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. This is the post-mortem podcast and I'm Mick Garris. There's something special about

Dark Cinema which perhaps is just a fancy-shmancy name for horror movies, but they

truly have the potential to be something much more than just scary stories.

Aside from being just good stories, the horror genre offers more possibilities for our unique artistic vision

than almost any other.

A good one hits you in a deeper place than a drama, a comedy, or a Western.

The tools of horror cinema, its very vocabulary, can be tapped to go beyond the merely reel into the hyperreel even the surreal.

Telling tales that seek to illustrate your fears, the ones that come from the

subconscious as well as the conscious calls for a visual imagination, a sense of bringing deeper than the

everyday to life, to take the nightmare world and give it birth, to reach deep down into what

scares you and puts you face to face with it.

It's not surprising that many filmmakers in the horror genre are also gifted in other arts.

John Carpenter is touring the world with his band after a lifetime of scoring his own films.

Germo del Toro is a masterful painter and sketch artist.

Jo Dante is a talented cartoonist.

Wes Craven was a novelist as well as a filmmaker.

It seems like almost everyone I know in the genre has

talents outside of the filmmaking world and I don't find that in other genre. At its

best, horror is metaphorical, phantasmagorical, and a blank slate for a questing creative mind.

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