You are now listening to post-mortem with Mick Harris, where the most influential voices in horror cinema will spill their guts, literally.

To the renowned horror director, writer, and producer.

Now here's your host, Mick Garris.

I'm Mick Garris and from Nice Guy Productions world headquarters overlooking the glamorous San Fernando Valley, this is post-mortem.

The arts, or popular culture if you don't want to be highfalutin about it, tend to overlap. Many artists are writers, painters are filmmakers, filmmakers are novelists, musicians are authors. Creativity need not filmmakers were in bands for example. Not surprising though as horror is to

cinema what rock and roll is to music. Horror and rock are both subversive, rude, and

don't want to play by the rules. I went from writing short stories at 12 to rock journalism at 16,

interviewing the likes of Janice Joplin and Jimmy Hendricks

when I was still a teenager.

Like our guest today, I ran a psychedelic light show called

Dr Heidegger's experiment in high school something today's guests and I have in

common and then into screenwriting to directing and into podcasting.

Filmmaking is the ultimate composite art form, combining music, photography, design, acting,

editing, and so many other intentionally defined elements that it could not possibly be

accomplished by a single artist.

But then in the world of cinema, okay film, okay movies, there are sub-genres a plenty. In the golden age of

Hollywood genre directors were not really a thing. Yes, John Ford

specialized in Western's, Alfred Hitchcock in thrillers, but that's not what they exclusively in assigned to them. Filmmakers would jump from a Western to a romance to a comedy to a horror film with

Nary a blink of the eye. It was only as time passed that there became such a term as horror director. It was the heyday of John Carpenter and

George Romero and Toby Hooper that defined the Masters of Horror, to the point where these

filmmakers who loved and excelled at making the skin crawl were only

allowed to work in that genre.

...