Horror Film Director Feature #2: Mick Garris

Known for his Stephen King adaptations, and for creating the impressive Showtime Masters of Horror (2005-2007) series, Mick Garris has been working in television and film for about thirty years, as a writer, producer, and director.

His first horror feature was Critters 2 (1988), and Garris has been working steadily in the genre ever since. I'm not sure how many people would care enough to argue, but I'm going to go ahead and say that Critters 2 is the best of that series. Expanding upon the first in nearly every way, the outerspace-bred Krites move past the farmhouse they first terrorized, and this time take on the entire town, during Easter. The action culminates with an enormous "Critter Ball," made up of hundreds of the little bastards, rolling over townsfolk, immediately shredding their skin, turning them into skeletons (there's a good deal more blood in this movie than you can get away with in a modern PG-13-rated film).

For my money, Critters 2 is as good as it gets, far as horror-comedy B movies go.
Garris followed that one up two years later, with the TV movie Psycho IV: The Beginning. Not exactly a career highlight, but not a bad film. Another two years, and Garris came out with Sleepwalkers, his first Stephen King adaptation (based on a King-written screenplay). A crazy story about incestuous mother and son shapeshifters.

He got a good deal of shit from horror (and Kubrick) fans for his update of The Shining (1997). I'd argue, though, that the faults with the second movie version of King's novel, lie mostly in the screenplay, written by the author, which sticks very close to his book but never quite builds tension the way Kubrick's film did.

There's more agreement on his 1994 TV movie The Stand. I never could get into this one, both before and after reading the novel. It's hard to say exactly what it is about it that I don't like, except to say that in every scene, it feels like I'm watching television. There are moments in Tommy Lee Wallace's TV adaptation of It that make you forget you're watching network television. I'd say the same for Garris's Quicksilver Highway and Desperation (2006), but The Stand always looks and feels like it needs a bigger budget, and some of the acting and dialogue is pretty limp.

But the movie does have its admirers, a pretty big fanbase actually, and is by no means a bad film. I just wouldn't suggest it as a good example of Garris's best work.

One of his more curious adaptations is the under-appreciated TV movie Quicksilver Highway (1997), which features two forty-minute stories, one an adaptation of Clive Barker's short story, "The Body Politic," the other based on King's short story, "Chattery Teeth." Both stories are representative of each writer's best short form material, and Garris's film is worthy of the source material. The first half deals with a man whose hand has suddenly become possessed, and the second with novelty store chattery teeth attacking a menacing hitchhiker.

Masters of Horror was a good series, and in addition to holding a "created by" credit, Garris has directed a couple episodes himself. Check out Valerie On the Stairs. It's available on Netflix Instant View. Garris followed this up with the network television series Fear Itself. From the little I saw of that show, it didn't seem to capture the energy of Masters of Horror (2008-2009), but when you start trying to combine horror and the three-letter companies, ABC, NBC, CBS . . . it probably isn't destined to work out.

I'd like to see him get back to something with a bit of humor in it. Critters 2 and Quicksilver Highway stand as two of his best works, and while Garris's later work has its share of great moments, some dark comedy might be in order.

Maybe something to top that giant Critter Ball?

Garris is currently in production on an adaptation Stephen King's Bag of Bones as a television series. Look for that later this year.

Horror Directors Feature #1: Clive Barker

Clive Barker's accomplishments include more than just film directing--his primary passions are writing and painting, and he hasn't directed a movie in more than fifteen years. But this entry is going to focus on his three considerably worthwhile directing outings: Hellraiser (1987), Nightbreed (1990), and Lord of Illusions (1995).

Hellraiser, based on Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart, broke new ground in the late eighties, introducing the S&M-styled demons, the Cenobites, in particular Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley. Bradley would go on to reprise this role in about a thousand Hellraiser sequels (none past the fourth film in the series are actually worth seeing), and, to horror fans, will always be best known as Pinhead. The first Hellraiser movie is startlingly graphic, but only in spurts. A creepy, "haunted house" kind of atmosphere pervades most of its scenes, set in the new residence of sixteen-year-old Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, who would reprise this role in three more Hellraiser movies). Kirsty's uncle Frank (Sean Chapman, early scenes; Oliver Smith, later, "skinless" scenes) previously took up residence in the house, and while there incurred the wrath of the demonic Cenobites. He returns from the dead with the help of Kirsty's evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins). Julia kills for Frank; each time she offs someone, he's able to add another layer of skin, muscle, and/or bone to his depleted frame.

As is the case with Barker's novella, the Cenobites take a backseat for much of the action, giving way to a story of familial horror, with Kirsty slowly becoming aware that her stepmother is cheating on her father with his recently deceased brother. An influential film, Hellraiser has been a favorite of horror fans since it first arrived nearly twenty-five years ago.

(Dimension Films currently has a ninth sequel--for the first time sans Doug Bradley--and a 3-D remake in the works. Jesus wept.)

Barker's second film, Nightbreed, is sometimes referred to as the Magnificent Ambersons of horror. It shares with Orson Welles' second film the unfortunate circumstance of being chopped up by its studio, with the excised footage subsequently lost (or destroyed). For years, horror fans have signed petitions and hoped for a "director's cut" release of Nightbreed. Things began to look up last year, when a full cut was found on video. Since then, however, the studio has announced no future plans for a full restoration. Too bad, because it's an underrated and exciting film.

One of the elements Morgan Creek/20th Century Fox and the MPAA ratings board took issue with was the fact that the "good guys" in the film are the monsters, a bit of a reversal on tradition. The monsters in the film being the residents of the town-within-a-cemetary, Midian, confined to live in secret, unable to come out during the day. Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) plays a man framed for murder by his doctor, the homicidal Decker (played by director David Cronenberg). He is killed, only to be brought back to life due to the powers of Midian. From here, Decker leads an attack on Midian, and true to the MPAA's complaints, the "good guys" of the cemetary city are the clear protagonists of the film.


Nightbreed was marketed in an odd manner (the cover art pictured to the left hardly invokes the mood of the film), and the studio's trailers attempted to sell it as a slasher film, which it isn't. What did we lose thanks to the meddling movie gods? At least a half hour's worth of footage. Nightbreed is an excllent horror-drama, and hopefully someday we'll get to see Barker's original vision.

The last time Barker sat in the director's chair was for Lord of Illusions, a unique mix of horror and film noir, based on a short story found in his Cabal (1988) collection (title story Cabal being the novella on which Nightbreed was based). This story introduces the character Harry D'Amour, who would go on to appear in the novels The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994), and the upcoming Scarlet Gospels. Played by Scott Bakula, D'Amour, a private investigator specializing in supernatural mysteries, travels from New York to the Mojave Desert, to discover the truth about magician Phillip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who has apparently been killed in the middle of a show, in full view of a packed theater house. D'Amour ties Swann to the mystical cult leader, Nix (Daniel von Bargen), murdered a dozen years ago in the desert.

MGM was somewhat put off by Barker's blend of horror and film noir, and thus asked him to cut out many of the noir elements for the theatrical version. However, the movie that was subsequently, and fortunately, made available on video, and later DVD, was Barker's original director's cut (many video stores carried this cut, and not the theaterical cut).

In the time that's passed since Lord of Illusions' release, Barker has been attached to various projects, and rumored to have another film in the works. He has, however, kept his Hollywood involvement limited to the role of producer (Gods and Monsters [1998] and Midnight Meat Train [2008], among many others) and writer (films based on his stories, including Bernard Rose's excellent 1992 film Candyman, based on the short story, The Forbidden).

He's recently been tapped to direct Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae, based on Todd McFarlane's gruesome line of Barker-inspired action figures. With two books on the way in 2011 (the next Abarat novel and the previously mentioned Scarlet Gospels), I'm not holding out much hope. But it would certainly be a treat for horror fans if he did return to film directing again, at least one more time.