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 this is post-mortem. I'd like to take a few moments to talk about the importance of independence in filmmaking, particularly in genre filmmaking.

For years, horror films were almost exclusively made by independent sources,

blood and guts and the less polite elements of society that are the meat and potatoes of

horror films were way too rude for the studios to handle. Yes, Universal was the studio of

monsters in the 30s and 40s, but they were big productions, beautiful films, but pretty

bloodless and pretty tidy.

Even the giant nuclear monsters and their brethren that were set loose in the hardtops and

drive-ins in the 60s, shocking though they might have been at the time, were still polished and trustworthy.

They might provide some frights and nightmares, but extreme storytelling was not at all common.

By the 1960s, however, there was an independent underground that climbed out from under the rocks and got their movies into the cinemas.

Movies that broke the rules didn't say please and thank you, that didn't necessarily have happy endings that dripped with blood

and a level of violence that had never been seen before. Paramount's release of

Psycho may have kicked it off in 1960 but Carnival of Souls, The Thrill Killers, Night of the Living Dead,

The Sadus, Deranged, Peeping Tom, the films of Herschel Gordon Lewis, they would never have happened through the Hollywood

Studio machine.

Yes, there was a lot of cruel, unnecessary garbage that happened once it was discovered

that you could make a movie cheaply without movie stars on 16mm film and get it released into the same movie theaters that played the blockbusters.

It awakened a sleeping giant of bad taste and dark dreams.

But some of those dark dreamers were artists, men and women who truly had a vision and no access

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