Their Wildest Dreams, Your Worst Nightmares: Revisiting ‘Masters of Horror’
I cannot put into words just how much of an influence Masters of Horror had on me as a teenager who was starting to get serious about wanting to write and make films. Reading the coverage of this show in Fangoria at the time was beyond inspiring. To watch these icons of the genre just get together and make something on the cheap, pretty quick, but turning out episodes that were bursting with creativity, that each had their own distinct flavor. It was incredible. It felt like we were getting new John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Don Coscarelli, etc. movies every week, because we were. These episodes felt like feature films and only came up just a little shy of a feature runtime. Some of them are longer than a couple of the Universal classics.
I absolutely wrote my first feature screenplay and was inspired to start shooting short films with my friends at least partially because of reading interviews with these seasoned legends talking about how much fun it was to just get together and make things with friends. These guys had their whole careers since they started out doing just that, and the passion remained exactly the same. It was also because of the burst of creative energy I felt watching each of these episodes as they first hit DVD.
Like Tales from the Crypt before it, Masters of Horror did not have to worry about standard cable censorship. It was on showtime and it really pushed some boundaries, most notably in Takashi Miike’s Imprint. That was such a huge part of what was exciting about the Masters of Horror experience. You weren’t just getting an anthology show, you were getting an entire slate of full-blown films from some of the best to ever do it. Ever since it aired, that has been the most exciting thing about Masters of Horror, for me. It exists in its own space. It’s not quite an anthology show and not quite a direct-to-video label, and yet at the same time it’s a little bit of both. It was its own thing, somewhere between Tales from the Crypt and 8 Films to Die For. They weren’t just typical anthology episodes stretched to an hour — well, okay, maybe some of them were — but they were serious, boundary-pushing, sometimes even groundbreaking films.
Mick Garris shepherded it, born out of a cable TV special documentary titled Masters of Horror, which first aired as Boogeymen 2: Masters of Horror, sequel to a horror clip compilation DVD, of all things, and that led to the “Masters of Horror” dinners which still as far as I know continue to this day, and it was those dinners and gathering those legends together that spawned the idea for the series. Just like those early “Masters of Horror” dinners, the series honored legends both old and new, allowing space for both established icons and those who were just beginning to make a name for themselves.
This show also had some of the all-time best DVD sets. In college, those were centerpieces of my dorm room physical media collection. I loved using this show to either introduce my friends to some of the greats, or prove that directors that many had begun to see as washed up or has-beens did, in fact, still have it.
With that in mind, I want to highlight and recommend some of my absolute favorite episodes from the series.
“Cigarette Burns”- John Carpenter’s first episode for the show feels so existentially dreadful, both exactly in keeping with the director’s sensibilities and intriguingly at odds with them at the same time. It’s similar to In the Mouth of Madness, but with a much more harrowing tone. Norman Reedus plays a collector of rare film prints who is hunting down the rarest one of all, a movie that screened only once because it was so grotesque it drove an entire audience to murder. In some ways, it’s Carpenter’s most abstract movie, featuring a film so brutally powerful it drives the viewer beyond madness, an imprisoned angel, and a purely unhinged performance by Udo Kier.
“Jenifer”- Anyone who says Dario Argento never directed anything great after the late ‘80s/early ’90s hasn’t seen “Jenifer.” It’s a gnarly, sometimes perversely funny, often disturbing look at what men will do for a great body. Jenifer is a woman with a monstrous face and a gorgeous body and the story revolves around a man who is obviously not with her for her personality as she begins to destroy everything in his life and even then, simply cannot give her up. The plot kicks off when a man stumbles onto another man about to kill a young woman and intervenes, rescuing her and taking her home. He has a whole life, he has a wife and a daughter, and she literally eats that life and yet he still cannot give her up. In the original comic that inspired the film, Jenifer was an alien, but I love the ambiguity of never knowing exactly what she is.
“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”- Don Coscarelli directs from a Joe Lansdale story and the tone and style could not be more different t than their previous collaboration, Bubba Ho-Tep. This feels like a precursor to You’re Next. A woman on an isolated mountain road finds herself targeted by a relentless killer, but uses survivalist training she never even wanted to turn the tables on her attacker. Ethan Embry gives an almost too chilling performance, and not even as an over-the-top creep, but as a scarily believable guy you might actually just encounter all the street who is way too eager to give you his opinion on the world’s many failings.
“Imprint”- The aforementioned Takashi Miike episode that was pulled from air on an uncensored network. It’s an impressive claim to fame, but honestly, what did you expect from the director of Audition and Ichi the Killer? My favorite thing about this episode is that Miike reminds audience, even in the ultra-gory 2000s when Hostel and Saw were rising in popularity, that American audiences have a very different threshold for gore. Miike did not limit the extremes he went to for the American audience in this episode, and people were not ready for it.
“Sick Girl”- It was so cool to see Lucky McKee join the ranks of the Masters of Horror, alongside Carpenter, Dante, Argento and the others, only a few short years into his career, coming off of the word-of-mouth success of the incredible and somehow still under-seen May. “Sick Girl” features May star Angela Bettis, who is always great. But the truly unhinged, captivating central performance comes from adult actress Erin Brown (AKA Misty Mundae) in this lesbian bug romance. Brown steals the show as a literal Manic Pixie Bug Girl and eats the “perfect nerdy too good to be true girlfriend” trope alive. I believe this was originally intended to be directed by Roger Corman, which is amazing to think about, because Lucky McKee absolutely took the opportunity to just make a Lucky McKee film as he normally would and present it to a wider audience. And we were all better for it.
“Valerie on the Stairs”- Clive Barker crafted the story for this episode directed by Mick Garris, about an apartment building that’s a commune for unsuccessful writers, where a new tenant is enchanted by the ghost of an unfinished idea, named Valerie. But this lover who can never have the companionship she seeks is likewise stalked by a beast whose hunger can never be sated, played by Tony Todd absolutely relishing in being a decadent demon from a doomed B-Movie. Absurdly inventive and creative. It is deeply poetic just in terms of its concept and it is a terrific “warts and all” portrayal of the process of writing. Pure Barker.
