thought all horror movies

have to be 90 minutes, and I was going,

"No, no, no action movies have to be 90 minutes.

Not horror movies."

There's still sequences that are all mine in the boys bathroom.

You know, with the skateboards, all the stuff with the mirror

and him getting sliced by hoax.

That's pure, unadulterated Robert Englund, you know.

It would have been a third again, better movie,

had they left it and trusted me with what it was.

I mean, I should get over it, but it's your baby.

The reason I don't direct film as much is not

because I'm intimidated by film, but I am desired

because of my name and because of the seats I fill

and because of my baggage that I bring.

I am desired to always do effects-laden movies.

And it's rough enough directing film

because once you say "action,"

you're against the clock.

That's all you hear.

Pre-production is fun. Post production is ecstatic.

But the actual shooting of a movie is not pleasant.

You're not sleeping at night,

you're worried about getting your day, it's not fun,

even when your actors and your cameraman

are bringing you great stuff.

The reason Robert Englund doesn't direct more film

is because people aren't asking me

to direct the films that I'm right for.

Left to my own devices,

I'm the guy that should be directing "Tender Mercies."

That's the kind of film I would do the best.

Announcer: Michael Keaton is "Beetlejuice."

I'm the ghost with the most, babe.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Oops.

It's show time.

Beetlejuice is for me one of the movies where it shows

Tim Burton firing on all cylinders.

He was just absolutely in his element.

It made him one of the premiere directors of the '80s.

It's hilarious, it's weird, it's funny.

The cast is terrific.

The practical effects are great.

Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin die.

They go to the afterlife and they find out

that they don't want to die.

The couple go back to their house,

but unfortunately, the worst family ever moves in

and wants to change everything that they love about the house.

So they enlist the help of Beetlejuice,

who is the human Exorcist.

He's there to scare them out of the house.

Problem is Beetlejuice is a little eccentric.

What do we got here tonight, kids?

Ooh.

Michael Keaton surprises you all the time.

To see him play Beetlejuice.

It was such a great character

and really outrageous and wild

and all over the place.

Scram!

That was neat to see that.

The "Day-O" scene was glorious to me.

I reenact that almost, you know, once a month.

I think Beetlejuice is the film

that really put Winona Ryder on the map.

I mean, she had such a great character.

It's kind of the updated Wednesday Addams,

just this creepy little girl who had to live in this creepy house

with her sort of creepy parents .

I am utterly alone.

I think that's really one of the first times

that you saw what -- what goth was all about

in comedy like that, so that was exciting to see her

and to realize that she was such an outcast,

and you really felt for her,

which made me really happy. I liked that.

Trachenburg: The waiting room is a prime example

of Tim Burton's creativity in the '80s,

because you had all these people

who were waiting to go to the afterlife

and each one of them died in a different way.

So you had the circus performer

who had been sawed in half for real.

You had the witch doctor with the shrunken head.

It's just brimming with that wonderful Tim Burton stuff

that we all miss.

You want a cigarette?

No, thank you.

Trying to cut down myself.

Well, Tim Burton, he's gonna surprise you

and do some beautiful, wonderful artwork and set designs.

He brings you into another world, which I really adore.

And his stories are fun.

They just engage you.

You look great.

I wish I could have done one of his movies.

Can you be scary? Oh!

Don't ask me if I can be scary.

What do you think of this?

Announcer: It's "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers."

These girls charge an arm and a leg.

You may not have heard of the term video nasties

or gross out films.

These terms refer to a whole group of pictures

from a blood and guts, sometimes real, sometimes fake.

In the U.K., we had the video nasties, which was

a reaction by the Conservative government

to sort of clamp down on horror movies,

because a lot of them were getting through

without being rated by the BBFC,

so kids could rent these movies and watch them at home.

So they wrote up a list of movies that had --

that were essentially had to be banned.

The funny thing was, was that there's a lot of people

criticizing these movies without actually seeing them.

It's often the case with -- with government.

They also had these local MPs as well who like to comment

and get sort of political points with their --

with their constituency by saying,

"Oh, this movie is really bad, it should be banned."

And someone goes "Oh, have you seen this movie?"

"Oh, no, no, I don't need to see it."

You think, well, you need to see something

before you criticize it.

If anyone can stand up and defend

the sort of horrific scenes that I have had to see

and other members of parliament have had to see,

I believe they're living in a different world

to that world that I live in.

The video nasties didn't stick around for that long,

but there were a number of movies that were

on the BBFC kind of hit list

for a number of years that remained banned.

And it was kind of years later that these movies

did eventually come out,

and people got to see them properly for the first time

and not some kind of wonky VHS

bootleg from 1982 or something like that.

Video nasties, they don't like violence or blood

and all that stuff.

You can have all the sex you want,

but if you use the word

chainsaw in your title, that's too violent.

And "Hollywood Hooker" sounds worse than

"Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers."

That was a great line -- they charge an arm and a leg --

because the movies about this prostitution ring

that my sister has fallen into and having to investigate it

and go under cover with this chainsaw cult.

I'm gonna burn that temple over those fuckers heads.

You know, you've got a lot of guts for a little girl.

It's a very silly romp.

A film noir, but it's in color.

Jack: I'll check the photo to make sure.

It was her alright.

I got involved with "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers"

when Fred Olen Ray gave me a call.

It was Memorial Day weekend,

and he said, "I'm gonna do a movie in three days now."

And it was just so tongue in cheek and so fun.

And I got to meet Leatherface from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

That was like a big deal to me,

because I loved that film.

-Please, Mr. Chandler,

think of the neighbors. They're trying to sleep.

Gunnar Hansen was like the nicest guy

who had no clue that he was admired by thousands.

I think it's time somebody cut you down to size, Jack.

Fred Olen Ray is very,

like, he's got that dry sense of humor.

He said, "Okay, dance sexy with these chainsaws."

And I'm like, "They're heavy."

And like, I'm trying my best to dance sexy with the chainsaws.

And I'm like struggling, and I am being asphyxiated

when I'm in the sarcophagus with the chainsaws running

and all the smokes going.

If you watch, I, like, kind of like stumble when I get out

because I'm like high from the smoke in there.

Then I was like dancing with them

and I felt something on my leg and I thought,

"Oh, my God, hot oil is burning my skin," but I didn't stop.

I kept going.

It was like, "Action.

Here's your chainsaw. Go."

They just said, "Well, this a great idea,

let's use real chainsaws. They're cheaper."

I think they probably got them at Kmart,

and then returned them the next day.

Announcer: Treat Williams...

Sit down.

Announcer: ...and Joe Piscopo are..

"Dead Heat."

"Dead Heat" is a buddy cop film with zombies.

You got Joe Piscopo and Treat Williams,

who discovered that there's this company

that has found a way to bring people back from the dead.

The only problem is you don't come back for very long.

You start to fall apart,

and they've been using it bringing people back

from the dead to go do things like heists.

Come on. You wanna be dead?

Part of the humor of it is that they called it "Dead Heat."

It's such a generic title,

but I think they were kind of aping off of the fact

that it was a goof on action films.

Johnson: I loved working on "Dead Heat."

Mark Goldblatt was really cool.

I mean, I had Carte Blanche...

...and I got to work with Vincent Price.

Death doesn't discriminate.

At least not till now.

We really did a lot of close up quality zombie makeups on that.

They cut out a lot of our effects

because they were just too over the top.

I was cut out of "Dead Heat"

because they didn't use that footage,

But I practiced at Steve's shop with this heavy skeleton

doing puppeteering, you know, dancing and dancing and dancing.

I danced to "Burning Up"

with this heavy skeleton for so long

so I would get it right.

She was the sexy dancer puppeteer

for the sexy skeleton, but they cut that scene.

Again, why they cut all our work out?

It would only make that movie better.

The shitty movie could have only been better

with a bunch of over the top effects, right?

Joe Piscopo when he was on "Saturday Night Live"

was kind of this skinny kind of Wiener-ish comedian.

He had started lifting weights,

and this was one of the first times where it really came out,

"Oh, look at this dude, he's jacked."

And I think that going forward,

more people will remember him as the big muscle dude.

I think my favorite part of the work that we did in

"Dead Heat" is the butcher shop that comes alive,

because I have always thought in zombie movies,

why is it just people?

And so this whole butcher shop when it comes to life,

I mean, there's even a liver, that was a really cool effect.

We built an inverted table and inverted the background

and inverted the camera the same way

and just let the liver roll.

But then it looks like it's moving

until it leaps on Treat's face.

Ducks, chickens, fish, you name it,

they all came to life.

Part of the way through the film,

Treat Williams dies.

They bring him back from the dead

so that he can solve the crime of who murdered him.

Hi, guys.

The longer he's been dead, the more alive he comes,

and that's reflected in the makeup.

When he's handcuffed to the back of the van,

car rolls down explodes,

he comes out and he's suddenly cool

because his hair is all punked out and it's black.

He's got a piece of shrapnel for a long earring,

and his blue ridiculous Hawaiian shirt is all black,

and he looks hip and he looks cool.

Detective Mortis, homicide.

At the end of the film, Treat Williams

and Joe Piscopo are both back from the dead.

Sinew is flying everywhere.

It's a spectacle that you need to see.

Announcer: This one maniac you'll have to face alone

or die.

"Maniac Cop."

Next to maniac, "Maniac Cop" is Bill Lustig's magnum opus.

How can you not love a movie about a killer cop

written by Larry Cohen and directed by Bill Lustig?

Bill Lustig went out and found the money for "Maniac Cop,"

and was the understanding that he would direct the picture.

I didn't want to direct it anyway,

so it all worked out okay.

There's a killer on the streets

and he's killing indiscriminately.

And a lot of people believe that it is Matt Cordell,

a good police officer that was killed in prison

but is now back for revenge.

Tom Atkins plays the cop,

who's on the trail of Matt Cordell, trying to undo

If it's really this killer cop back from the dead.

It's called "Maniac Cop" because it's got a maniac cop in it.

And it was my job to find him and to kill him.

But I didn't, he killed me,

threw me out of window on top of a cab.

Died, ignominiously.

The maniac cop Matt Cordell is played by Robert Z'Dar,

who is quite possibly the only actor in history,

who has a more impressive chin

than Bruce Campbell, who is also in the movie.

He has a rare medical condition called cherubism,

and they use that to great effect in this movie,

and it actually ended up benefiting him

in his movie career.

The climax of the film starts with a car chase

and culminates in one of the best villain deaths in the '80s.

It ends with a cliffhanger that leads into "Maniac Cop 2,"

which is in my humble opinion, the best of the series.

My one question is,

what the hell is the matter with William Lustig?

Bruce Campbell and I,

we run into each other every once in a while,

and he said the same thing --

"What the hell is up with Bill Lustig?"

"You're the star the first one," he says to me,

and 25 minutes into the movie, you're dead and out the window

on top of a cab at the hands of the maniac cop.

In the second one, I'm the star

and I go to a news stand to buy a magazine,

somebody stabs me to death.

It has nothing to do with anything, and I'm dead

Oh! Talk to me, talk to me.

Talk --

Police! Police! Police!

There you are. William Lustig, nuts.

I had thought, well, it's "Poltergeist,"

you know, it's this, it is a sequel.

It's a popular franchise,

I thought this could be a lot of fun to do this.

Gary Sherman had this thick book and he had everything.

He was like a scientist, he had everything laid out

and how this was gonna be done.

And the special effects were gonna be

real and challenging.

And I thought, well, that's sort of right up my alley.

With my dance background,

I can -- I can do this, you know?

But it was brutal to shoot.

It really was difficult.

We're back.

The use of the double and the mirrors and all of that.

And when you had the long hallway of mirrors

and you had different characters.

I think at one point, there were maybe five different characters

that were involved.

It was extremely difficult and frustrating,

and it all had to be timed and perfect.

And even with the queues, one thing could go off

and you had to start all over again.

Because everything took two, three times as long as

it would have the way we shot it.

The payoff, of course is it's like,

oh, that was worth it. You see it.

And I think the hallway scene is a great case of,

oh, look, that really worked. It was great.

And there's something magical in the moment, you know.

Hello?

-Hello? -Hello?

Zelda Rubinstein .

Oh, my God, she was so much fun.

We really had a blast.

She had a lot of boyfriends, I know that.

Zelda attracted very handsome young boys.

I can lead you into the light.

I have the knowledge and the power.

What I honestly remember most about that film,

other than being wet for a very long time ,

when Tom and I were running around, was Heather O'Rourke.

She was just a real little girl.

She liked Barbies, and she loved her mother.

She wasn't a child actress.

I mean, she had none of that going on.

There was so much chaos on that set,

because it was so challenging.

But whenever Heather was on the set, it was like,

she was like a grounding force.

A woman's entitled to change her mind.

And I always feel like I can relax.

Heather is here.

It's kind of funny when you think about it.

And I always think about, you know,

the tragedy of her loss and all and how unnecessary it was.

But the fact that she had this old soul, you know,

and that's the only way that I can look at it

that I don't feel so desperately sad.

Announcer: A new dimension in terror.

"Waxwork."

"Waxwork" is somewhat inspired by other wax movies,

like the 1924 silent film "Waxworks,"

and the 1933 and 1953 versions of "House of Wax."

This one is more about the wax figures coming to life.

You have a familiar face, Zach Galligan

from "Gremlins."

Welcome to the Waxwork!

He and his fellow students go to a wax museum

that's full of classic car scenes.

And when they wander into the display, they become part of it.

One of the girls goes into this area, and it's a vampire.

Or you have one person goes into a an area, and it's a werewolf.

A lot of them are based on the old horror tropes.

It's very clever because the way that they do it

is after the person dies,

then they become part of the exhibit.

They become wax models like in "House of Wax."

They had the marquee de sade, they had zombies,

they had a wide variety of different exhibits.

The effects are better than you probably would be expecting

with a movie like this.

Sadly, the original cut of the film got rated X

and they had to cut out some of the gore

in order to get it down to an R rating.

The ending is crazy, because everything

in the museum attacks.

I mean, this is '80s excess

and it reminds you what you love about the decade.

Take me! Take this.

Announcer: Her life becomes a nightmare

when she won't stay out of the basement

and snared by evil cellar dweller.

"Cellar Dweller," really?

Well, this is what I remember about "Cellar Dweller."

Stuart was shooting "Robot Jox" in Italy, And he said,

"You know, I want you to do a cameo in this."

You think Achilles has a chance?

Damn right he's got a chance. He's got to kill that convict!

And then Charlie, I believe, called me and said,

"Listen, while you're over there,

do you think that you could also do a day on this other movie,

kind of a half day of reacting and carrying a hatchet?"

We had Jeffrey Combs appears as the comic book artist

from the past in this sort of pre-title sequence

to "Cellar Dweller," just to set up the whole story.

And he's drawing on the inspiration of the dark arts

as embodied in this book,

clearly ripped off from "The Evil Dead."

And he pays the price, and he dies.

I certainly felt like I'm going to write

the best version of a movie called "Cellar Dweller"

starring this John Buechler-designed monster

that all takes place in one building

that is humanly possible.

Are you trying to say to me that a monster

you drew just stepped of the page

and devoured Amanda and Norman?

That's how I got into the "Cellar Dweller.

It's like, "Here's the monster, write a movie called

"Cellar Dweller' with this monster."

That was Charles Band's way.

But there's a lot to be said for having set parameters,

and, you know?

I mean, my God, Michelangelo just --

he only had that ceiling.

I still think the monster is really cool.

More and more as time goes on, I do meet "Cellar Dweller" fans,

which at first kind of surprised me,

but now we kind of, you know, is heartwarming .

You know, it's -- it's nice that like you write something

and then you might just sort of shrug it off

and not think about it for a few decades

and you find out that actually had

a positive effect on somebody.

No!

Announcer: "Night of the Demons."

We're you going?

The party's just begun.

People love that movie,

and I find it to be so campy.

Hey, grandpa, look at the mirror!

You stupid bastards!

I really wanted to prove myself on that,

even though it was a very low budget movie,

we did the best we could.

No!

No! Holy shit!

"Night of the Demons" is about

these girls that have a party, and everybody's excited to go

and they're all dressed up in different costumes,

and they call out a demon.

Concentrate.

I get possessed, and I just go crazy.

Squelching, growling]

I am writing on my face with lipstick,

I'm making lipstick disappear in my breasts,

which nobody expects.

It's like it's supposed to be kind of titillating.

Hahaha, but it becomes weird.

When they do the effect on camera, they show my breasts,

then they cut away and then there's a mold of me

from here to there.

They had cut out a little slit,

so when I'm doing my lipstick trick,

that lipstick just goes right through there.

When I first met Steve Johnson, who did the effects,

I went to his shop and they had to do a lifecast of my breast.

I had a crush on him right away,

and then I guess he kind of had a crush on me, too.

So it was very awkward because he's putting alginate,

which is like a plaster type thing that hardens on me.

And then they're wrapping me like a mummy with bandages

and having to touch my breasts, and it was just very awkward.

So it was interesting how we met.

I enjoyed that effect, because it wasn't on my face

and I didn't feel like I was like covered

in all this horrible stuff.

But I'm like a very vain girl in this movie,

and I have to ask if my makeup's okay.

Is my makeup okay?

I put my head back, you know, they cut away

and then I'm possessed.

Ah!

Stop looking at me! Ah!

I had contacts and teeth and all this makeup

that was glued to me,

and then I surprised him by poking his eyes out.

And in fact, it's not my hands that are doing it

because I didn't do it right.

They had to like put my bracelet on this guy's hands

and have him poke my eyes out professionally.

I could look at it and see how it would scare the shit

at certain scenes.

You see Angela gliding down the hall

and going through the shadows and light with that face.

It's pretty -- pretty creepy.

Most of the cast thought the house was haunted.

They thought there was really hauntings.

I think it scared them.

As a horror fan, you were kind of learning that the business,

the movie business was very fickle.

So any number of your horror icon directors

can be jumping to any project at any given minute.

Every month in Fangoria, there's a section called

Monster Invasion, and that's news of upcoming releases.

And there would always be a paragraph at the bottom

called The Terror Teletype.

"Director X is making film Y with actor Z"

and you'd be like, "Wow, I want to see that."

And then that movie would never happen.

And that happened a lot.

"The Fly" is one of my favorite films of all time,

and given the opportunity to write the sequel

was incredibly exciting to me.

And what I came up

with bears very little resemblance

to the movie that was eventually made.

The original "Fly 2" that I came up with

had a lot to do with something that was going on at the time.

There was a couple named Tony and Susan Alamo,

and they would try to find mothers talk them

out of the abortions and talk them into

raising good Christian, God fearing children.

So I took it a step further and said, well,

let's find an organization

that not only wants them not to abort,

they are also training them, as the Soviet Union

did decades ago, creating super children.

If Veronica Quaife and Seth Brundle

had had that baby and Veronica wanted

to abort because of the monster

she knew it would become but was talked into giving up

her baby for adoption by this group,

they suddenly are in possession of this super powerful creature

that looked human but was much more than that.

It would become the first line of defense

in a new Christian army.

Then along came a new studio head, Leonard Goldberg.

He had a very short life

as a feature studio at 20th Century Fox.

He wanted a teenage monster movie.

That's what was popular in the '80s,

so suddenly, what I thought could be a good companion piece

to the Cronenberg movie became something much more mundane.

I did write a version of that,

but I left to direct my first movie "Critters 2" at that time,

and Frank Darabont came on board as the second writer on "Fly 2"

and then Jim and Ken Wheat.

So in the resulting movie...

I was sitting in my seat,

and I was watching it unspool,

and I'm sinking lower and lower in my seat.

It's so far removed from what the intent was,

and I thought Chris Wallace did a great job as a director,

good cast and everything but --

but it was so far afield from what I had intended

that it -- I haven't watched it since.

Woodruff: "Pumpkinhead," it's a morality tale,

which always make for the best movies.

I have been trying to get back into the world of "Pumpkinhead"

and get the rights back to do a prequel that --

that sort of sets up the story

and tells it in a linear fashion,

so that it leads and ends up

with the Stan Winston movie from the '80s.

But -- but while that could be a long,

long, long process with --

with yielding very little. .

After "Chainsaw 2," I wrote a treatment for "Chainsaw 3"

and that Sawyers have now moved to New York City.

Leatherface and Stretch are married.

They have a little baby in a bone crib

with like a little leather mask on.

Chop Top is a DJ in a disco club.

Leatherface by day works for Parks and Recreation,

sewing off limbs in Central Park.

And Jim Siedow, the cook, has a famous chili restaurant

down in Soho, and at night

Leatherface goes into the steam tunnels under Grand Central

and chops up some of the homeless,

and that's the meat for Jim Siedow's

award-winning chili.

Tobe didn't really want to go to that place.

So that was you know that -- that was kind of stillborn.

We thought that the follow up to "Re-animator"

wouldn't be "Re-animator 2."

Gordon: The idea of doing a series of movies based on Lovecraft

was something that really appealed to us.

And so the next project

was gonna be "Shadow over Innsmouth,"

which is a story about people turning into fish.

Lovecraft is taking evolution and turning it upside down.

Instead of, you know -- you know the idea of us

coming out of the sea, we're going back into the sea.

People are changing into underwater creatures.

Yuzna: And Dennis actually wrote the script of that

while we were in post production for "Re-animator."

That to me seemed like the sequel, just like the sequel

to the "House of Usher" was "The Pit and the Pendulum."

We'd get Jeffrey and Barbara do it more like a William Castle

series of movies or a Corman Poe series.

Gordon: Everybody, including Charlie Band,

who owned the studio that were making the films

thought this concept was ridiculous

and no one's gonna want to see a movie like this.

Brian Yuzna and I took that concept and pitched it

to just about every studio in town.

The closest we ever got to getting it made

was one guy who said,

"Well, if you make them werewolves, we'll do it.

Turning into fish is not scary."

And I wanted to say to that guy, you know, how about

if I just bring a big fish in and put it on your desk

right now, you know, or shark or something?

I think you might find that a little disturbing.

Winston: Shadow had a ton of really cool production concepts

that were developed by the masterful illustrator

Bernie Wrightson.

Stuart Gordon never got to make "Shadow over Innsmouth,"

but he did get to use some of those elements in "Dagon."

We will live for eternity.

The thing about "Shadow over Innsmouth"

is it's one of the most action packed

Lovecraft stories ever that he ever wrote.

"Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a novella.

It really is like the closest he ever got to a novel.

You know, I read somewhere that Fritz Lang wanted

to make it way back in the day, which would have been wonderful.

"Bad Taste" was my personal introduction to Peter Jackson,

and I've been in love with his work ever since.

He was a New Zealand filmmaker who wanted to move on to bigger

and better things, and he certainly did.

He was getting a lot of attention for "Meet the Feebles"

but that one still didn't go over quite as well.

This was the movie that kind of broke him to American audiences,

and then of course, this led into "Dead Alive,"

which made people stand up and take notice.

"Bad Taste," it's about aliens that come down

and find the new taste sensation on Earth is human flesh.

Tomorrow we're having you for lunch.

It is a film that only could have come

from the mind of Peter Jackson.

The aliens are these big, dumb monsters

that have asses that stick out really far.

They're not scary at all.

They're completely meant to be dumb.

Peter Jackson is starring in the film as well.

He plays a guy named Derek.

And as we know, Dereks don't run.

I'm a Derek.

Dereks don't run.

He falls off a cliff and his skull breaks open

so part of his brain falls out.

Throughout the film, his back of his head keeps falling open,

and his brain keeps getting exposed.

He starts picking up brains along the way

and shoving them back into his head,

and he takes his belt off and puts it around his head

to keep his skull closed to stop his brain

from falling out all the time .

The effects in the movie are outstanding.

You can actually look at this,

and if you look at Peter Jackson's work

with "Lord of the Rings,"

you had the foundations of Weta, who goes on to be this in-demand

Oscar award winning effects company

that was making this really goofy weird stuff

back in the '80s.

Announcer: This time, he's back with a vengeance.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.

"Halloween 5" is the revenge of Michael Myers,

And it's when the series starts to introduce

some of the weirder aspects.

There's apparently now a psychic connection

between Michael and Jamie Lloyd and he's sporting a tattoo

that would come to be part of the curse of the Thorne cult,

but you don't get that weird green blood

that Michael Myers has in the next one.

I rewatched 5, and it's actually really, really good,

maybe even better than 2.

And it really is the return of this horrific

mad man to his hometown.

Fundamentally, what is scary about Michael Myers

is that mask, that rubber mask, that white face,

that unknowable entity

that is consistent throughout the franchise,

even though the mask changed,

I think not usually for the better over the sequels,

people saw that original mask, and went, "That is scary."

Every horror movie works

if it's got a well written script,

it's not about budget, it's about the story.

There has to be some different elements

where you care about the characters.

Can you kill him?

I think so.

-Wait a minute, Loomis -There isn't a minute to wait.

And that's kind of the whole crux of that movie,

and why we care, because we know the showdown is coming

between characters that we care about,

And that's why the movie resonates because you care

about what happens at the finish of this movie.

Oh, God.

Announcer: "Shocker."

Horace Pinker is a serial killer,

he goes on death row...

...death by electric chair.

He gets shocked, but then, like feels the power.

And survives it, and comes back from the dead

as an electric murderer.

The reason why "Shocker" really works

is because the character of Horace Pinker,

the murderer, is played by Mitch Pileggi

who was Skinner in "The X Files."

He plays it really evil and mean and straight.

Finger looking good.

He's got that look and so it works.

Horace Pinker's makeup was really interesting

in that everything in that movie is practical, everything.

Shit!

I went to visit my boyfriend, David Anderson, on the set.

They were rolling gurneys out of the house,

And I'm like, "Wes, I'm gonna get on one of the gurneys

and play a dead body." He was like, "Great."

And then I just got on it one of the gurneys

and they rolled me out under a blanket.

That's me.

It was pretty ridiculous.

Somebody put me in the credits. That was probably Wes.

He has a sense of humor.

Watching horror movies being filmed by Wes Craven,

there's never a dull moment.

I've heard of audience participation shows,

but this is ridiculous.

Jerico: When you talk about the connection

between heavy metal and horror movies,

"Shocker" is probably the epitome of it

because they had some heavy hitters on that soundtrack.

The theme song is called "Shocker."

And it's by a band called The Dudes of Wrath.

Who are The Dudes of Wrath?

Paul Stanley on vocals, Desmond Child on vocals,

Rudy Sarzo on bass from the Ozzy's band,

Tommy Lee on drums and Guy Mann Dude on guitar.

There's no way that can be a real name.

Announcer: "Silent Night, Deadly Night 3:

Better Watch Out!"

Supported by full trade and consumer advertising.

I'm playing Ricky the Santa Claus killer.

Horror.

I've escaped from the prison hospital,

I've come to after being in some kind of a coma.

I'm wearing my brain cap,

which is basically a clear salad bowl

with a bunch of blinking lights with a rubber brain

with a bunch of orange liquid swirling around in it.

I liked gutting Tony from "West Side Story"

Richard Beymer, the therapist going "Ricky, Ricky."

Come on, Ricky.

I don't like to hurt anybody on the set.

I did a couple takes and he complained

that I wasn't doing it hard enough.

He challenged my manhood.

I remember, basically, so it felt,

and so I did really...

.

That got the Richard Beymer's seal of approval.

Carlos Palomino picks me up

for a middleweight boxing champion of the world.

Merry Christmas, buddy.

Hop in.

Working his way up the ladder

in the acting business.

What happened to you, man?

You get a head transplant?

That's the last we see of Carlos.

The next thing we see of me is I'm wearing Carlos's clothes

and I'm knocking on the door of a -- of a house.

Yes?

An old, kindly old woman opens up and she goes,

"Oh, you look like you're a homeless man.

Why don't you come in, I'll give you something to eat."

I had a fear, a secret actors fear and that was --

that I would never be able to cry.

Some actors really just were in touch with their emotions.

They could turn the, you know, the water on and off

and I just thought,

"Geez, I'll never be able to do that."

And I remember looking up at this kind -- this lady,

they beautifully cast.

She's beaming down at me, and I started to cry.

This moment was so loving,

the tears started falling out of my eyes,

and then all of a sudden Monte goes, "And cut.

"Sotto voce."

And all of a sudden the crew starts spontaneously clapping.

As these tears are coming down

Ricky the Santa Claus killer's cheeks,

and I just remember thinking, "This is fucking weird."

Woman: Did you really kill your mama?

What?

Did you really kill your mama?

The power of that movie is the truth of that movie.

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

was based on a true story.

It's something that goes for the gut.

I personally love to hate serial killer movies.

They scare me a lot because they're representative

of something that really happens.

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,"

that one feels very raw and gritty.

Don't do that, Otis, she's your sister.

Okay, I was only kidding around, Henry.

-Tell her you're sorry. -Okay.

They did that on a very, very low budget.

That was one of the first movies that Michael Rooker did.

His performance in that film is so scary.

Henry: You strangle one and stab another and

one when you cut up, one you don't,

then police don't know what to do.

Seemingly having a normal life

with kind of an almost girlfriend and a friend,

and he was living with somebody

but all the while committing these crazy murders is chilling.

I'm really fascinated by this sort of psychological reasons

why we become who we are,

And that is an obvious clear case of some sort

of deep childhood trauma that hasn't been addressed,

and some sort of unhealthy relationship with his mom.

Mentally unstable people with childhood traumas

who then manifest those traumas

into real life horror shows, it happens.

And that is scary.

Sometimes you beat me, make me wear a dress,

watch you doing it.

This is less of a, you know, exploitation movie

and more of a character study,

and that's the kind of stuff I dial into.

Maybe there is a line that you can cross.

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" came close to that...

...but that just makes a great horror movie

that gets under your skin and becomes super memorable.

There's so many things that a horror film can do for you,

and I think a lot of the fans find it very healing

that have gone through things or going through things.

They find hope in that, and they think --

they live through you vicariously going,

"I'm gonna kick ass,

I'm gonna get rid of all these bad things in my life."

And I've had fans come and say that to me,

I didn't have friends or I was teased

or gender issues.

And this was one world where the monster gets payback

when you're a kid.

I've been bullied, I've been an outcast.

And I think that is kind of what resonates with fans,

because a lot of my fans will tell me

they've had similar issues

when they were a kid or a teenager.

People are watching horror because it's,

"Oh, I see myself in it.

Oh, this got me through a tough time.

Oh, this final girl reminded me of this trauma

that I experienced."

And they're turning it into a kind of therapy.

People are even kind of dissecting

what the movies meant to them.

it's refreshing because all I've been hearing about,

"Oh, it's such a great movie."

But now "it's a great movie,

because this is what it meant to me and this is why."

Horror is personal.

I think it represents not only our personal styles

and our personal feelings, you know, about the genre

and what we love about it.

But I think for a lot of us, it becomes part of our journey.

for as scary as it can be and as fun as it can be,

regardless of the quote unquote quality of it,

It still means something to us.

We're talking about this, like, incredibly respected,

well done horror film, or this sort of campy horror film

that's actually terrible but everyone loves it,

and everything in between.

It's kind of inspiring to see people so deeply excited

and invested in entertainment.

You know, it feeds them.

They stand the test of time, because they're --

they're super fun.

When you look at a lot of films, specifically horror movies

during the '80s, they were taking a beating

left and right from critics.

But I think that kind of goes to show

that you really shouldn't judge movies

based on sort of that time that they released,

because ultimately, I think they're gonna live on

and in very different ways and come to mean a lot to fans.

I think we're all missing our youth, basically.

The '80s to me was a great time.

I was vibrant more.

So the nostalgia is breaking down meaning.

The good, the bad, the in between.

It all means something to all of us, in one way or another.

Emotions and memories and nostalgia

that it's tied to these films

for a lot of us who grew up during that time.

Film is an art unto itself.

You need to look back at its history

because it's not only the technology,

it's the storytelling, the narrative.

There's only so many stories to tell around the campfire.

Never neglect that stuff, even if your appreciation for it

is as something primitive, and -- and -- and old and naive.

You still need to see it.

I think there's so much access

to just everything now that a lot of stuff gets lost.

So if you curate the ones

that you feel are important to be seen,

then you bring attention

that they might not have gotten otherwise.

Curation is key.

Nobile: I think it's important to keep digging up films

and putting them in front of new eyeballs,

because the pool is just getting more and more narrow.

I don't know, I just want people to be excited

about the discovery of these older films.

Word of mouth keeps '80s horror alive.

i have a list at home,

things I have not seen that I need to watch.

Because of the horror community, every time something comes up

that I haven't seen, I write it down,

because how could you --

how could I have missed that, you know?

The horror family is a family.

The knowledge base there is incredible.

I think revisiting the films is really interesting

if you revisit them at later points in your life,

so you can revisit a film, a well made film,

and it will yield new things for you.

That's incredibly influential to me.

People can talk about '80s horror

till the sun comes up.

I sure do.