You are now listening to Postmortem with Mick Garris, on the Dread Podcast Network,

where the most influential voices in horror cinema will spill their guts to the renowned

horror director, writer, and producer.

Now here's your host, Mick Garris.

From Nice Guy Productions' World Headquarters overlooking the glamorous San Fernando Valley,

I'm Mick Garris, and this is Postmortem.

Movies are magic.

They tell impossible tales and make the impossible possible.

Special effects have matured to such a degree that you can render anything on the screen and

make it believable, no matter how wild your imagination.

One of the earliest practitioners of film tricks was the French illusionist Georges Mellier,

who, upon seeing a demonstration of the Lumière Brothers' new cinematograph, immediately understood

the possibilities of bringing his magic to the screen.

His films were ingenious, though he rarely moved his camera from a stage-wide pricinium,

where his wonders were played out in front of a stationary, imagined audience.

He made characters disappear, shrink, and be shot in a rocket into the eye of the man

in the moon in his most famous movie, A Trip to the Moon in 1902.

That motion was a huge new development, especially in the hands of Master Willis O'Brien,

whose last world gave 1925 audiences the opportunity to see living and breathing dinosaurs,

cavorting on the big screen.

Stop motion matured even further under the hand of O'Brien's protege Ray Harryhausen.

Screen magic has continued to evolve in amaze over the years, with makeup effects, physical

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