"Critters".
They bite.
People kept trashing "Critters"
for being a bad cheap imitation of "Gremlins".
They're not the same movie.
No, the critters are fucking gonna eat you alive, man.
It's attitude with an emphasis on the drama.
I didn't even do nothing.
Boy, you shot her with a slingshot.
It's really just the way Stephen Herek approached it,
and took it seriously.
We want the Krites.
Oh really?
Who are they, some new team?
It acts like a studio movie,
and it's a $2 million little independent.
I love the little country family,
completely innocent of everything.
And boy, Dee Wallace gives it her best.
Get out of my house!
We had so much fun on "Critters".
I loved working with Stephen Herek.
He was so easy to work with.
Always knew what he wanted.
And it was a tough shoot,
because we worked mostly nights.
The creature designs in "Critters"
I remember thinking were really funny when I was a kid.
Little creepy yet adorable balls of spikiness,
and they have really terrifying eyes and teeth,
but that's what made them so fun.
The Chiodo brothers of "Killer Klowns from Outer Space"
fame created the Krites in "Critters".
With "Critters" there is an element where you are scared
because you don't know what's gonna happen.
They just seem in it to destroy things
and kill people.
They didn't have the big critter finished.
That's why in that one scene, you only see his eyes
coming up through the window.
It was hard to stay in the fear
and everything that we had to do
because it was pretty funny.
We would be ready to do this hysterical scene,
and Stephen would go okay, roll them in.
Just roll the little balls
across the set.
I did not have anything to do with the Krite and E.T. scene.
Nothing.
And the fans that are really fans
that are really knowledgeable,
they just get off on all that stuff, and it's great.
I think it's wonderful that directors
throw in all those cross references.
A lot of people make horror movies
just because it's the easiest,
or what they think will be the easiest
stepping stone to a career or a paycheck or something.
But there's a lot of love and craft in that movie
that I really appreciate.
"Manhunter".
"Manhunter"'s based off the novel "Red Dragon"
by Thomas Harris, who also made "Silence of the Lambs",
and just like with "Silence of the Lambs",
this is a movie that critics have to refer to
as a thriller rather than a horror movie
so they're allowed to like it.
The movie is about a killer named the Tooth Fairy
who bites people's faces.
You can't call this a horror movie?
Give a kiss.
William Peterson plays a detective, Will Graham,
who's investigating murders being committed
by this killer, who we later learn is this guy
called Francis Dollarhyde,
and the reason the novel was called "Red Dragon"
is because Dollarhyde worships this painting
called the Red Dragon, and identifies himself
as the Red Dragon.
You will lie awake in fear
of what the Red Dragon will do.
Francis Dollarhyde's played by Tom Noonan
who also played Frankenstein in "The Monster Squad",
and he's a very, very effectively creepy villain.
He's up there with Buffalo Bill
from "Silence of the Lambs", in my opinion.
Put the fucking lotion in the basket!
As a testament to how scary Tom Noonan is,
he can wear pantyhose over half of his face
like he's Howie Mandel trying to blow up a glove
with his nose, and still be scary.
Well, here I am.
This was the very first screen appearance
of Hannibal Lecter, except this time
he's played by Brian Cox, not Anthony Hopkins.
And Cox as Lecter is a lot more subdued
than Anthony Hopkins, but he still has
this quiet menace about him.
Would you like to leave me your home phone number?
Even if he seems to be cooperating with you,
he still never really lets you know
what his true intentions are,
but you can be rest assured that they're not good,
and he's smarter than you are.
I know that I'm not smarter than you.
Then how did you catch me?
You had disadvantages.
What disadvantages?
You're insane.
At this point, Michael Mann was famous
for the series Miami Vice,
and this movie uses a lot of the same
color scheme, a lot of the same use of music.
In a way, this could almost be like a really scary
extended episode of Miami Vice,
and I think that kind of ended up overshadowing
the movie a little bit.
Wes Craven, a very groundbreaking filmmaker,
whenever his name was on a film,
I would always either go and see it or rent it.
He definitely had a shaky track record.
But it seemed like he was always looking
to find something that would catch on.
He was always doing these very interesting stories
about how kids were dealing with a lot
in terms of their family dynamics, and things like that,
and we see that especially in the movie "Deadly Friend".
"Deadly Friend".
She can't live without you.
"Deadly Friend" was adapted from a story called "Friend".
They were trying to make this love story.
A little bit of science fiction element,
little bit of action, little bit of horror.
We're pretty close approaching
the way a normal human brain works.
"Deadly Friend" is about a guy named Paul
who is a genius.
He's created this robot friend named BB,
a robot with super strength who thinks for himself,
and has emotions, and feels things.
What could go wrong with that kind of strength?
Well, turns out everything.
I'm side eyeing this robot here,
because that robot's a killer
just waiting for an excuse to kill.
Sam was played by Kristy Swanson,
who we love her as the original Buffy.
Dad just will beat her,
which is terrible.
He yells at her, and then throws her down the stairs.
You whiny little bitch!
Ow!
She dies.
Paul's like, I think I can save her.
You're giving her a robot brain?
Giving her a computer.
It's a battery powered self-contained computer.
So now he has a robot's brain
in a human girl's body, but she's dead,
so he has to hide her, or else she's walking around,
she's a zombie, right?
And then it all goes badly, and I'm glad it goes badly,
because it would be weird if it didn't go badly.
She sort of becomes this very interesting
kind of totem, in a way.
How she's able to right the wrongs
of the way that she's been treated,
the way other people have been treated.
Elvira, played by Ann Ramsey.
She's that gun-toting get off my lawn
times 40 Karen that you could meet, right?
Who's out there?
What are you doing?
It's just me, Ms. Parker!
What is that?
BB!
But we love her.
We love Ann Ramsey from "Throw Mama From the Train",
and from "Goonies".
We love her in that mean scary woman character.
Damn kids.
BB picks up the ball,
and throws it at Elvira's head,
and her whole head explodes.
The whole head goes
That's my favorite kill of the movie.
When they had the movie together,
a studio watched it, and they said, no.
This needs more violence.
It needs to be gory.
Because they're under contract with the studio,
they went back and shot gore scenes.
Then they were told it was too much.
They needed to be trimmed.
So the creativeness is pulled back from Wes Craven.
Another movie where everybody had fun.
But I don't think Wes Craven did.
♪ Rock and roll
"Trick or Treat".
The ultimate rock and roll horror movie.
The perfect mixture of the mythos
behind the heavy metal culture in the 80s.
Just a great misfit in high school story,
which I totally related to.
All right, so "Trick or Treat".
You had Ozzy Osborne, Gene Simmons,
and Skippy from Family Ties.
One of these things is not like the other.
Rockstar Sammi Curr,
victim of a hotel fire.
Dead at age 38.
A rockstar dies, and then this evil something or other
comes back as a rockstar.
I knew that "Trick or Treat" was just candy.
It tastes sweet and then it goes away.
It's a story of Ragman.
He is picked on, he's bullied
by pretty much everybody.
I wanna nail every one of those bastards!
I don't know how, I don't know when,
but I'm gonna nail them.
His hero is Sammi Curr,
who is demonic, dark, in your face.
He ends up killing himself in a ritual,
setting himself on fire.
His soul gets trapped in the acetate demo
that Gene Simmons has.
This is very cool.
And then when you play it backwards,
he comes back from the dead.
You.
Great cameos by Gene,
and then Ozzy as the Bible thumping PMRC minister.
These evil people have just got to be stopped.
And it's just so off the hook.
They were looking at a lot of different rock stars
to play Sammi Curr.
Eddie.
We had a deal.
I didn't wanna be this guy with leather studs.
I was much more interested in the DJ.
It's party time, yeah!
This is the old Nooser coming at ya
right here on this fine, fine Rocktober morning.
It's the sweeping sensation,
like patterned after Wolfman Jack,
who was a DJ at the time.
I just had two or three weeks off between a tour,
and wound up doing it.
Eh, Ragman!
I remember I was so excited to meet him.
I said to him, hey Gene Simmons,
can you do the thing with the tongue?
And he said no, I only do that for girls.
Tony Fields was genuinely scary
playing Sammi Curr.
Hiya, bud.
Boy, he got that rockstar stuff down.
He could dance and sing and move with the guitar
and jump off the stage,
and capable of so much,
and we lost him way too young.
The film script was funnier and darker.
I think what we ended up with was something in the middle.
Charlie Martin Smith was directing for the first time,
"Trick or Treat", that was his first time.
We had a kinship, a nerd-like kinship,
that other directors might not have picked me.
I have to be honest with you.
Keanu Reeves was up for it.
The gore is great, the kills are great.
When he yanks the old lady through the TV,
and she just immediately turns to dust.
Uh, what the shit just happened, dude?
This is insane.
We were blessed to get Kevin Yagher
to do the special effects and the makeup in the film.
It was the first time that I had acted in a movie
with an imaginary monster, and things happening, and stuff.
Oh.
Of course, the amazing soundtrack by Fastway.
♪ Rock and roll
♪ Rockin' on a midnight
♪ Steal your soul
Just such a killer collection of great tunes
that I still listen to to this day.
♪ On a midnight
♪ Steal your soul
We were giddy, it was so good.
We were like, this is good.
If the film was successful when it came out,
it wasn't successful enough for them to do the sequel,
and I'm not still living off of it.
If you think about all the movies that are out there,
it's unimaginable that people still care about this movie.
Un-fucking real.
Heavy metal fans stayed true.
Marty Rantzen is still a dork,
but tonight he's getting even.
Vestron Pictures presents "Slaughter High".
April fool's!
"Slaughter High" is about a kid
that gets bullied, and years later at a reunion,
he comes back.
Starts killing.
It's a revenge film.
It's a horrible prank, and a prank that went
horribly wrong for everybody else.
I'm sorry, Marty.
We didn't mean to!
First of all, it was called "April Fool's Day",
and of course, that's like the American "April Fool's Day",
so we had to change the title.
It was meant to be shot in the States,
and there was no budget, so it was all shot in England.
Three directors.
George Dugdale, my husband.
Peter Mackenzie Litten, and Mark Ezra.
They all took different roles.
Peter Litten did the special effects,
so he'd step in and do those scenes.
Mark was more the writer, and George would be
very hands-on as the physical director,
which worked really well.
Good friends.
I've never had that before, but it was interesting.
Carol, my character.
Come on.
She wasn't a very nice person at all.
She was a bit of a tease,
and she thought she was the bees knees.
And she was meant to be an 18-year-old.
I'm sorry.
I was in my 30s at that point.
They were clever in the casting,
because they got people in their late 20s and stuff,
so it didn't look too out of place.
You filthy stinking bastard, Marty!
What do you want from us?
There was a mix of Brit actors,
and then we had about four, five Americans,
so that made it credible.
Simon Scuddamore.
Very intense, and he did a brilliant job.
He made Marty totally come to life.
It was wonderful.
How do you want it?
Please, stop!
No!
And what they did, I don't know why they did it,
it was just like a pack of hyenas, really.
The scene with the Bunsen burner.
They did such a good job with that.
No CGI.
All practically done in front of your eyes.
It all sets on fire.
I think it's a fabulous sequence.
It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek play
upon other films that were maybe more serious.
Given the budget, I think it stands up quite well.
People seem to like it, especially in the States
when I go there.
They say, we love it.
I say, what do you like about it?
They say it's so cheesy, we just love it.
Maybe it is a bit cheesy,
but it's cheesy and fun,
and the effects were really well done,
and hopefully the acting's okay.
Look, Manny.
The guy's weird, the story's weird, and-
And what?
And you're weird.
"Class of Nuke 'Em High", like all Troma movies,
was a movie ripped from today's headlines.
There was a nuclear power plant being built
about a quarter of a mile away from the United States'
most populous city, namely New York City.
And right next to where I lived,
so that gave me the idea of let's talk about that.
But sir, if we could just shut down for 48 hours-
Shut down?
They'll investigate us.
The EPA, the NRC.
"Class of Nuke 'Em High" is like a Cuisinart of genres.
People really enjoyed the mixture of humor and horror,
and social satire, and politics, and violence.
It's an excellent film.
It's very entertaining.
It's got something to say about pollution and radiation.
We have found no connection
between that unfortunate student
and this facility.
I almost killed one of my kids in it.
That was kinda fun.
We had to have a motorcycle run into a bake sale
with a lot of women with cakes,
and I put my wife and kid right in the center of it,
so that if anybody got hurt, you know, my fault.
Nothing happened, but they came pretty close.
Well, the whole idea of blowing up your school,
I always loved that.
And I think that was one of the reasons
it was successful.
We literally destroyed a school.
Once it got into theaters,
we made over 100 prints.
A video cassette company called Media Home Entertainment,
they sold over 500,000 video cassettes
around 200 bucks for a video cassette.
You know, "Class of Nuke 'Em High"
is still very popular with fans.
Nostalgic, too.
We've got all these young people
who are now in their 50s
who still like "Class of Nuke 'Em High".
They want to see the future, but now.
It's a good movie.
It's so good that there's "Subhumanoid Meltdown:
"Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 2",
"The Good the Bad and the Subhumanoid:
"Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 3".
There are five of them.
Tromaville High School will be
temporarily closed for remodeling.
All right!
This is actually based on a true story.
"The Zero Boys".
Dawn of a new breed of heroes.
This really did happen upstate California.
There was a group of people that would go paintballing,
and there was a maniac that would kill them.
Somebody said I'm gonna write a movie about this, and did.
In the movie, there's a group, and they're called
the Zero Boys, because they never, ever, ever, ever win.
But this one time, they won.
Do it.
The Zero Boys are the best!
Fucking assholes.
And they won my character.
And so she's very unhappy about that.
I am so thrilled to be with the champions.
Go on.
Show me what makes the Zero Boys tick.
So they get up there, and all of a sudden
something is wrong.
Jamie.
It was kind of more getting into the torture thing,
like really kind of sick and weird.
Directed by Nico Mastorakis,
who was this Greek guy who loved action exploitation horror.
And Nico just delivers this powerhouse of action movie
mixed with horror.
The running and the hanging by our feet
and all that other kind of stuff,
a lot of inventiveness with weapons, and crossbows,
and things like that.
And this movie is brilliantly photographed
by Steve Shaw.
Every shot of that movie is almost like a painting,
especially when they're out in the wilderness.
It was a lot of running around in the woods,
that's for sure.
Everybody camped together and went
we have a serious problem here.
What are we going to do?
And did it as a group.
You have to get engaged with the characters,
and care about them, or relate to them,
or have an opinion about them.
If you don't know who these people are
on an intimate level, then you don't care.
We wanna care.
My favorite kill in "The Zero Boys",
he falls into this pit of spikes,
and then you can't get out.
But it was a good kill.
Joe Estevez played the killer,
and he looks exactly like Martin Sheen.
Probably scarier, because he has more experience
doing these kinds of things.
It was Hans Zimmer's first American score.
Frank Darabont was on the crew.
I remember he was telling us all about
how he had a story that he bought
from Stephen King for a dollar,
and it was "Shawshank Redemption".
"The Zero Boys" is under the radar because it always was.
It was always an underground thing.
What's scary about "The Zero Boys"
is you could be doing something that you love to do,
and be in mortal danger.
There's no place safe.
My real name is George Tani.
Growing up, I was very impressed
with Ray Harry Haroldon movies.
"Jason and the Argonauts".
My dad took me to the theater.
He said it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be a fighting movie.
It's like a skeleton, you know, you're gonna like it.
And I said oh, that's great.
I have been watching "Godzilla", and all those,
Tojo and kaiju films.
When I saw "Howling".
The first time I saw the man turned into the werewolf,
changing right in front of my eye,
I was like, this is it.
And then you see more coming up
from Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin.
And then Dick Smith's "Altered States".
The images of that really made me decide
this is the way to go.
When I went to New York studying in school
of visual arts, right in the beginning of punk movement.
♪ God save the queen
I saw the art side of it.
Punk music really gave me the art,
okay, we can do a lot more on edge.
I can perform something shocking to the people.
"Nightmare 4", my effect was Debbie's roach,
the girl that hates the cockroach,
and then she becomes a cockroach,
and then crushed by Freddie.
That's like Kafka, you know?
And this is a surreal sequence.
The fake body, we take it off
so she can put her head out,
and fake arm, it breaks.
It's old trick, but the images,
and what happening, really creep them out.
Everybody is like really, ugh!
That's gross!
I succeeded the illusion.
I'm very proud of that show.
It was Brian Yuzna.
We were really creating the scene together.
Especially the chanting sequence.
It's a real grotesque orgy.
I love Dali.
Dali is the one that made me really into art.
My crew was all inside, you know?
Inside of that creature.
They can move.
That's why you don't have to have expensive
mechanical movement, you know?
And the people can move organically.
I put in my 200, 300% on it.
So my sleeping time is really maybe average
of two hours a day, or something,
during the show.
There was not much budget, so I just have to
sculpt everything myself, pretty much.
And fast.
Making things for "Bride of Re-Animator",
we didn't have enough time to shoot everything
that we wanted to do.
It was very rushed.
Herbert West, he does a bunch of experiments,
so I can do so many different idea.
The design comes in as outrageous as possible.
You stupid biped!
Vietnam veteran, Noble Craig, is an actor
who is amputee.
I've been working with him since "Poltergeist II".
The vomit creature, crawl across the room,
that is Craig.
And then "Big Trouble in Little China",
sewer creature, the creature comes out from a tunnel,
eats the guy, and then comes back, right?
That's it.
It took three months to make it.
That too, Noble Craig is inside there
in special makeup effects.
I think that is one of the evolutional happenings
happened in film industry.
When I was in Japan, first I call myself Toshusi Mad,
and then I wanted to have something
that is really crazy.
Mad is something that is much more crazier than crazy,
I think, you know what I mean?
More power with it.
And then I remember the blues singer
named Screaming Jay Hawkins.
If I use Screaming Mad George.
That sounds good.
Screaming Mad George is my artist name.
"Witchboard".
"Witchboard" is the reason I will not allow
a Ouija board in my house to this day.
Don't come into my house with a Ouija board.
All I ever wanted to do was figure out
where I could get a Ouija board.
I wanna try this thing out.
Can you hear me?
That movie came out right at the right time
for my puberty.
Tawny Kitaen, the quintessential wow.
I had already seen her in "Bachelor Party".
I'd seen her in all the fucking Whitesnake videos
at that point.
♪ Well here I go again on my own ♪
Doing flips on the cars, and splits and things.
It was very impressive.
I'd really like to try this.
"Witchboard" is about somebody
who becomes obsessed with the Ouija board.
David, do you remember me?
A Ouija board that then opens the portal of hell
to a demon.
Ooh, that's a little spooky.
It's a little stupid.
It's a lot stupid.
The visceral horror and gore that starts to happen
once the horror is unleashed in "Witchboard".
It really scared the crap out of me
in a really fun way.
It's the very first film that we got
from Kevin Tenney.
This was a precursor to "Night of the Demons".
He starts to frighten and terrorize her,
gradually breaking down her resistance.
And once that's done, he's able to possess her.
The thing that Kevin Tenney brought to the table
that set him apart from other directors I've worked with
was his sense of humor and his passion for horror.
Ouija board was copyrighted
so that he couldn't call his movie "Ouija Board",
so he changed it to "Witchboard".
It's pronounced Ouija, not Ouij-i.
It comes from the French and German words for yes.
Oui and ja.
Ouija.
It was great working with the late great Tawny Kitaen.
You must be Linda.
She was fun to act with.
She had a little brown dog
that she brought on the set all the time.
Jim, this is Zarabeth.
The best medium in northern California.
When we did that seance scene,
every time they'd say action,
and I'd go like, whoo.
Pretend like the boy was in my body.
I'd look over at her and she'd be like,
she'd start laughing, and then we all start laughing.
And nobody could ever pull it together.
And I was like, I can't do this!
It was so goofy.
But with the scary music, when we finally got a take,
it worked, you know they put a weird effect
on my voice or something like that.
She hurt me.
She won't talk to me anymore.
Zarabeth to me is definitely a highlight of "Witchboard".
Just some more psychic humor.
Come on Brandy, let's hit the musky dusk.
Her death is so gnarly, too.
They'd say action, and then I'd get to
pretend like I land on the sundial,
and I had got one of those blood pills in my mouth,
and I did get to go like,
and like split out blood,
which I adored.
They had taped the top of the sundial to my back
so I ran down the set,
pretending like I was a shark.
I see danger ahead.
For Linda?
For you.
If you miss my house.
On "Witchboard", I had so much fun laughing.
It's coming up on the right!
A little more psychic humor, huh?
With tears and belly laughs everyday.
Tawny Kitaen.
When I saw that she died,
I felt loss, and sadness.
She was a blast, and funny, and smart,
and lovely, and it's weird for me to even think
that she's not around.
It's bizarre to me.
"Blood Rage", also known as "Slasher",
and "Nightmare at Shadow Woods".
I mean it's like, make up your minds,
will you people?
There's so few Thanksgiving horror movies,
that I feel like this has kind of had a resurgence
in recent years, because everybody wants
a horror movie to watch on the holidays.
Twin boys, one crazy, one not.
There's a mix-up.
One gets put in an asylum.
One's out loose.
Nobody in the movie knows.
Everyone in the audience knows.
Here's to the new family.
"Blood Rage" is about a Thanksgiving meal
that just goes completely awash in blood.
I'm not a fan of horror.
When I got "Blood Rage", it was a new
genre for me completely.
I went to the video store, and went to the horror section.
I literally had to go and investigate it.
What, are you gonna try and shoot me again, Todd?
It's twins.
You know?
So I'm going, are they kidding?
Do they know what they're getting involved with?
That's a chore for most people in any film,
let alone on a low budget.
I broke it down, Stanislavski, building a character.
The psychopath, you know?
And then the other guy was closer to what I usually played,
the sort of hate yourself, low esteem,
I'd played a couple of prisoners,
and stuff like that, and mixed up kids.
Very intense.
"Blood Rage" operates in a world
where it's the family Thanksgiving and murder.
Looks like you're gonna get a chance
to meet the rest of the family.
My psychotic brother just escaped.
It's the turkey and killing people.
It's rich.
I'd say that this big bird is ready for carving.
Why does this make me so crazy?
Time to eat, let's all sit down.
It's time for dinner.
Look what the cat brought in!
Louise Lasser gives 110% in that movie.
She's incredible.
She was, god bless her, a force of nature.
Mary Hartman was seminal TV, man.
That was hot stuff.
You know, murder with no reason, or no motive,
I mean really senseless, when you think about it.
Do you think this is too spicy, or not spicy enough?
She set the tone for "Nightmare Mom".
She creates the world for the film
Oh please.
Please don't do this to me.
She had that voice, she would just
get into these states.
She was transformed.
Come give mommy a kiss.
That scene around the refrigerator?
I mean, come on.
This is a woman who's freaking out over food.
And it's so over the top.
I've been calling you and calling you!
Why didn't you answer the phone?
Todd's here!
And he's killing again!
She was bringing it.
She got an applause on the set,
and I've only been around that a few times.
It's bananas.
It's a movie where no one in the movie
is making the same movie as anyone else in the movie.
They're all singing in their own key,
and the movie's all the better for it.
It's unhinged, it's delightful.
Shooting a melodrama like "Blood Rage"
is a whole different thing.
You can tear up the furniture.
You can do crazy stuff you just don't normally get to do.
It's horror, low budget horror.
But this had a building audience
and a genre that had legs.
It was like heavy metal, man.
This ain't going away.
This is gonna be a decades long thing.
Get used to it.
It's not cranberry sauce, Artie.
It's not cranberry sauce.
They have opened "The Gate".
Pray it's not too late.
One of the greatest things about "The Gate"
is that for a lot of kids at that time,
it became their gateway horror movie,
because it felt like a kids movie
that didn't play by the kids movies rules.
Already filled it in.
Whoa, whoa!
"The Gate" is about a group of kids
that dig a hole in their backyard,
and find demons.
Hi.
Hey.
It's a PG-13 horror film.
I always saw it as a film
that the whole family could watch,
that adults could be sort of nostalgic
about growing up, and kids could find an adventure in it.
Sacrifices.
We had so much fun making that movie,
even though it was very difficult.
You know, money was short.
All those people put their heart into it.
The actors, the writers, the special effects people.
We were able to pull the most out of everybody.
The album, backwards!
Tells you how to close the gate.
It's like the first heavy metal horror movie for kids.
They got their lyrics from this thing
called the Dark Book.
It's like the Bible for demons.
So you have somebody like Tibor,
who had a background working
in heavy metal music videos
coming in and being able to infuse that
into this kids movie is pretty astounding.
It's always much scarier when horror
comes into the normal world.
Stephen Dorff was just so cool to me
when I was a kid.
It seemed like something that could happen to me.
I could look down in my backyard
and I was always sure there was the potential
for a portal, monsters.
I always feel kids can make great actors
if you can key into them, you treat them like adults.
When they're in the right frame of mind,
you can do amazing things,
and get very real performances.
We have to close the gate.
We have to go to the hole and do it right.
You mean you guys were serious about that demon stuff?
The main theme of "The Gate" to me
is sibling relationships and friendship
to overcome insurmountable odds.
You need your friends.
I think of all the effects that they were
able to do in that movie courtesy of Randall William Cook.
I was already reading Fangoria
and I was into the effect part of it,
like the technical part of horror filmmaking.
I knew that we would have to use an encyclopedia of effects.
There was no one solution to all that stuff.
And thank goodness that Randy was so good
at all of those things.
When the workman falls over and breaks into the minions,
that to me is like a seminal important moment
in the movie where you go wow.
Even I go wow.
But it is still cool as hell to watch that sequence,
and I wish we got more movies
that tried to do stuff like that more these days.
Like, I don't care if it looks a little dated.
I don't.
Because it's still magic to me.
It's like a bespoke movie.
It's handmade.
It's kind of rough around the edges that way.
That's what draws people to it.
They can see the love that went into it.
"Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" is the story
of a band called The Tritons, led by Thor,
who was a very popular wrestler, rock and roller.
He was very popular up in Canada.
So this band comes to this tiny little farmhouse
on the outskirts of Toronto
to record their new album.
It's kind of like a vacation.
I like it.
You would.
Come on you two.
Don't start.
It turns out that they are in a house
that had been possessed.
And one by one, they start being killed off
by these demos.
Kind of this quirky movie
directed by John Fasano.
It's hard to call these things demons.
They're puppets.
I can destroy and destruct-
Demons that are rejects from Fraggle Rock.
We talked so much about the glorious age
of practical effects of the 80s,
but sometimes, they were not so glorious.
My favorite monster effect
in "Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" is one that I did.
The chicken monster.
That was a really fun project to work on.
And then I got to puppeteer it.
Jon Thor is a sweetheart.
He's always so positive.
He was up for anything.
♪ You get me any day
♪ Energy
It was November, and we had that wind
coming off of Lake Ontario,
hitting you like a brick wall.
This house that we were shooting in,
which had no electricity, had no hot water,
and they're in a shower, buck naked in this shower,
freezing to death.
I mean, that water was ice cold.
But the ending is not to be missed.
I walked onto set, and I saw Jon standing there
in this little gold Speedo, and codpiece,
and this gold lame cape.
And at one point, I looked over,
and I could see his cape was starting
to spark and catch fire.
Oh my god, that would have been
just the icing on the cake for sure.
Of course, you gotta love the big devil at the end.
It was a disaster.
Nice effect, Randy.
It weighed 50 pounds at least.
And it was so unwieldy.
It was just a mess.
But of course that's the scene that everybody
loves the most in that movie, because it's so outrageous.
Like you have to see this to believe it.
"Jaws" follows in a line of horror films
where nature is out to kill you.
"Jaws: The Revenge".
It's just the idea that meeting a shark
face to face in the water
is more likely than finding Jason Voorhees in the water.
The Jaws sequels were never like the first movie,
and so anytime they sequelize something,
it was like, oh god, what are they gonna do?
Lorraine Gary, who once again stars
as Chief Brody's wife, now a widow,
she travels to the Bahamas,
and what do you know?
That goddam shark is still after her.
And she's convinced that the shark
is following her family,
and she seems to have some telepathic link
with the shark.
It's such a far cry from Spielberg's original.
Just like the idea of a shark being a slasher movie
villain that's gonna follow these people
from Amity Island to the Bahamas.
It has a grudge against the Brody family.
It's just absolutely ridiculous.
- Their family- - What shark is this?
A friend of the other shark.
Is this like a cousin, a nephew?
You got it.
They just
put that movie together, really quick.
They cast all of us before they even made
the arrangements with the special effects guys.
They kind of did them almost at the last minute,
and they were like, wait a minute.
We can't do this, what you wrote in the script.
We can do something like this,
but we can't do that.
So they had to rewrite the scripts.
I got a script that I thought
oh, this is a pretty good script, you know?
I believe it, I play this guy.
Everything this guy does makes sense.
This is not gonna be stupid.
It's gonna be great.
About three days before we started shooting,
I get a new script
that accommodates all the technical stuff
that can be done.
For me, was like, oh god.
I couldn't make sense of it,
so I was pissed off all the time.
We were like that, you just try not to make it unbelievable
and it's hard.
I didn't know sharks sound like that.
Jesus Christ!
What's great about it is Christmas.
Who saw that coming?
Like, "Jaws 4: The Revenge", Christmas Jaws.
♪ The first noel
♪ The angels
We blew through most of the acting
in three weeks in that movie.
I was on that movie for five months.
So there was a lot of sitting out in the ocean.
We spent months sitting doing nothing
because the shark didn't work.
We were shooting this one scene,
and it was in a little, little tiny rowboat.
The whole boat goes down.
The battery pack that powers the camera
is encased in plastic, but it might leak.
So as soon as that becomes submerged,
this hand grabs me by the shirt
with one hand, yanks me out of the boat.
It was Michael Caine.
Get the fuck out of that boat!
I mean, I don't know that I would have been electrocuted,
but that's what he was thinking.
So he just acted like that.
Hang onto your socks, lads.
Michael Caine saved my life.
Oh shit!
Even if you kill them,
they're still deadly.
"Creepozoids".
Fun movie, little TNA
with a wonderful director, David DeCoteau,
who remains one of my closest friends.
"Creepozoids" is a very, very, very low budget alien.
It was really fun, because we did it in,
which then, was really quick, seven days.
This place may not have all the comforts of civilization.
Civilization doesn't have all the comforts
of civilization anymore.
That's just my point.
There's this horrible thing
out after us that was not from this earth,
and it's killing us one by one.
When you are doing low budget things,
the monsters are usually very fragile.
You had to be very careful of these monsters.
So you're battling, but holding back too,
because you could break them.
My mom came to set,
and both of us are afraid of rats.
So what do they have?
These huge rats.
It didn't look bad, that baby mutant,
but it was kind of silly.
It was a fun adventure, because that was the first time
I really got to fight, and be like, no makeup,
and a soldier.
I did, in "Creepozoids", had to battle a stunt person,
which was interesting, because they go all out
I'm like oh, I'm gonna get killed.
I'm gonna get hurt.
Linnea and I go back to a movie I made
1000 years before that, which is hard to believe,
called "Fairytales", and before that,
a movie called "Auditions".
It became apparent that most
of the female applicants were non-professionals.
The whole idea was they would come in,
sign a release, get paid I think $10,
because we made it clear that their audition
was gonna be used in the movie.
And the girls had to take their tops off,
because they had to be kind of sexy
fairy godmother, Cinderella.
I forget the story.
Many years later, suddenly she's back
as a more mature still very young woman
in the lead of "Creepozoids".
When I did "Creepozoids", this one girl
would not do a topless scene.
She was such a prude, I thought.
And she was doing all this backstory on herself,
like who is my mother, who is my father.
On a $60,000 film.
But she went on to big things.
She became a porn star.
And I was like, wait a minute.
You wouldn't take off your top.
Now you're a porn star.
Let's not turn this into a slumber party, okay?
"Zombie Nightmare" is the story of a young man
who is murdered, run over with a car
by these bunch of teenagers.
His mother goes to a voodoo woman
to bring him back to life
to take revenge on these kids,
these spoiled brats.
See look, I told you.
There's nobody here.
At the same time, there are two detectives
working to try to figure out
who's killing these kids.
Let's not have any more high school kids
turn up dead.
Understand?
The script was actually much better
than the final film, that John Fasano wrote, by the way.
It was about racial tensions, also.
Pretty young thing has just walked
into the wrong neighborhood.
I do believe you're right, Mr. Barnes.
Hey, don't be so uptight-
I went to Montreal with Adam West.
It was surreal.
It was like, I can't believe this.
I'm acting in a monster movie
with my childhood hero.
Come on, Frank.
I'll buy you a drink.
Jon Thor, he actually replaced
the original zombie actor in "Zombie Nightmare".
We actually filmed the end of the movie first
so the zombie was still played by Peewee, the stuntman.
And he's big guy.
I'm the young detective, and I arrive at this garage,
and I get there just in time to see
the zombie kill Tia Carrere.
Right?
Police!
Hands in the air!
He knocks the gun aside,
and picks me up by the throat,
and then throws me onto a car.
It's my first movie.
I'm fighting a monster.
This is what I wanted my whole life, right?
Mystery Science Theater discovering "Zombie Nightmare"
definitely saved that movie from disappearing forever.
It's called "Zombie Nightmare",
and it stars Adam West and...
There's a scene when one of the zombie characters
is essentially dying.
His mouth is open, and his eyes have sunken back,
and there's all of this mist coming out of him.
At the time I thought, oh wow.
That really looks good.
Maybe this is gonna be good.
I had hope, anyway.
Kill me!
Kill me, Frank!
Frank!
"The Video Dead".
I love "Video Dead", because it does something different
with the zombie genre.
We're given this weird nightmarish suburbia,
where these zombies are killing people,
but they all have a story.
They try to live.
Like, they try to adapt.
You have this haunted TV that gets delivered.
And initially it goes to a writer
in the opening of the film,
who's played by Michael St. Michaels,
who would eventually go on to become
the Greasy Strangler.
The TV somehow is a portal for this zombie movie,
but also real zombies as well.
That's the first movie I've ever died twice in,
and one time I killed me.
When I shot it, I was the first 20 minutes of the film.
The distributor didn't want that,
so they took out a bunch of my scenes.
The hardest thing I did in "The Video Dead"
was being dead.
That scene where they open the door.
We had to do that two or three times
because I could not stop shivering.
Holy shit!
A few days later, they called me up
and said would I be interested
in being in the movie some more?
I came back as Jack the Zombie.
The actor who originally played Jack the Zombie had died.
I don't know how or why,
so they had a vacancy, and I was
the right height and weight.
All those zombies had personality.
They weren't just eating brains
for the sake of eating brains.
They were going places.
They were doing things.
Those are some of the best zombies we have
of the entire 1980s decade.
The bride zombie, she's doing all these domestic things.
And then you have the rockabilly Flock of Seagulls zombie,
who's kind of like the ladies man of the zombies.
My favorite scene is when I'm the way too cool zombie.
Yes, I like you, you know?
I could tell I really creeped her out.
I really enjoyed working with Robert Scott.
He really didn't want anybody to know
that that film had only cost $35,000.
It was shot on video, transferred to film,
and then transferred back to video again.
It was generating a nice amount of money here and there,
prior to Avco Embassy going bankrupt.
People were impressed that I was in it.
I didn't have to pay for video rentals
in a couple video stores.
This bar I hung out at kept me drunk
for about six months, because I brought in
a copy of the thing and showed it at the bar.
People look at that film, and they wonder
whatever happened to that guy.
And now they get their answer in "The Greasy Strangler".
"Slumber Party Massacre II".
If you go, don't go all the way.
Oh god, anybody got any tranqs?
A lot of us straight boys
used to wonder in deep thought
about what must be going on
when girls are having a slumber party.
You look like a big chicken.
Bawk, bawk, bawk!
I love the "Slumber Party Massacre" series.
They're all written and directed by women,
and that shows in the content of the film.
One of the cool things about "Slumber Party Massacre 1"
is that it's really satirizing the slasher genre
at a time when the conversation around
whether or not slasher films were feminist.
But "Slumber Party Massacre 2" takes that and runs with it.
Come on baby!
We gonna rock and roll!
"Slumber Party Massacre 2" is actually a meta film.
A comment on those kinds of slasher movies,
at the same time that it is one.
Plus, it's a musical.
♪ I love to jam it to the floor ♪
♪ Let its wild parts roar
I was working for Roger Corman,
and I said Roger, I'd really like to direct something,
and he said, okay.
I have something you can direct immediately.
He said "Slumber Party Massacre II".
We have to make it, because I've sold all the rights to it.
"Slumber Party Massacre II" is about some girls
who get away for a slumber party at a cottage,
and it's interrupted by a musical icon serial killer,
who is going to sing and kill them
with his crazy guitar.
Yoo-hoo!
I'm home!
What could be more evil
than a weaponized electric guitar?
To drill poor innocent victims' heads in?
I couldn't think of anything that represented
the phallic nature of rock music
any better than a guitar that had a drill on the end.
Atanas Ilitch plays the driller killer.
And this is Atanas Ilitch's only album.
If you look, he's holding a cat on the back.
He was full of lots of enthusiasm and ideas,
and I didn't have a choreographer,
so he and I had to make up his "Let's Buzz" dance together,
and the chorus was
♪ Let's buzz
He's out there.
♪ Let's buzz
It was a sexy song.
My favorite two things is the dead chicken
that jumps out of the refrigerator
onto Crystal Bernard's chest,
and spews weird liquid out of its cut neck.
The other one is they're driving away,
and the Driller Killer, of course, is in the backseat,
and he drills the kid who's driving through the seat.
It sold a tremendous amount of video cassettes
which was what Roger wanted to sell at that point.
He said it made over $6 million
on a $390,000 budget.
It actually got banned in the UK.
They wrote a letter to Roger
saying you can't show this film in the UK
because it's a particularly virulent combination
of sex and violence.
I wish I had a copy of that letter.
They sounded extremely offended.
The way she broken my heart,
it made me cry,
so don't you know she had to die.
The 80s, like any other film decade,
was about transition.
I think that there was forward motion in a lot of fronts,
and there was backward motion in a lot of fronts.
Move lady, or I'm gonna blow off
your old man's 'acho bizeezhiis!
The 80s was before we were PC.
Gay people, black people, Asian people,
in the 80s movies were always the butt of the joke.
And we just dealt with it.
We were just used to it.
Urban stereotypes of black people, Asian stereotypes.
And yes, they were harmful,
but we weren't as aware that they were harmful,
because we just had not awakened ourselves yet.
No!
I think stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason,
because there's a lot of truth in them.
But I also think that the 80s is more complicated
and messier than just a reductive,
the black guy dies first rule.
I look back at Romero, "Night of the Living Dead",
a black leading man.
Very bold move on his part.
He wasn't there as a symbol of a black man.
He was there just as a man.
What people don't give Romero enough credit for
is that in his zombie trilogy, Romero's always
putting the underdog at the front.
Get out of the way, bitch,
or I'll go right through you with this.
We're getting to make this a habit, man.
"Night of the Comet", we had a Mexican man
as the male lead, which, because it's Los Angeles,
we didn't think anything of that,
but everybody else was like, whoa!
Jeez!
There goes the neighborhood!
In those days, it was defiant to cast a Latino.
I would be very happy when I would watch
a horror movie back then, and see
the kind of diversity that did show up.
Want one?
Because representation is such a new idea,
because sometimes you don't know what you don't have,
until you start to get it,
and then you're like, oh.
We didn't have this before.
Oh, look at that face.
Okay do the other one.
I'm from a Filipino family,
and our culture was never represented.
Unfortunately, even today, we're very limited.
Looking back on the way casting was in the 80s,
I know it can be easy to be upset at the past,
but it was of its time,
and it was kind of rough.
No!
In the rare instances where you do see yourself
represented onscreen, or something that is even
closely akin to you, and it's shown in a negative way,
or there's violence being done to this person,
it weighs on you.
I feel like we can learn from our mistakes,
but not beat ourselves up about it,
and not feel like we have to change the edit.
I don't think we need to throw away
representation that isn't perfect,
and in the 1980s, representation was not perfect.
It's important to remember what the social context is
when something's made.
We should be talking about our history.
There's a reason why this isn't okay now,
and was happening then.
Context, context, context is what's important
when it comes to these films.
Doesn't it bother you that he's a fag?
Come on-
Tell me, Billy.
Are you a fag?
We need to talk about more than just the word.
We need to talk about what the word was doing there,
and who put it on that page.
Every filmmaker, their upbringing
influences their storytelling.
With that in mind, I began to make my own films,
and I began to write my own films,
and I began to create opportunity,
not only for myself, but for everyone else.
What do you make of it, Mark?
Beats me, Chief.
Seems like the work of pathological weirdos.
Representation being a double-edged sword.
I'm really getting scared.
I can't take back any movies I did,
and I don't want to.
I represent as far as I can what I look like
in the group of people I come from,
but I never pretended, and I don't say
I'm speaking for everybody.
I just have my little lane,
and I try to stick to my lane.
When you look at horror of the late 1970s,
early 1980s, we start to see
actual queer representation trickle in.
We see gay guys kicking ass in films like "Siege",
and "Savage Weekend".
That was getting way more normalized in the 70s,
and then when AIDS hit, they all got shoved
back in the closet pretty hard.
Suddenly, there is very much no longer an interest
in having queer characters normalized in those films.
It was a big elephant in the room,
and I think a lot of horror filmmakers
didn't want to bother navigating that.
It's part of the evolutionary process of horror.
For me, like it was such an educational process
to be able to go back and look at how
we've changed, and how our dialogue,
and how our discussion of these movies has changed.
Oh god, she's a boy.
It's hard to compare the 1980s
and representation in horror to what we have today.
Because what we have is a conversation happening
that's asking for what we want our future to look like.
I look at everything that happens in the past
as opportunities to do much, much better in the future.
It was once said to me that representation is a journey,
not a destination.
So to me, representation in the 80s
is a work in progress.
Representation now is a work in progress.
There's forward movement, and there's backward movement,
but you can't snapshot it and say this is what it was.
Because I think it's a more complicated
messier picture than that.
"Return of the Living Dead: Part II".
Just when you thought it was safe to be dead.
I love a good zany horror movie.
Zombie content right now is very serious.
It's all about society and humanity,
and what does humanity mean.
This movie, it's fun to watch zombies
just be ridiculous.
"Return of the Living Dead: Part 1"
is truly a dark comedy.
You're laughing at the situations
the kids get themselves into,
and "Part II" kind of went for the jokes.
It's less of a sequel, and more just kind of
a goofier remake of the first one.
"Return of the Living Dead II" shows that
even if you die in the first movie,
you can still come back for the sequel.
Not bad.
Nice bit of rump in her time, huh?
James Karen and Tom Matthews from the first movie
come back for this one.
They're kind of filling the same role,
and basically have the same arc as the first one,
so they sort of are playing the same characters.
We've been here before!
It's like a dream, this whole thing!
You, me!
"Return of the Living Dead" was a huge hit in Japan,
and they said if you can have Jimmy Karen
and Tom Matthews come back, we'd give you
a little bit more money.
So that's how Jimmy and I got involved
back in it again, was because of the Japanese.
Jimmy Karen, lot of people on the East Coast
call him the Pathmark man.
March rolls in with hundreds of price reductions
in this new Pathmark circular.
So he would give weekly specials every week
for 30 years.
24 hours a day, you'll save
with one stop shopping at Pathmark.
He was so infectious on the set.
Raised everybody's game up.
You laugh at the situations we get ourselves into.
You can't believe the shit that's going on.
Are you fucking kidding?
That's insane.
That's what you're responding to.
We're acting it for real, man.
It's the dead!
They've come back to life!
The dead?
Dead, dead what?
People!
We need your car!
Well it sounds to me like you need a hearse.
I had an issue with Jimmy Karen
eating brains, actually,
because the director wanted me to eat frickin' brains,
and I was like, that was just so over the line, I thought.
I got really upset about that on the set.
I had issues with him, Ken Wiederhorn.
It's like he lost a bet and had to do the movie.
Hemdale made him do it to do other movies
that he wanted to do.
It's a sad story of Ken Wiederhorn and his career.
He came right out of the gate with "Shock Waves",
he had "Dark Tower" that he wrote
that was completely butchered.
"Meatballs II" was never a "Meatballs" movie.
It was a movie that he made,
and the company was like, we need a sequel.
And they retitled it.
And this happens again.
I mean, Ken has the script,
and it's not really a zombie comedy,
but they want to make a "Return of the Living Dead II".
He just really wasn't interested
in doing the movie, but he did it
Oh, fuck this!
The strengths of "Part II" that people really enjoy,
I think the fact that the main character was a kid,
so they have an emotional connection to the movie.
Brains!
I've never heard anyone say
that they've hated "Part II",
except for me.
This is big fucking trouble!
I've changed my mind since then.
You've got to give the devil his due!
"Sorority Babes".
"Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama"
is about these kids that think, okay,
we're gonna break into a mall, in the bowling alley,
and steal a trophy.
Come on, man!
I'm working on it.
Will you cool your jets?
Things turn out really bad,
because they awaken this imp.
Such a sour face!
Stop it, you little prick!
Very funny imp, but very menacing,
and does bad things.
Have a nice trip!
See you next fall!
I crack me up!
It's that story of the monkey's paw.
Be careful what you wish for.
Gold!
Lots of it!
Then gold it is!
This isn't gold!
These people make these wishes,
and they go so bad, it's not even funny.
Oh perfect form!
Lovely form!
Now I come along, and my name is Spider in it,
and I save the day.
When I got the script, it wasn't called
"Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl O' Rama",
it was called "The Imp".
We had no idea what the imp would be like.
We didn't know what it would sound like,
we didn't know what it would look like,
because no one was there.
We just had to pretend we were looking at something.
We had no idea it would be a funny voice.
Uncle Imp is gonna get ya!
Fun, fun, fun!
Dukey Flyswatter was in a band
called The Haunted Garage.
He was a great guy and everything, to work with.
No, that's his real name.
I don't know what his real name is.
It's probably Howard, or something like that.
Would I lie to you?
"The Serpent and the Rainbow".
When I think of the movies that Wes Craven created
that really moved me and challenged me as a viewer,
"Serpent and the Rainbow" is definitely at the top
of that list.
I love "The Serpent and the Rainbow".
They have this dust that you can put into people's faces
and they become a zombie.
So you could bury them, they could come alive again.
It is Wes Craven's take on the zombie film.
Everybody was kind of trying to chase
what George Romero did with "Night of the Living Dead".
It wasn't until "Night of the Living Dead"
that people even started talking about ghouls as zombies.
Zombies were Caribbean.
Zombies were in "I Walked With a Zombie",
you know, "White Zombie".
That was kind of zombies.
But now, zombie became synonymous with living dead people.
The whole meaning of the word got screwed up.
Wes Craven is inviting us
to learn the history of these monsters
that we're fascinated with.
This comes from him being an academic.
He goes back to the root of the zombie,
and he goes back to Haitian folklore.
It's very much about the idea of wealthy white people
trying to steal cultural heritage
away from Haitians.
Now, if you don't like the word zombie,
you can choose another word,
but the fact is, somebody brought him
back from the grave, and I want to know
how they did it.
They send Bill Pullman's character there
to find out what is the secret
to immortality, essentially.
He thinks that he understands these rituals,
and that he is above them, he is a man of science,
but then he discovers that he doesn't really
know it at all.
Whatever happens, death is not the end.
Wes Craven is a great, great director,
and comes up with great ideas.
Really fantastic effects in that movie.
Some of the camera tricks that they're able to do,
especially in the sequences with the coffin,
when it fills with blood.
It's just phenomenal.
The dream sequence with the zombie bride,
a snake comes out of her skull.
I mean, that is incredible imagery.
You dreamt of me and of the grave.
I know because I was there.
Zakes Mokae in that movie is absolutely terrifying.
Bill Pullman really, he had to put up
with a lot for that movie.
I want to hear you scream.
Where he's basically in a chair, nude,
and a nine inch nail that changes a lot.
You see it once, you're never gonna forget that moment.
And get out!
"The Serpent and the Rainbow" feels the most
like who Wes Craven was as a person to me,
because he is interrogating the way
that our society functions, and our fear of death,
because I think ultimately, a fear of death
in this film is a fear of losing power and influence.
He has always reinvented horror
as a means to teach us either about ourselves,
broader society, or about the sins of America,
the way we extort other cultures for our own gain.
Don't let them bury me.
I'm not dead!
When I really think about all of my memories
on the set of "Sleepaway Camp",
we were just one big family.
One of the most magical times of my life.
I was a 13-year-old making this fun movie.
Spoiler alert, I mean the first penis I saw
was my own penis, you know?
It was like, this was a movie like none other.
Once you find out what the ending is,
you start to understand the deeper meaning.
And there's a lot going on.
Your gender identification, your sexual orientation.
It was never intended to have
any kind of negative connotation
on any aspect of life.
Goodnight, campers.
"Sleepaway Camp 2".
Michael Simpson called about portraying Angela
possibly in Parts 2 and 3.
It was the late 80s.
We were seeing more comedy.
And I just didn't take very well to that character.
Wake up, everybody!
Breakfast in half an hour!
I put it on hold.
I'm young, let me go to school.
Robert Hiltzik made this movie, and it was great.
So when Robert wrote the sequel,
he continued that dark movie that was made,
and the producers were like, nah.
We want to really play into Angela.
Fritz Gordon is actually Michael Hitchcock,
who wrote Glee.
He was brought in to write the horror comedy.
There's lots of good kids.
We just have to weed out the bad.
But it's mainly one liners,
and just kind of Pamela Springsteen
taking this Angela character,
and just amplifying it so much.
Say no to drugs.
She brought so much energy.
That was an Angela that was fun.
You talk too much.
Also, them playing with the transgender character,
fully a woman, has completely undergone everything.
A surgery and all.
You're Angela Baker, the angel of death!
They should have called you Peter!
My name is Angela Johnson.
A Bruce Springsteen sister.
She kept it secret.
She wanted to be an actress,
but I guess it wasn't for her.
She ended up doing photography instead.
Some of Bruce Springsteen's album covers
is Pamela Springsteen's photographs.
I was once a camper myself.
She's the boss' sister.
She was born cool.
Angela is killing because she's bullied.
She's weeding out all the bad kids,
and she's on top of it,
and she doesn't care what anyone thinks.
Please, don't!
Sorry!
Once I start a task, I always finish.
It has some kind of cruel deaths,
like shoving somebody down a Porta Potty.
What's down there?
The leeches attached to her face,
she's obviously covered in poop and pee,
and it's just like, ugh.
What a horrible way to die.
I love that outhouse scene.
That was disgusting!
It's a perfect, perfect, perfect blend
of horror and comedy.
A lot of people say "Part 2" 's my favorite,
and I think that's fantastic.
I do wish I had played those roles.
I do.
I always say I have no regrets in life.
None.
But I do regret that.
Even if you're sad, you gotta eat.
Isn't that right, Leah?
Just would have been super cool
to feel like I had done the entire franchise.
I think the series is empowering.
I've watched it over 40 years
grow into this, you know,
it has a life of its own.
"Sleepaway Camp" is so interesting to me.
I still have so many questions.
I'm completely cured.
If I wasn't, they wouldn't have let me out.
"Don't Panic" really feels like it was
made by a fan for fans.
One!
Two!
Three!
This 17-year-old boy has a party
where his friends surprise him with the Ouija board.
And if you thought this movie was about the Ouija board,
oh you thought wrong.
In Spanish, "Don't Panic" was called
"Dimensiones Ocultas", which means occult dimensions.
At that time, the only way was to shoot in English,
sell it in the international markets.
We tried to hire actors that were English fluent,
and that had an international look.
Let's look at the character Michael.
That's what I call a pullet.
You have a perm on your mullet.
And you're wearing dinosaur pajamas at 17 years old.
They're after me.
They're gonna get me.
Don't worry, baby.
I won't let anybody hurt you.
I always get questions about those pajamas.
They seem to be the most memorable aspect
of "Don't Panic".
Michael.
This time you have to stop him.
Don't fail.
What the fuck?
It almost felt like a medically induced dream fever.
It was just so out there.
Hurry!
Do you believe in Satan?
Roberto Palazuelos is playing
the character of a tough bully guy.
He goes inside the car, sticks his head out
from the window.
What Screaming Mad George did for us,
he made a piece of prosthetic,
like a retractable knife inside the mouth.
And then when he opened his mouth,
you could see the blade pop,
and the blood come out of the mouth.
I think it was a very good kill.
It really became a success
when video came out.
And then we started getting requests
from all the world.
We sold it in United Kingdom, Japan, China, Germany.
I've gotta save Christie!
Please listen to me!
It scared the shit out of the audience.
You want to play games?
Good.
I like games.
Say your prayers.
"Lady in White".
"Lady in White" is a particularly strong example
of gateway horror.
That was one of the scariest movies I saw as a kid,
because it's dealing with very, very dark material,
and it's stuff that could happen in real life.
The titular lady in white is a ghost,
but what this movie is really about
is a child killer.
It was seven years between "Fear No Evil"
and "Lady in White" before I got back
behind the camera again.
It was a remarkable experience,
such a far cry from "Fear No Evil".
What I wanted to do this time
was really try to make something
that was personal on an autobiographical level.
A beautiful story about what it was like
growing up in that era,
and combine it with this ghost story,
that drives it thematically,
and perhaps more so commercially.
It's like the most cinematic version of Halloween
that you can have.
It smells like Halloween,
like you watch that movie, and it tastes like candy corn.
The seasonal feel.
We began during the fall,
and the moved into the winter months.
I wanted a contrast between the darkness
that was going to happen in the film,
and these beautiful bucolic moments.
Hey!
The first image that came to mind
for "Lady in White" was this image of Frankie
being locked in the cloakroom.
Comforted by their ancient voices,
and I began to dream.
Lukas Haas plays Frankie in this.
I'd seen him in "Witness",
I'd seen him in "Testament",
and I knew that this kid was extraordinary.
He had an innate ability to express his feelings.
That's what acting's all about.
Mom used to say sometimes when someone dies violent,
they can't rest in peace.
The story is as much about a time and place
as anything else.
A key character is a black man
who gets caught in the madness of what's happening,
what's going on in that town.
Dealing with issues of race,
particular as it relates to the lady,
what was going on in that era,
and being truthful as to how people spoke,
how they reacted, how they dealt
with each other between races.
I wanted nothing but the truth.
Harold Williams is a perfect scapegoat.
He's black.
When it comes to pure cinematic drive and force,
I think the climax works beautifully.
I think that theme of loss
and coming to terms with loss
and dealing with loss is universal.
My mommy's lost and I can't find her.
The "Lady in White", it fucked me up.
Seeing it as a kid, in a way that it just becomes
like embedded in you, and become a core memory.
10-year-old Melissa N. Montgomery
was the first victim believed to have been murdered.
I'm glad that people are still discovering
"Lady in White".
It continues to remain somewhat hidden.
It's fun for me.
I already told him.
Her mother is the lady in white.
I'm awake!
"Dream Demon".
The movie was about the fine line
between dreams and reality.
I think I'm awake, and then I keep waking up.
This is crazy.
You better call that doctor friend of yours.
My character was like a punk rock chick
connected to this English girl.
Wake up, Diana!
Come on!
Wake up!
Diana, please!
Ultimately we realized that through our dreams
and in our ability to crawl into our dreams,
I think that we ended up bonding.
Cheers.
Now wake up!
Come on, wake up!
Wake up!
Stop!
I loved working with Gemma Redgrave.
She was like my best friend.
No that's, no that's, that's very good.
That's really very good.
Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail.
I remember having good laughs with them.
Hey come on, leave her alone.
What do you think she is, dog meat?
Piss off, darling.
We're the press!
Oh yeah, well print this, dickhead!
It was an adventure,
some groundbreaking special effects.
All of these art director types
that got to really stretch out their creativity
and just be as gross as possible.
So I'd be like, huh.
She's crawling through slime today.
The script was peculiar.
They had so many rewrites,
and the director was kind of a nut.
They wanted me to stand in front
of these six foot flames.
It's hot, right?
The director was like okay, you're gonna come in
in front of that flame, and I'm like,
how about this, fuck no I'm not gonna stand
in front of, and then he got really mad at me,
and I was like, I'm not standing in front of that.
That is dangerous.
Forget you.
You stand in front of it.
He's like, all right fine!
He stands in front of it,
and he singes the back of his hair.
I have not worked with Harley Cokeliss since.
I don't think I was his favorite actress.
Diana!
The most challenging aspect
of working on horror films,
it's me screaming and crying.
It's me bringing to life my own personal freaking fear,
so I guess bringing your own reality to the screen
is the trickiest bit.
But what a blast.
I'll do it any day of the week.
Pay me.
Where's my mark?
Anybody who thinks it's a good idea
to get shaved by a monkey
needs to reassess their life plan.
You're not gonna hurt me.
I'm part of you.
"Monkey Shines".
A leap into terror.
"Monkey Shines" is about a mind meld
between a man, who suffered a horrible injury,
and this monkey.
You're giving me a monkey?
How am I supposed to take care of it, Jeff?
The idea is that it's gonna take care of you.
He ends up becoming telepathic
with this monkey, and the monkey ends up
becoming kind of jealous of the people
that are close to our main dude.
Allan-
And the monkey starts to enact
a lot of the rage that the quadriplegic is experiencing,
and people start to be killed.
It sounds all very far-fetched,
but the way that Romero handles it
is completely expert, and a perfect example
of what a great filmmaker Romero was,
even out of the zone of zombies.
Yeah, yeah.
I made up a formulation based on human memory cells.
I've been injecting one of my monkeys.
George sets the tone.
Come on, give it right here.
Now, now.
- Thank you. - Good girl.
It was a fun set to be on.
Jason Beghe.
I liked Jason a lot.
He was a very intense guy.
Don't.
Do not.
Don't do it!
Goddam you, you-
I think it was a lot more pressure for him.
He was carrying that film, really.
I love monkeys!
Monkeys are awesome!
Well, not so much.
Kind of scary, really.
I really wanted to love the monkeys,
but truthfully, I had to really fake
not being scared.
Hey, company's here.
Come on.
They're very strong.
In the pivotal scene, monkey's trying to drug me
with this hypodermic needle.
I had to wrestle with the monkey.
And a lot of that was a puppet.
But there was one short time
where I was actually holding on
to a real monkey.
Ella, no!
I can't say I had a lot of affection for them.
But I faked it really well.
And we had that love scene
that was one of the more challenging scenes
I've ever had to do.
As a young boy, watching that sequence
and wondering about how this guy
was going to have an encounter with this woman
that we knew he liked,
and the way that happened,
the harness thing for his bed,
and this monkey's watching, like getting angry.
That movie's messed up, man.
We were in it together,
and we got through it.
I do believe we drank a little bit
of champagne during it to relax,
because it's so hard, these intimate scenes, you know?
With a crew.
It's a scene I'm actually pretty proud of.
"Monkey Shines" is George Romero's
first studio movie.
The movie was taken away from him and recut,
after he added things that they asked for.
The original ending was much darker,
and they hated that.
I wish we could see George's original vision.
It's what happens when you work for a studio.
The movie's not yours.
Even if it wasn't appreciated at the time,
I think anybody who appreciates George
is gonna take another look at any of his work.
It's an interesting story.
It has survived better than I would have thought
at the time, that's for sure.
"Black Roses".
The hottest band this side of hell.
A big heavy metal band is coming
to do a series of concerts,
and the parents in the town are very much against it,
because you know, rock and roll leads to the devil.
The fact that we had Julie Adams in the movie
was a thrill for all of us monster kids,
because she was in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon".
Their satanic music and subversive lyrics
threaten to undermine the very fabric of our society.
John Fasano.
We did four movies in four years.
John and I had known each other since elementary school.
And so now, here comes the biggest thing
to hit Mill Basin ever, and they try to stop it?
You call that good?
When the investors saw the first cut of the film,
they were like, it's a little short.
It needs more monsters, and more boobs.
So we shot these additional sequences.
I did do some special effects for the reshoot.
John wanted her hand to be starting to look
like it was changing, so I sculpted an appliance.
She's there, and she's sort of caressing herself like this,
and I'm just going like, nobody's looking at that hand.
Mike Maddi designed this creature.
It was like bald, and had these huge fangs,
and these long, sinewy arms, and talons.
And it took five of us to work that puppet.
It's definitely a major leap
from "Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare" in terms of the effects.
The record starts bubbling up.
What the fuck?
And then it becomes this creature that attacks him.
Probably the best effect in the movie,
listening to metal, and metal inviting in this monster.
It's clearly playing on satanic panic.
Maybe the parents in the PTA have a point,
and this is Satan music.
So that's kind of funny.
Let's make blood city!
"Black Roses", yeah the band actually are from hell.
What do you know?
We are the Black Roses.
The flowers of evil!
You have been chosen.
"The Brain".
What I love about that title
is that nobody would second guess
that a movie called "The Brain"
is about a brain that kills people.
The plot revolves around this evil scientist
played by David Gale, who you might remember
as the professor in "Re-Animator".
I will be famous!
He runs this TV show that brainwashes people,
and gains control of their minds
with the help of this weird brain monster,
and then there's this rebel high school student,
who's the only one who can resist the brain's
mind controlling power, and save the day.
You can go now.
What the hell happened to me?
But not without some horrific hallucinations.
The protagonist, he's driving the car,
and the brain is sort of taking over his mind.
I mean, could you imagine that?
If you're driving a car,
and then you just see a video wipe transition
turn into a brain?
Holy shit.
Look at that brain.
You can't tell how it moves around.
All you see is this enormous face
coming after people.
It's kind of scary, but it's also really funny.
That's food for thought.
I mean, you just look at that thing,
and you gotta love it.
So there's this toy and a cartoon in the 80s
called Madballs.
Madballs, Madballs!
Gross for one, gross for all!
We play with a Madball!
They're gross!
That's what the brain looks like.
It's a giant Madball attacking.
I worked in Madrid on a wonderful film
called "Howl of the Devil".
I love Spain.
I've done quite a bit of work in Spain
with Sinbad, and various things.
Paul Naschy, both directing and as an actor
in his own right.
He had such presence on camera.
Menacing presence, but he was very charismatic.
And I'd be speaking English to him,
and in post, they'd dub him.
The plot basically was this man,
by day, he was quite normal, head of the house,
and he had his lovely son, Sergio.
And I was the maid that came to clean up,
and look after the son, basically.
But then by night, he would change
into these wonderful characters.
He became Frankenstein, he became the wolf man.
These very strange characters.
Some of the sequences we had to do
the man with a great big chainsaw
that came running after us.
No!
Carmen.
I liked her, because she was very proud.
Quite a holy Catholic lady.
And then the priest, who was a lovely
sweet, sweet actor.
Was trying to molest her, to attack her.
It was quite an emotional scene, actually, for me.
And for him, because he was so upset.
He spoke English, he said I'm so sorry,
he says, so sorry.
Paul want me to do this, and I don't want to do it.
I said, we'll make it look as good as we can,
but I might push you and punch you a bit.
He said, that's okay.
He said, I don't mind.
You do what you do.
So then we went for it,
and I managed to get away from him, basically.
It felt like one of my better scenes,
because she was in a really state of distress before it,
and this exacerbated it,
made it far worse for her.
Paul was, to me, the king of Spanish cinema.
He absolutely was.
People loved him.
When we talk about genre, and we try to put things
in boxes, one of the ways we got in trouble very early
was we conflated a setting with a feeling.
Horror is an emotion.
So you can have a horror in space.
You can horror in the old west.
You can have horror in a comedy.
It looked like this!
Horror is about a feeling that you evoke
in your audience.
Lollipops!
And all free today!
Horror is a more flexible genre
than people realize, and oftentimes it can be found
hiding within other genres, nested in there,
waiting to strike at any moment.
Fear is always there.
It's just one decision, or one thought,
or one perspective away from being right in your face.
Any movie could suddenly become a horror movie.
You're dead.
Horror is catching you off guard,
and taking you off your axis somewhat.
No!
The horror has been a part of our lives,
new just didn't know it.
It was dressed up in fairy tales.
But it's always been a part of us,
because fear and darkness
is always a part of your life.
It's part of life.
Disney goes very dark.
"Pinocchio", for instance.
The Pleasure Island scene.
Bad little boys doing bad little things,
smoking cigars, gambling,
until they turn into donkeys,
because it's a cautionary tale.
They're doing the shit they're not supposed to be doing,
and they just start transforming.
What do I do?
"Willy Wonka".
Not a horror movie, per se.
Does it have horror elements?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Round the world and home again!
That's the sailor's way!
The horrific nightmare boat sequence,
where he's just staring deadpan,
and starts singing that weird song.
♪ There's no earthly way of knowing ♪
He's singing.
And there's like, these horrible projection
that are happening.
As a child, I was sitting there watching this
thinking what the fuck is happening?
Now I am gonna be sick!
Never mind the fact that these children
are just getting offed, one by one.
It's kind of like a slasher movie.
She was a bad egg.
I seem to find horror in every film I see
at some point.
Any time you're writing interesting characters,
they're gonna have a dark side,
and so if you get some people with problems,
and issues, and anger, and stuff,
then you have a dangerous situation,
and that's scary.
We might not call "Blue Velvet" horror,
but I do know it was covered in Fangoria.
David Lynch is bouncing in and out of horror
throughout all of his films,
and I think horror fans,
our antenna perked up.
It delivers horror probably more effectively
than half the movies sitting in the horror section
at the video store.
The severed ear moment.
The camera moves in.
There's ants on it.
It's incredibly graphic.
That's a pure horror moment.
Don't you fucking look at me!
Frank Booth is one of the great horror villains.
He was terrifying, because he was unpredictable.
He was a madman, and it felt unsafe
in a way that by, say, 1986,
a lot of our movie slashers didn't.
Does horror even need to be scary?
It just has to disturb you in some kind of way.
What's cool about the 1980s
is horror was so big, that it actually
infiltrated other genres.
Ow!
I'm glad to see you finally made it
to the suburbs, bitch!
My first horror film, "Return to Oz".
It's like mombie taking her heads off,
screaming, the wheelers.
Come here!
It can be a character,
like one person in that film brings the horror.
The judge in "Roger Rabbit", right?
When I killed your brother,
I talked just like this!
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom",
looking as a human hand plunged into the chest
of a sacrificial victim, and the beating heart
was ripped out.
This horrifying ritual really held
all the elements of horror.
A movie that scared the crap out of me
when I was little was "The Wiz".
My favorite movie of all time was "Wizard of Oz",
which is also pretty scary.
You know, you get to those winged monkeys,
and it's like, terror.
Help, help!
Help!
"The Dark Crystal", "The Black Cauldron",
like animation, horror.
The field.
It's covered with blood.
These movies have elements of horror,
and that's what we grew up on.
The psyche can do crazy things to you, as well.
Your thoughts can turn dark on you,
and that's also scary, and a person that you know
can change on you, and that's scary.
Aging is scary.
Dreams are scary.
The dark is scary.
There's dark every day.
It's gonna get dark every day.
It's gonna get scary.
Wait!
Ow!
Get away!
Horror is everywhere.
It's everywhere.
"Things" a horrifying sensation
that'll rip apart your soul.
A lot of people know that Canadian horror movies
are Canadian just because they're in English,
so they get lumped in with American ones,
but don't be fooled.
Just because Canadians have a reputation
for being polite doesn't mean our horror movies are.
Canada actually made a lot of slasher movies
in the 80s, which is appropriate,
because we helped start the genre
with the original "Black Christmas" back in the 70s.
Why should America have all the fun?
In addition to all those great slasher movies,
Canada was also responsible for making this movie
called "Things", which has been called
one of the worst movies ever made.
Oh no!
What did I do?
These two idiots sit around and drink beer
for a little bit, and then all of a sudden,
these weird ant thingies invade their home.
Oh my god!
Susan!
It's not a horror comedy,
but I'd be hard pressed to find something funnier,
because it's fucking terrible.
The whole thing has a very home movie quality to it.
Everything looks homemade, like the little ants
looks like they're made out of paper mache,
the blood looks like they mixed food coloring
and corn syrup.
Mm, that's human blood, all right.
"Things" might just be the most Canadian
movie ever made, and I don't just mean
most Canadian horror movie,
I mean the most Canadian movie, period.
Oh thanks, man.
You can practically smell
the half empty Molson bottles,
watching this movie.
Blood is just dripping like maple syrup!
The big selling point for "Things"
is that Ginger Lynn is in it, the famous porn star.
But when you see the movie, she's not doing
anything porn related.
She's like a newscaster for, I don't know,
30 seconds at the beginning of the movie.
They probably took whatever budget they had
and gave her half of it,
so what, two grand maybe.
At the end of the movie, they start killing
these weird ant things with a chainsaw,
and spraying fake blood everywhere.
I really hope the guys who made it
got their damage deposit back on the place
they were staying.
But now that everyone seems
to be talking about it again,
do I dare subject myself to the ridiculosity of "Things"?
I'll be okay!
The situation in Venice is now critical.
A giant toxic cloud has settled over the city,
and is slowly destroying every form of life.
I'm in an infamous movie
that has several different titles.
"Shocking Dark", AKA "Terminator",
or da-da-da-da-da.
The movie originally was called "Shocking Magenta".
How are you gonna translate that?
That doesn't work in any language.
That's not the only name
it's called "Contaminator".
"The Killers of Venice Beach".
It has lots of names, and that has something
to do with distribution.
Venice before the year 2000.
"Shocking Dark" is a movie where the filmmakers
attempt to warn people of the hazards
of industrial pollution.
Fear fighting against the unknown.
Hurry!
They're coming, they're coming!
My character in "Shocking Dark"
is Lieutenant Koster,
and I'm telling all these guys what to do.
All right, you bunch of pussies!
I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!
And I'm not politically correct about it,
and I don't care, but it's because
they're my guys.
Careful, baby.
That thing just might go off!
They're sending us into the depths of Venice.
My impression is they're gonna find out
it's a creature from another planet.
I can't say that was exactly the plot
when I started the movie.
And they're waiting for you!
Who are they?
What are you talking about?
It's a sandwich that didn't even have
a whole loaf of bread.
So it starts out pumpernickel,
and then it ends up a brioche,
and then it's a slice of pizza.
Can't you smell that stink of shit?
The creatures in "Shocking Dark".
I have been told they remind people
of the creature from "Alien",
but when I was in the movie,
and as the movie was told to me,
by the director, Bruno Mattei,
he intended it to be more
of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon".
We're chemically dumping in the waters around Venice,
so originally the concept was this thing,
maybe it got radiated,
because that's what they were kind of thinking.
Something wraps around my neck.
Go back and watch carefully.
So this hand is going oh, oh,
and this hand from below is wrapping around
my own neck, and I'm going like that.
So every time somebody says to me
it's a ripoff of "Alien" and "Terminator",
I go not if you're holding the rubber mask
with your own hand
"Shocking Dark" is such a shameless ripoff
of so many other things that it was legally not
able to be released in the States for many years.
This is the end of the line.
You look at movies by guys
like Bruno Mattei, and you think it was
probably a pretty good party onset.
End of the line.
Maybe as long as the filmmakers are having
a great time, you hope it bleeds through
to the screen.
Bruno Mattei was by no means kidding himself
of where he was in the film industry.
And he's in on the joke.
I worked on two movies with him,
and he was always up against a budget,
and he never took it badly,
he was never in a bad mood,
and he was a lot of fun.
I miss him.
I miss him a great deal.
A new film by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
"Santa Sangre".
"Santa Sangre" is a Felini-esque kind of nightmare
from the perverted mind of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
It's just saturated with blood,
circus carnage, crazy cults, skin, surrealism,
and enough symbolism to send you to a shrink.
Now you're a man.
It is an absolute masterpiece.
Jodorowsky, he was approached by Dario Argento's brother,
Claudio, to make a movie.
It was essentially, I need you to make
a Dario Argento movie, but by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Well, he ended up taking it way further
into the direction of Jodorowsky,
and making something entirely unique.
Sure, it's painted in a horror movie,
but it's a coming of age story
about a boy growing up in a circus freak setting,
that really shows the streets of Mexico City
in a different light.
There's something so special about all these characters,
being in makeup, being in their costumes,
and that's how they are every day of their lives,
and actually also something very sad
about that, too.
That that is the identity of these characters.
That is the way that people see them as,
as clowns, as performers, as freaks.
It just shows such a truth,
not just in Mexico, but it shows a truth
of how easy we are judgmental.
There's so many scenes in that film
I did not expect to continue to escalate,
to go oh my god!
Oh my god!
Ugh!
The dad, the owner of this circus,
just has an affair, spoiler alert,
cuts this woman's arms off,
and it's like what the!
It's insane!
The wonderful character of Conchita,
and you just see how her arms
get completely cut off,
blood pouring out of her arms,
and how she's just looking at the sky, at us.
The one-two punch of attacking them
during sex and throwing acid on them,
and then getting both of her arms chopped off,
with beautiful Simon Boswell music
playing in the background.
That's hard to equal in cinema,
let alone in this movie.
And from that point on,
to see our main character
trying to find acceptance, love, and freedom
of his own demons, how he now is trapped
to be his own mother's arms,
speaks to such a sadness,
and such a truth of manipulation.
It just completely breaks my heart,
and grosses me out
"Santa Sangre" was not afraid to talk
about the problems of machismo,
the class system, and just the difference in cultures
with the Americanos and the Mexicans,
and all from the point of view
of an innocent child.
That corruption, that manipulation,
how sex and violence can really, really change
a child's life, that movie is true horror.
For "Fright Night", I had no sense
of what is was going to become.
I thought it was a fun movie,
it was creative, and it was gonna be
a little bitty horror movie for that summer.
Really special experience, and the longer I'm away from it,
the more I realize that.
"Fright Night 2".
♪ Take me baby
"Fright Night 2", Tommy Lee Wallace
did a terrific job.
I wasn't available.
Instead I did "Fatal Beauty" with Whoopi Goldberg.
I should have done "Fright Night 2".
Johnny.
Peter.
It's happening again.
"Fright Night 2" was really more about the modern
80s age, when people were really starting
to experiment and to be curious about cultures and people.
I give you the new host of Fright Night, Regine!
From Regine's point of view,
my only brother, the love of my life, was murdered.
And I am 2000 years old.
Uh, come in.
Thanks.
I find Charlie Brewster,
and I play with him like a cat playing with a mouse.
Julie as Regine was breaking the glass ceiling in a way.
This is not a dream.
"Fright Night Part 2" is a lot about inverting
the sexual and gender stereotypes
that had traditionally been part of the vampire genre.
She was taking ownership of lust and power
and hunger and all of that stuff,
and she feminized it.
I think Regine is empowering for women in general,
and for Latinas.
There's an eroticism that is beyond gender identification.
Regine Dandridge, it was very open to love and sensuality.
She's not just a stark, startling character.
She's cushy, and warm, and you know.
Is it hot in here?
You'll have to get closer than that.
Peter Vincent was Roddy McDowall's love letter
to the vampire hunters of the past.
Peter Cushing, Vincent Price.
Roddy was a photographer,
so he was always taking pictures.
He was into documenting stuff.
Encyclopedia of movie history.
He knew where the bodies were buried.
I kill vampires.
It was a different movie,
it was like an army of ghouls and vampires
and creatures that we were up against this time.
Russel Clark played Belle,
a wraith-like vampire on roller skates.
Those three characters, Jonathan Gries,
Brian Thompson, and Russel,
they're all so distinctive and unique
in the characters that they came up with.
I have an entourage of fabulous men.
Russel Clarke, he had choreographed Michael Jackson,
and Brian Thompson came up with the naming
all of these bugs with their Latin names.
There's just a scholarliness to this foursome.
Are you thirsty, Charlie?
Once I started transitioning into a vampire,
I enjoyed getting to fang up
and get pasty, and all that stuff.
I had my Christmas cards that year
were me in a vampire, sort of holiday vampire theme.
"Fright Night 2" resonates with people,
there's something for everyone in it.
And everyone's kind of represented, especially today.
You notice if someone's not represented now.
It shocked people that somebody
would break the rules as much as we did,
even though it made more money at the box office
than anything else that opened that weekend,
I think the whole distribution went into a tailspin,
and then you could hardly find it on VHS,
but people have unearthed it,
literally dug it up from the grave,
so I'm very grateful to the people
who've done that, because Regine was really fun.
Welcome to Fright Night.
I have such a specific memory
of begging my dad to take me to see "Relentless"
when I was too young to see it.
I was probably 12.
Judd Nelson is Buck Taylor.
And Buck Taylor is "Relentless".
This was a Hollywood maniac slasher,
so it was a well-produced film.
Cops chasing a serial killer in Los Angeles.
Well, who the fuck killed him?
Well how the fuck do I know?
It's my first day.
Judd Nelson is the product
of an abusive relationship with his father,
who was a police officer, who he both feared and idolized,
when he couldn't live up to his father's ideal
to also become a police officer,
he decides he's going to go out and kill people
with his father's name.
Leo Rossi and Robert Loggia,
they are investigating it.
Read this.
No clues, no nothing.
What is it?
The asshole left it.
John had seen "Maniac", and really liked it,
and came aboard wanting to play the role.
For me stylistically,
it was my Dario Argento film in daylight.
What really messed me up too with that film
is there's a pretty brutal
piano wire strangulation sequence.
It was intense for me to watch as a kid.
Isn't that better?
I like the scene where Judd is running
on the rooftop.
We did a little trick there.
We used a Louma crane,
and when he's hidden, the stunt guy
comes out the other end,
and we tried to make it as seamless as possible.
There was a moment that was cut from the script
that I really wish I had shot.
The scene that I had stolen from a Japanese movie
called "Vengeance is Mine".
Coming down the street was a patrol car,
and Judd looks down at his hands,
and there's blood on his hands,
so he goes in the bushes, and pees on his hands
to wash the blood off of them.
And I thought, wow.
That would really say a lot about a character.
It might have been a bit too much
for mainstream audience.
It's all right.
I had a great time with Judd Nelson.
Always joking around.
All the actors, all sweethearts.
It was a wonderful experience on that film.
Yo brothers, what's up?
I had no interference.
Everything that's in "Relentless" is mine,
for better or worse, it was the way
I made the film, and I'm quite proud of it.
I think it came out okay.
Please.
Don't hurt my son.
But it feels dated to me.
First is "Maniac Cop", which was made before that
doesn't feel dated to me.
Go figure.
Oh my god!
William Hickey as
"The Puppet Master".
One of my favorite franchises is "The Puppet Master".
And the first one was just so perfect to me.
And now they have 80 of them.
Every single one, I want.
It had Blade, Tunneler, Jester,
with his weird face stuff, and Leech Girl,
and lots, and lots, and lots of creepy ass puppets.
I have all those puppets as action figures.
They're some of my favorite collectibles to this day.
I just wanted to see the puppets fucking kill people.
You pair that with just this weird fucking story
about an undead dude who just wanted to get his,
gets his rivals together to kill them off one by one.
And using the old techniques of the old Puppet Master,
I brought myself back to life.
Why?
I want to live forever.
That is a piece of art that came to life as a movie.
Yeah, I'm a stop motion freak.
Dave Allen helped shape shift those characters
into what they are now, and gave them some
historical context, because it takes place in the 40s.
And next thing you know, we morph into a script,
and David Schmoeller did a great job with the script.
Charlie Band, he would give me a lot of creative freedom.
It's real easy to write these things.
You hope that this is gonna work.
It goes from effect to effect.
I mean, some of them work great,
and some of them are really stretches, you know.
You fucker!
I thought I could create magic,
and these really great things would happen.
These little dolls, they would find
all these sadistic ways to murder human beings.
It was diabolical.
Leech Woman, Lord she looks so cute
and pretty but then
and this nasty ass leech,
and it's just, no, why?
We actually used leeches.
The puppet with the tiniest little head,
and massive baby hands, just beating the crap out of people.
You're taking inanimate objects
and turning them into real things.
We would talk about it, and he would go off
and execute whatever I needed to have
these puppets doing.
There would always be some surprise
that was better than what we had talked about.
Low budget filmmaking is an art in itself.
It's such a crapshoot.
What's happening, Alice?
You're making movies for no money,
and then you're expecting a studio to pick it up.
The fact that Paramount released it
gave it a lot of cache.
Gave it a lot of credibility.
What the hell are you looking at?
The original idea of these characters
that all start off a little differently,
helped my business, my life, and my creativity.
We're about to shoot our 13th Puppet Master
32 years later.
"The Black Cat".
The last word in terror.
"The Black Cat", Luigi Cozzi,
or Lewis Coates, as he's known in America.
Black Cat, 1A, take one.
My lovely Luigi, who directed
and kind of created "Stellar Star Star Crash".
It was his baby.
He wanted to do this one for quite some time.
Well, we've already got the storyline blocked out,
but before we get down to writing the screenplay,
we'd like some pointers about reincarnation.
I read the script, and I thought yeah, it's interesting.
It's different.
Don't use that name.
Change it at once.
What name, Levana?
Yes.
Don't take the risk of summoning her.
Dario Argento had a hand in it.
Dario Argento directed it, "Suspiria",
and I must admit, it was very, very good.
Luigi worked very closely with Dario.
It was shot in Italy.
Not a lot of plot, but beautiful to look at.
Great performances from the actors.
They were all European.
I think I was the only English person in it.
We had a wonderful prince called Urbano Barberini
who was in it, and then you had Florence Guerin,
who was wonderful in the film.
She was fantastic.
You can never leave!
You'll never be Levana the witch!
Never, never!
She was an actress, I was an actress.
Cut.
Florence was the nice one.
I was just a bitch, I would say, really, basically.
Sorry.
So I have your permission to, uh,
put it to him?
But it was good character for me.
I liked it.
Quite dark, and she was all out for herself.
Everything was about her, really.
She was very jealous of Florence and the husband.
Why in god's name did you do it?
The same reason I took Mark away from you, Anne.
For Levana.
My character was capable of anything, really.
I liked that concept.
What is your command?
I ordered you to stop Anne.
It rolled along nicely.
Maybe not the best dialogue.
And you know what you must do with it.
The baby's in the other room.
Some of the scenes were quite heavy
with the special effects.
Very bloody.
It is a bit weird, isn't it?
They're quite gruesome effects.
Looking back on it, they were really, really good.
The Spanish title for "Grave Robbers"
is "Ladrones De Tumbas".
There's a lot of satanic rituals,
and a lot of killings.
A guy is persecuted by the Inquisition,
and he's tortured, and murdered,
and he promises to return for vengeance.
Our main characters, they go to the cemeteries,
dig up the graves, extract the bodies,
look for gold and valuable things,
and they sell them in the black market.
They go through a tunnel into the dungeons
of this old hacienda.
And strange things start happening.
By the time we shot "Grave Robbers",
I was a big expert in prosthetics
and special effects, cinematography.
I had learned a lot.
We didn't shoot it in English.
We shot it in Spanish.
We shot that film in Valle de Bravo.
It's about an hour and a half from Mexico City.
It's in the mountains.
There's woods all over.
One girl is kidnapped.
And the policemen go inside the dungeons,
and he finds his daughter tied up to the floor.
The demon walks in
and they engage in a fight.
When our hero comes in and saves the policeman
and saves the girl.
That's a memorable scene.
It had known actors for the domestic market.
It was aimed for the right target,
and it was a very big success in Mexico,
and then a big success when the video clubs
started renting it out.
No!
I wasn't aware how this film became
part of the cult 1980s horror films,
because my career has gone on.
I'm mostly known in Mexico for being
a reality show producer.
I'm proud of them because they were done
with no money, with no time,
with no technical resources.
I was in the process of learning
how to become a filmmaker.
We were just kids having fun.
I have no idea why people romanticize films
simply because they were made in the 80s.
Hi.
But because they were made in the 80s,
they develop a cult reputation.
I'm really thrilled that audiences now
really appreciate this stuff,
that back in the 80s, people were just like,
nah, you know, whatever.
Now there's a whole new renaissance,
if you will, and people are really getting into them,
and really loving them, and giving them
the kudos that they deserve.
They have a life today that's not the same
as their life in the 80s,
but let's get real about, you know
Orson Welles didn't make any of these films.
We need to reframe the way that we look
at good and bad movies.
Bad movies can be enjoyable.
You can find a different way to look at it.
I mean, no one's setting out to make a bad movie.
It doesn't really matter how great
or not great these movies were,
it's important to remember
how the cast, the crew, the producers,
the director, put all their love and energy
and money into these various films,
and really made them into something unique
that there was an audience for.
I think it's important for us to keep
these films in conversation.
Especially the ones that people think
maybe are not so great, because there's the obvious ones,
like "The Shining", "The Thing".
Those extend beyond horror audiences.
But then there's kind of like,
we have these in danger of being forgotten
or going extinct gems.
As we move from this media format
to this media format,
there's things that kind of get pushed to the wayside,
and we're leaving them behind.
Hide the body, and come back,
and clean up the blood.
People should champion anything that they enjoy,
because that's how you keep things alive.
Streaming is great.
I love that it makes things easily accessible
to the masses, but also it doesn't compare
to browsing and picking something up
and feeling it, smelling it,
holding it in your hands
is a special kind of experience.
Home video and cable meant that movies
didn't go away, and that meant that movies
found their audience.
And then word of mouth kicks in.
And to no small extent, creates horror fandom,
which has become this tidal wave
over the 30, 40 years since that technology arrived.
Of course it's not ideal to see a movie on tape
as opposed to seeing it on the big screen,
but as we see that the way that the world
has currently gone, many more people see movies
on their devices than they ever see
on a theater screen, and the trade off
is it isn't gonna be seen
by very many people in the theater.
It's mostly gonna be seen at home.
Today, there's a kind of casualness to it.
I'm still a child of the cinema.
I'm not crazy about people being introduced
to horror through digital.
The upside is that the screens are better,
they're bigger, the sound is better.
People are very serious about the way
they present their films,
and so it's a theater-like experience,
but it's not a theater experience,
because a theater experience is with a large
audience of people, who make the difference
between what you're watching, and what you're experiencing.
An experienced horror film with a big audience
that's enjoying it is a completely different
and more fun experience than watching it
at home with two friends.
That's just night and day.
Part of the problem is our technology
is so magnificent now.
People think anything old is clunky.
This desire just to see the new,
the new, the new, the next, the next, the next,
sometimes prevents us from taking some time
out of our very busy lives
and realizing that there's some great stuff
from the past.
Maybe the movie itself isn't necessarily great,
but it's the experience of watching it
that makes it great, and then 20 years later,
you're telling people, no you have to watch "Motel Hell".
This is one of the greatest movies ever made.
They hold it near and dear to their heart
because they've seen it with their father who's passed,
or cousin made them watch it to scare them,
or whatever, however they saw it.
It holds good memories for people.
Horror is personal.
We can all agree on a good horror film.
It's like, ah "Psycho".
But nobody's defending "Psycho" to the death.
I think we have it all wrong when we talk about horror.
We're like, this is good, or this is bad.
No.
Something is entertaining or it's not entertaining,
and by putting everything on a good and bad dichotomy,
we ruin our experience of being able
to talk about a movie, like "Sleepaway Camp II",
that's just like a fucking good time.
"Sleepaway Camp II" doesn't have to be high art,
to be a social satire.
Howdy partner!
I actually think that you can find
more in our culture and history
and even just social context
in films that are labeled trash.
There's more there to actually pick from,
and shine a light on who we were as people.
Like, a popcorn film?
That's loaded with identity, and society, and culture.
I'm way more interested in the history I'm gonna get
from a movie that people cast aside
than the history I'm gonna get
and what I learn in a film school class.
Let's not get insanely academic about these films.
The people who watch these movies in the 80s
weren't watching them from an ironic point of view.
They were watching them because they enjoyed the mayhem.
The people who watch those same movies today
are watching them from an academic standpoint,
as though they're analyzing every little detail
of the film.
These films were made by guys
who wanted to make a fast buck.
These films were made for money.
They were not concerned with trying to impress anybody.
They were concerned with the largest audience possible.
They were filmmakers, but they were also businessmen.
These aren't big extravagant productions.
You crazy bastard.
Horror lets you be creative.
You can go outside the box.
You can go outside the scope.
Horror, it can look cheesy and bad,
and it's fun.
We love to be scared,
and we love to think we're in peril.
And we love to be at odds with each other.
Movies are so powerful, because it reminds us
of a simpler, more innocent time.
And that's where we all want to be.
God knows in this day and age.
That's where we all want to be.
So, before watching "In Search of Darkness",
I was definitely one of those guys
who was like, yeah man, I know 80s horror.
Freddie and Jason!
Sweet!
And then I watched "In Search of Darkness",
and I realized, you naive bastard,
you know nothing about 80s horror.
So now I actually know things,
and like, how had I lived my life
and missed "Sleepaway Camp"?
That is a fantastic movie.
So thank you for awakening me.
80s horror is very important to me
as I grew up in the early 80s,
and horror was embedded in our culture.
It was in our toys, in our cartoons.
It was everywhere.
We used to draw monsters in art class,
like the Monster Squad,
and that was acceptable back then.
You wouldn't get locked up for stuff like that.
I miss going into a video store
and grabbing a random VHS
and saying hey, this box art, it looks good.
Is it a curse, or is it great?
You never know.
And you watch it with your friends
in the middle of the night, enjoying it,
and it brings you back to a simpler time.
80s horror is so important to me
because it's an escape from reality.
Takes me back to a simpler time.
Gives me that nostalgia.
And these documentaries,
they help nail the fact home
that horror can be a cathartic way
to deal with fear and all the BS this world
has to throw at us.
80s horror, and all horror in general,
and I love that.
These documentaries are amazing for that.
Favorite movie of all time?
"Silver Bullet", 1985.
It is incredible.
Rock on.
Hey.
I just wanted to say thank you so, so much
to everybody involved with "In Search of Darkness".
It's been absolutely fantastic.
I've really, really enjoyed.
It's flooded back memories of going down
the video shop, the video store,
in the 80s, looking at the best horror films
that were released.
Absolutely fantastic.
And it's also introduced me
to some of the classics that I missed,
down the video shop, going back all those years.
80s horror happened to coincide
with the VHS era, and in my opinion,
the 80s horror was the prime attraction
of the VHS.
I mean, look at that.
How could you walk by that and not want to rent it?
Oh, hi.
I'm AJ Danna.
I played Tapehead at "Slashback Video".
The "In Search of Darkness" trilogy
has meant so much to dust off these old
classic horror tapes, and make sure each and every
actor and filmmaker involved in these movie making gems
did not pour their blood, sweat, and tears
into movies in vain.
So anyways, thanks.
I decided to back the "In Search of Darkness" series
for the tireless people behind Creator BC,
because you learn something interesting and significant
about the films from the people who worked on the films
that you can't find anywhere else.
To me, horror movies were a safe haven
growing up in the 80s.
I spent so many hours in the video store
browsing for titles to watch.
When "In Search of Darkness: Part One" ended,
the covers shown up with a key,
and a dark room, the TV, the characters.
It was like I was that same boy.
This documentary has been a door to go back
and complete that journey.
80s horror movies are important to me
because I was raised the right way,
and grew up watching them
ever since I was a wee little one,
despite not growing up in that generation.
But it was cool people from that generation
who showed me those movies, and gave us
something to bond over.
But my favorite horror movie has to be
John Carpenter's "The Thing".
The most amazing practical effects
to the gore, and of course starring
the absolute hunks Kurt Russel and Keith David,
what is there not to love?
So 80s horror rules,
and thanks to "In Search of Darkness"
for bringing it all back.
You know, growing up as a kid with not many friends,
actually I had none until I was 10.
Single father, worked nights, and slept all day.
Horror movies were my go-to,
and the monsters were my friends,
and it was just awesome.
With the "In Search of Darkness" trilogy,
I got to relive that past as a child,
and it just, it's perfect.
80s horror was the best.
It was imagination.
It was entertainment.
It was fun, it was gory, it was crazy,
it was the best.
80 horror rules!
I'm Matt Weinhold, and I love 80s horror
because it's scary, sexy, innovative,
indecent, unapologetic, and fun!
It's the punk rock of horror!
Having been a teenager in the 1980s,
I was able to experience most of these films
in a theatrical setting.
The 80s gave us the best of John Landis,
and John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg,
and we got to see the birth of franchises
of "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street",
and "Poltergeist", "Evil Dead",
and what "In Search of Darkness" has allowed me to do
is revisit those memories, and love these films
all over again.
In the 1980s, we gazed into the abyss,
and we smiled,
because it was filled with visceral practical effects,
intrepid heroes, garish demons,
and synth-laden nightmare schemes.
Thanks to "In Search of Darkness",
the abyss can finally gaze back at us, and smile.
My love of 80s horror films
started back when I was 11 years old.
I stayed up one night and watched "A Nightmare
"on Elm Street" with my mum.
Halfway through the film, I got so scared
that I went up to bed, and five minutes later,
I was back downstairs watching the rest
of the film with her.
That's where it started, and it's never stopped since.
Watching "In Search of Darkness" documentaries
takes me back to the best part of my childhood,
and also knowing that I'm watching these documentaries
with a community of people
that also share my love of 80s horror,
it is the best feeling.
The immense popularity of these movies
showed so many of us that we were part
of a global community, and so in a way,
the darkness became a place of comfort,
because we knew we weren't alone.
In a sense, it's more like it's our story,
and what these movies mean to us,
and I can't thank these documentaries enough for that.
Everything about it is so beautiful.
It's one of the best times of horror
and it makes me feel better about me and myself.
There's something for everyone in there,
whether you like slashers, comedies,
my personal favorite horror movie from the 1980s
is "Killer Klowns from Outer Space".
I saw that movie the first time
when I was maybe 10 years old,
and that's one of the movies that made me
fall in love with horror, and the reason I'm as big
of a horror fan as I am today.
When I wanted to get into horror,
and I was too scared to watch it by myself,
my friends would sit with me in my dark basement,
and we would watch 80s horror movies together.
And we started with the classics,
and slowly moved our way out to totally obscure titles,
but for me, those were really special times in my life.
And it really made horror, especially 80s horror,
something that brought people together in my life.
80s horror movies really had a style of their own
that make this particular decade of work
always so unique to look back on.
It was also a decade where it felt like special effects
were perfected in such a way, you could almost smell them
through your screen, something like "The Thing",
and speaking of "The Thing", you could have
hard horror subject like that,
but you could have also sillier stuff like "Vamp",
which makes this particular decade always so fun
to go back and discover new gems,
and I really am glad that these documentaries exist
to highlight all of that.
Best thing about 80s horror were the comedy movies,
like "The Burbs", and "Gremlins 2",
"House", "House 2", the "Ghostbusters",
all those movies made it so much easier
as a kid to then turn around and be able to watch
movies with this scary bastard in it,
and scare the shit out of you when you're a little kid.
John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper,
Tom Holland, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi,
Stewart Gordon, Don Coscarelli.
I just need an indestructible boogeyman
carving up annoying teenagers.
I don't need to know how or why.
It just has to show up every few years,
and do it again in creative ways.
Give me a monster with sharp teeth,
and gooey tentacles.
What I don't want is found footage,
and shaky cam and possessed dolls,
and cheesy ghosts, and spare me all the CGI blood.
I want Tom Savini, Screaming Mad George.
I want a Kurtzman Nicotero hamburger.
Hey guys.
My name is Jason.
And no surprise, my favorite horror franchise
of all time is "Friday the 13th".
I did a book report on Part 3 in grade six.
Yes, I was in grade six watching these movies,
and I absolutely loved them.
I think the 80s is absolutely the greatest decade
of horror films, and I grew up in the 90s.
There were so many great horror films made back then.
I can't even decide which one's my favorite.
I also think "In Search of Darkness" is the greatest
documentary ever made.
It introduced me to several horror films
I had never heard of, including "Sleepaway Camp",
"Fade to Black", "Motel Hell",
"American Werewolf in London",
"Society", "Scanners", "The Changeling",
"The Ghost Story", and so many more.
I don't think there will ever be anything
like 80s horror ever again
Hello, everyone.
What I've enjoyed most about the "In Search of Darkness"
documentary series would have to be
the behind the scenes information about the movies
I know and love, but also, and probably more importantly,
the vast amount of hidden gems
it has introduced me to.
It is mind-blowing how many entertaining horror movies
there are from that decade.
So thank you.
One of my favorite 1980s horror movies
would have to be "Night of the Demons".
Reason being, I was pretty young
when the movie first came out.
My older sister introduced me to the film
because she wanted to scare me.
It scared me pretty good.
I remember having a hard time going to sleep that night,
scared that the monster was gonna get me.
So I have a lot of nostalgic feelings about the movie.
That's why I like it so much.
My first and absolute favorite 80s horror movie
is "American Werewolf in London"
by John Landis.
Watching that movie sent me down a rabbit hole
of 80s horror movies that I'd never seen before,
and through that movie, I got introduced
to "In Search of Darkness",
and ever since, things have never been the same,
and it's been an amazing journey.
I thank you for it.
80s horror is incredibly important to me.
Horror slashed its way into my life
when I was a kid.
Myself and my buddies would stay up all night
watching horror movies, from horror icons
like Freddie, to "Killer Klowns from Outer Space".
The greatest times of my life
is due to the horror genre.
80s horror strapped me into my adult life
where I now collect 80s horror memorabilia,
plus I'm always on the hunt for 80s horror
that I'm yet to discover.
I have an insatiable thirst for blood in film.
Tom Savini's work in the genre
has my jaw dropped to the floor.
The realism of his work is something
that's gonna be admired long after I'm gone.
For me, he sets the bar for practical effects within horror.
I love "In Search of Darkness", as it's
a time capsule of horror, for us, the fans.
"In Search of Darkness" is also a love letter
to everyone that holds a special place
in their heart for horror.
I love how they use all practical effects,
for these, all the blood and guts,
all the rubber monsters that they used,
all the costume work is all hand made,
and all practically done.
It makes it look great.
The 80s was an era of DIY.
If you didn't have a passion for your craft,
or you didn't want your story to be told,
it simply wouldn't make it out there.
This is what showed in the films growing up,
which was hard.
It's difficult to articulate this feeling.
However, every fan or person contributing
to this series, will have moments which resonated
and impacted into their adult life.
What I love most about the 80s,
especially 80s horror movies,
is just how ridiculous the concepts are,
and just how well they're executed.
"In Search of Darkness" meant a lot to me
because it introduced me to a whole field,
a whole group of people,
that are so dedicated, and so motivated,
on trying to find a lot of 80s horror films
that not a lot of younger horror film fans even heard of.
Sometimes y'all have heard of "Halloween"
or "Friday the 13th", or "Nightmare on Elm Street",
but it's these small classic films
that really hold deep to my heart,
knowing that a lot of people have seen it
really brings joy to me.
That's why it meant a lot to me.
Hey, I'm Twisted Todd.
I'm a big fan of 80s horror films,
mainly because as a kid growing up in the 80s,
didn't get to watch a lot of horror movies,
but my parents rented a lot of them,
and I got to hear them from my bedroom,
which fed my curiosity,
so about the time I was in middle school
in the late 80s, finally got to watch horror films,
fell in love with the slasher genre,
love films like "Creepshow",
and then later on in my college days,
I really fell in love with the cinematic genius
of directors like John Carpenter,
and of course Sam Raimi,
because I'm a huge "Evil Dead" fan.
I grew up mesmerized by horror movies,
primarily throughout the 80s.
They were such an important part
of many of my formative years,
and contribute to so many of my young memories.
I've since come to embrace and enjoy
all cinema, having learned so much more
about all genres over the years,
but you never forget your first love.
Horror films of the 80s
were so imaginative, and so ambitious,
but they pull it off, and there's a real
charm to them, a levity that we didn't have
in the 70s, when everything was very real,
and very gritty, and then we lost it
somewhere in the 90s,
and then things got very cynical.
But there's a fun factor to the 80s,
and it's no surprise that it takes a project
three, four plus hour documentaries
to really do that decade justice.
Growing up in the 80s, horror movies
were a big part of my life.
Thanks to a video rentals shop,
I was able to watch as many as I want
when I wanted without issue on my edge,
that helped me get through the trauma of school,
and everything that came with it,
and this is why I'm passionate about them,
and in particular, "Nightmare on Elm Street"
is one I'm really passionate about.
80s horror movies were a big part of my childhood,
having grown up in the 80s,
I watched them all.
My favorite 80s horror movie of all time
is "A Nightmare on Elm Street".
It was the first horror movie I ever saw,
and it planted the seed for my love of horror.
These "Search for Darkness" documentaries
have been nostalgic, and brought back
all those happy memories of visiting video stores.
I was born in 1980,
so being a child of the 80s,
some of my best memories
were hanging out with my mom
on a Friday or Saturday night,
going down to the local video store,
getting some 80s horror on VHS tape,
and just making those memories
and being scared, laughing,
and getting all cringed up.
And the "In Search of Darkness" series
has brought those memories back to me,
and helped me discover all the horror films
I never knew existed!
Thank you for that.
Hi there.
I love watching horror movie documentaries
and anything regarding horror,
but one series I really love
is the "In Search of Darkness" series.
I love how all these people just show
how much they love and care for these movies,
especially for the movies I've never even heard before,
and I love this series, because it shows me
all different kinds of horror
that I haven't even heard before,
or even seen, or anything like that.
So I'm sad that it's ending,
but hey, gotta end sometimes, right?
I think most horror fans would agree
that the absolute best decade for horror
was the 1980s.
We got the best of the best,
the worst of the worst,
the best of the worst,
and everything in between.
I can't even pick a favorite,
because there's far too many to choose from,
but having something like the "In Search of Darkness"
trilogy has been an absolute dream come true.
Getting to sit there for hours and hours on end,
and watch my favorite filmmakers
talk about my favorite films has been great,
but it's also been great to be able to discover
new movies that I may not have even heard of before.
"Evil Dead II", "Re-Animator",
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2",
all of these great horror films,
with comedic timing, comedy inserted into it,
really affect me, shape me,
to such a degree that today I write about horror
and horror comedy for Pace Magazine and Vulture.
80s horror for me signifies complete nostalgia.
I clearly remember being a young boy
and seeing these wonderful and iconic 80s posters,
and being simultaneously scared and intrigued.
But now as an academic that writes about horror,
documentaries like "In Search of Darkness"
are highly important as they raise the profile
of horrors in that form.
These films are not only fun and super cool,
but they are significant cultural products,
well-deserving of academic analysis and study.
The 80s was a time when the horror genre exploded.
Big name horror icons like Jason, Freddie,
Chuckie, Pinhead, all got their start in the 80s.
And being a late 90s kid, these were names
that I grew up knowing to fear.
My girlfriend and I searched out
a lot of these films, and it was something
that we could always bond over.
And I think that "In Search of Darkness"
did something really great,
cataloging and celebrating all of these films.
They have inspired me to go to college
and learn how to write horror films.
I'm a future filmmaker
because of all the movies I've watched.
And I'm thankful that I was able
to be a part of this community.
Watching horror movies as a kid in the 80s
inspired me to get into the film industry,
especially to make horror movies of my own,
and so "In Search of Darkness" continues
to be that inspiration,
and I hope it does the same
for, you know, the next wave of horror creators,
for generations to come.
80s horror means a lot to me,
takes me back to when I was a kid
hanging out with my brothers and my friends,
staying up late, watching movies I know I should not
have been watching at the time,
and falling in love with stories and characters
created by Wes Craven, John Carpenter,
George Romero, and Charles Band.
I will always be in their debt
for providing me with hours of entertainment,
and with "In Search of Darkness",
it has provided me with even more hours
of 80s horror entertainment
that I will continue to watch to this day.
Long live 80s horror and "In Search of Darkness".
As an 80s kid, one of my favorite memories
are from video stores Friday night selecting movies.
The horror section always had the best films,
and the most amazing cover art.
The 80s horror basically has it all,
a great story, a good cast,
amazing special effects, and a cool soundtrack.
These documentaries have been life-changing for me.
They were films that I had forgotten about,
films that I had never seen,
and a love for a distinct period
of my early life that I oftentimes feel disconnected from,
and I'm so thankful to have found these projects,
and been able to back all of them.
Thank you.
All the best parts of nostalgia
in a pool of blood.
Love it.
Hey, this is Jacob.
And Angelica.
We're both fans of 80s horror movies.
That's why we own all three volumes
of "In Search of Darkness".
It's a dictionary, basically, of all the greatest
horror movies made from the 80s
that we've all grown to love.
"In Search of Darkness", you rock.
The "In Search of Darkness" documentaries
have allowed me to relive, year by year,
a truly golden age in horror cinema.
In the 80s, we had directors like Carpenter,
Romero, and Cronenberg in the peak of their career.
We had a new generation of practical special effects
in horror cinema, and video stores coming out
with a new horror title every week.
The fact that we're still talking about all these films
over 30 years later just shows how durable
the horror genre is.
So please, keep those documentaries coming.
Hi.
First of all, I want to thank you
for including us fans in so many ways,
and for the journey you've been taking us
for the three "In Search of Darkness" documentaries.
I love 80s horror so much because of the style,
the creativity, and the passion for each of the films.
But the most important part for me is
that every single film from this horror decade,
the good and the bad,
are so great because of the fun they make.
David, Robin.
You've created a monster.
A timeless milestone for every horror fan.
And I'm extremely thankful for being featured
in part one of the ultimate horror documentary experience.
It made me feel like I'm 15 again.
So for anyone who's "In Search of Darkness",
stop searching, because we found it.
80s horror is so important to me
because it gave me ideas to draw when I was younger,
and as my drawing ability progressed,
today I'm a tattoo artist,
so I guess you could say 80s horror helped shape my life.
Plus being Canadian, I want to give
a special thanks to David Cronenberg
for all the inspiration he gave me.
"In Search of Darkness", honestly,
greatest documentary I have ever watched.
It brought me straight back to some of the most
special times of my life.
As a kid in the 80s, I was constantly
in and out of hospitals.
Watching horror movies and playing video games
was a release for me.
Basically, I'm the kid on the box art,
and on the posters.
I'm so proud to be part of this incredible journey
through 80s horror that is the "In Search of Darkness"
trilogy, and I just had to immortalize it on my body.
I love it, that we're done.
I love it.
Love it.
Enough is never enough
Of the Stuff.
Mmh.