I am – Hercules!!
“Gaspode” is back, and he brings more news of the just-launched Showtime series “Master of Horror”! The event he describes here apparently transpired over the weekend:
Damn, you folks are fucking harsh! When I sent in my review of ‘Cigarette Burns’ the other day, I made a point of saying I really wasn’t familiar with AICN bigwig Moriarty’s work. Honest guys, I don’t know the man, never met him, not even sure if I’ve ever had an e-mail from Mister M. At the moment, he’s not even on my good side, after I sent in an interview with Corpse Bride co-director Mike Johnson and he never even bothered to post it. So when I claim a tiny speck of objectivity, please don’t waste endless bandwidth talking about how we’re all best buds. Obviously I can’t speak for the other contributors to this site, but I only check in once in a while I’ve got something that I think you guys might be interested in.
Like today for example. Having just come back from another day covering the Chiller Theatre convention here in New Jersey, I was fortunate enough to sit in on a Masters of Horror panel, as well as a special night-time screening of ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ hosted by the master of Lovecraftian creepitude himself, Stuart Gordon. I’ll get to my review of the episode shortly, as well as a few highlights from the post-screening Q&A, but first, a few highlights from the MOH panel.
The Masters of Horror
While several thousand die-hard horror fans eagerly lined up at this year’s Chiller Theatre convention to plunk down twenty bucks for George Romero’s autograph, not to mention that of several dozen minor celebrities, pro wrestlers and c-list reality bottom-feeders like Tonya Harding and Jerri Manthey, the best-kept secret of the weekend was that Anchor Bay was sponsoring a panel to unveil Showtime’s new Masters of Horror series. On hand were directors John Landis (American Werewolf in London), Stuart Gordon (Re-animator, Dagon), Gordon’s frequent writing collaborator Dennis Paoli, and new kid on the block, Lucky McKee (May, The Woods). Despite some audio-visual problems, and the fact that Chiller hadn’t done all that much to publicize the event, for the small group of fans that attended (which included Raiders of the Lost Ark actress Karen Allen and Animal House’s Mark Metcalf), it was a highlight of the weekend.
The panel opened with a clip from each director’s contribution, starting with McKee’s ‘Sick Girl.’ “My episode is about two girls that fall in love,” he explained cryptically, “and a bug that gets in-between them.” Unfortunately, the director proved to be anything but Lucky, as the clip came up in black and white, followed by an on-screen menu as the AV guys struggled to fix it, accompanied by a few sardonic comments from Landis. “This is Lucky’s first experience watching his stuff fucked up!” he joked. “William Friedkin said, ‘The projectionist is the only one with final cut.’
As the DVD projector was getting fixed, the subject moved on to casting, with Landis pointing out that he had cast former ‘Dream On’ star Brian Benben as the lead in his episode, ‘Deer Woman. “And a drop-dead gorgeous Brazilian model named Cynthia Mora who plays the Deer Woman. She’s one-quarter Amazonian Indian and gorgeous!”
Gordon was able to bring in ‘Dagon’s Ezra Godden to star in ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ which is based on another H.P. Lovecraft story. “It was a story we had trouble doing before,” adds Paoli, “because of the subject matter, so it was great that they let us do it. That was the other thing: they us say what we wanted to say and do the stories we wanted to do, so that was pretty amazing.”
Regarding the show’s Vancouver shoot, Landis refuted a rumor that Dario Argento’s episode had gone way over budget. “No, that’s John Carpenter causing trouble! It’s not true. Everyone did fine. All the FX work id done by a CG guy in Toronto, who did really interesting stuff, and KNB (Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger) did the prosthetic FX, and there are lots of them!”
In terms of securing the rights for various stories, Gordon pointed out that Lovecraft was in the public domain. “But I know they got the rights to Joe Lansdale’s story for Don Coscarelli.”
“And Dario’s is based on an EC Comic,” adds Landis.
Although the directors were pretty much able to make their episodes as graphic as they wanted (thank you Showtime!), Landis noted that there is one notable cut in Argento’s episode ‘Jenifer,’ which will eventually be restored for the DVD. “It involves some cannibalism of a phallus that is a little severe. I remember when I saw it, Dario is a very sweet guy and we were all watching it on the AVID going, ‘Jesus Christ!’ So it will be implied on Showtime but it will be explicit on the DVD.”
Landis also explained that McKee joined the roster of MOH directors after Roger Corman had to drop out to health reasons and Romero had a last-minute conflict and were replaced by McKee and John McNaughton. “They gave me three scripts,” recalls McKee, “and I thought I could take that one in a direction that fit my sensibility and just rewrote the thing like crazy for a month and a half before storyboarding it and tried to make it fit my style. The original script was about a guy and a girl that fall in love, and I changed it to two girls because I wanted Angela [Bettis] to be my lead again. Anyway, two girls is much better!”
Each of the panelists went on to point out how different each episode was in terms of style and story. Landis expressed some jealousy for Joe Dante’s episode ‘Homecoming,’ which is outrageously pointed and topical. “It’s about the war in Iraq and our president, and it’s excellent. I think the wackiest one is probably Dario’s. it’s the one that you watch and think, ‘What the fuck am I seeing?’ McKee said Tobe Hooper’s episode ‘Dance of the Dead’ blew his mind. “It’s like, made by a kid that’s not even born yet; it’s so visually breathtaking.”
“Tobe was so excited,” continues Landis, “because they used this new kind of gel for the first time, that does flame FX, so you have a burning person, but it does it on your skin in a way that can’t burn you, so of course Tobe put it on three naked girls being thrown into a dumpster! Now that I think about this show, we’re in deep shit!”
With that, the AV guys finally had the projector up and running, so they ran McKee’s clip again, this time in color, followed by Landis’ and Gordon’s. “When you see on TV,” promised Landis, “it will be in focus.” Another quick round of questioning followed, with McKee talking about how excited (and overwhelmed) he was to be joining this group of directors, Gordon talked about the baby in jeopardy from his episode (which we’ll get to in the review), and Landis confirmed that a second season is already in the works. And asked about any films in their career that they regretted turning down, Landis cited Men in Black, which he originally considered ‘Ghostbusters dressed as the Blues Brothers,’ and Gordon revealed that he had passed on In the Mouth of Madness,’ which had been sent to him by a young writer named Michael DeLuca. “And he ended up running New Line, so big mistake!”
That wrapped up the Masters of Horror panel. Obviously not an awful lot revealed in terms of news and information, but I hope I was able to give you a sense of the easy give and take between the four of them. And now onward to our second event… -------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Dreams in the Witch House’
Written by Dennis Paoli
Directed by Stuart Gordon
(Spoilers follow: don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
There is a scene in the movie Crazy People where Dudley Moore’s stressed-out advertising executive describes an upcoming horror film with a tagline that goes something like ‘This movie will not just scare you; it will fuck you up for life!’ I couldn’t help thinking about that warning during the screening of ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ adapted from a story by H.P. Lovecraft. There are a few images in the episode that are not only extremely disturbing, but they will also linger in your subconscious long after the closing credits roll.
Gordon and Paoli have collaborated on Lovecraft adaptations several times in the past, including Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) and Dagon (2001). Although they’ve often taken liberties with the original source material, they’ve have more success in bringing Lovecraft to the big screen than just about anybody else I can think of.
It seems hard to believe though, that Paoli and Gordon’s best adaptation to date may be ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ which airs as the second episode in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. Although there are some key differences with the original 1933 story published in Weird Tales, the spirit of Lovecraft come through in delightfully chilling fashion.
Walter Gilman (played by Dagon’s Ezra Godden) is a grad student at Miskatonic University, where he’s studying ‘string theory,’ which is based on the theory that different universes intersect at certain points, and by finding the places where the inter-dimensional membranes are thinnest, one can pass back and forth between them. Strapped for cash, Walter moves into a fleabag apartment, which isn’t all that pleasant. There are strange noises in the walls, the chanting derelict downstairs keeps giving him the skunk eye, and Frankie (Chelah Horsdal), the single mom down the hall and her infant son Danny are attacked by an overly-aggressive rat looking for- quite literally- a late night snack of baby food. Even stranger, Walter begins to notice that the configuration of his bedroom walls is looking suspiciously like some of the physical structures in his string theory research.
When the downstairs neighbor hears about the rat, he buttonholes Walter in the hallway and asks if the rat had a human face. Just a crazy drunk, Walter thinks, until he wakes up one night to find the rat sitting on his chest, and sure enough, his face looks like an even nastier version of Tim Spall’s character in the Harry Potter films. ‘Walter, she’s coming for you!’ the rat warns, before scurrying back into the wall.
It turns out that a witch has her eye on Walter, and she’s using the inter-dimensional membrane to cross between her world and the apartment. One night she appears to Walter as Frankie (in a wonderfully gratuitous moment of full-frontal nudity) and when he begins to make love to her, ‘Frankie’ turns back into the witch, clawing bloody furrows into Walter’s back. Thank God it’s only a dream- except for those nasty back wounds.
Waking up from another dream a few days later, Walter finds himself half-dressed in the rare book department of the Miskatonic University library, where he discovers a book called (you guessed it!) The Necronomicon. It reveals that the witch is planning on sacrificing baby Danny, using Walter as the instrument of sacrifice. Needless to say, when Walter tries to get Frankie to pack up her baby and move out, she thinks he’s some sort of lunatic child molester and refuses to leave. Honestly, why doesn’t anybody ever believe crazy student dressed in bloodstained clothing? Are the witch and her nasty-ass rat familiar just figments of Walter’s fevered imagination? Not according to the neighbor downstairs, who crossed paths with the witch decades earlier and has the scars on his back to prove it. Instead of moving out, he spends all of his time trying to keep her at bay with prayer and a wall covered with crucifix.
When Walter finally tears through the wall of his room, he discovers the nexus between dimensions is even close than he thought, and fighting his way through a nightmarish crawlspace filled with tiny moldering skeletons. When he emerges in the witch’s workshop, he discovers that sure enough, she’s already got baby Danny caged and ready for sacrificing. And guess who’s going to do the honors?
I don’t want to spoil the final ten minutes or so of the episode, but they are easily as chilling as just about anything that Gordon has ever put on film. And while the disturbing coda may not fuck you up for life, you probably won’t forget it any time soon.
‘Dreams in the Witch House’ is a thoroughly chilling piece of work. There were a number of times when I thought, ‘There’s no way that Gordon is going to go through with it!’ but thankfully, he never wimps out. There are a couple of sequences that rival the decapitated head molestation scene in Re-Animator or half a dozen scenes in From Beyond, but I’d rather let all of you discover them for yourselves.
Performance-wise, Ezra Godden does a capable job of playing the grad student slowly dragged into a world of madness. Like his character in Dagon, he could probably haul ass out of town just about any time and the story would be over, but he’s trapped like a deer in the headlights of a fast-approaching 18-wheeler. More importantly, he really doesn’t want to leave, because he wants to know all the answers, however horrific they are in the end.
After the lights came up at the Chiller Theatre screening, Gordon grinned at the enthusiastic crowd. ‘Happy Halloween!’ he dead-panned, sitting down with Paoli to answer a few questions. The biggest change they made in Lovecraft’s original story was to change the Frank the neighbor into Frankie the single mom, giving more immediacy to the baby-in-jeopardy storyline. And one of the highlights for both Gordon and Paoli was the opportunity to create the human-faced rat Brown Jenkins, one of their favorite Lovecraft characters. As Gordon recalls, Showtime had been pressuring them to lose the rat, figuring the creature would have to be done using expensive digital technology. Instead, the director decided to use an old-school approach, enlisting a Ukrainian magician/mime friend and putting him in a surprisingly simple KNB makeup. “One of the reasons we always wanted to do the story,” notes Paoli, “was to bring Brown Jenkins into it.”
So that’s our visit with the Masters of Horror. Hope it whets your appetite for some of the upcoming episodes, particularly ‘Dreams in the Witch House,’ which airs this coming weekend. Thanks to the good folks at Anchor Bay for arranging the event, and to Paoli, Landis, Gordon and McKee for being so generous with their time.
Submitted with even more plant-like enthusiasm by
Gaspode
(Who still doesn’t know Moriarty, or Brown Jenkins for that matter)
