Mick Garris: A Conversation with a Master of Horror

The first real horror film that I saw was Sleepwalkers (1992) by Mick Garris. I was 14 when I saw that film. When I met Mick in Copenhagen two and a half decades later – he was guest of honor at the Bloody Weekend film festival in the spring of 2019 – I told him that his film had messed me up none too gently. This, evidently, tickled his funny bone. I also told him that The Stand – also directed by Garris, and also, like Sleepwalkers, based on a Stephen King script – turned me on to the horror genre. I imagine I’m not the only horror film fan who has Garris to thank for their obsession.

A living legend and a master of horror, Garris has directed many films and television shows and stands behind such neo-classics as the groundbreaking anthology series Masters of Horror (2005-2007) and, most recently, the anthology film Nightmare Cinema (2019). He’s behind what, to my mind, is the best horror podcast out there – “Post Mortem with Mick Garris.” He has directed more King adaptations than anybody else. It seems that he knows everybody in the community of horror film directors, and is universally loved.

It’s paradoxical, at least on the surface, that such a gentle, kind, and humble guy can make films that terrify millions of people, but Mick’s films are always infused with a genuine humanity, with authentic empathy. That’s maybe what’s makes them so frightening. You come to care deeply about the characters who confront monsters and abject terrors. And as King has pointed out, there’s no horror without love.

Here below is a transcription of my conversation with Mick, which took place in April 2019, and which took us deep into the dark realms of horror cinema. The transcription is slightly edited for readability.

Mathias Clasen: What is the appeal of horror?

Mick Garris: Well, obviously it’s something that you think about a lot, if you’re making it. But I think it has a lot to do with the people who love it. And the people who make it are, more often than not, outsiders: they don’t feel accepted and they don’t feel a part of society and – maybe not like monsters – but they feel like “the other.” I know I did, I do. A lot of the fans who really are serious about it, a lot of the people who make it, they were not the prom king or queen; they were not the popular kids in school. I came from a broken home, my parents split up fairly early. It’s not uncommon.

But I also think it’s greatly therapeutic. It’s “whistling past the graveyard.” There’s a reason people embrace it in their youth, because they don’t know about mortality, and I think it protects you from mortality. You laughing at the viscera being ripped out and blood spurting and all of that, is incredibly protective and nutritious for someone. But it’s also part of the maturation process. You don’t want to love what your parents love. People go to heavy metal music because your mom’s not going to like it. “It’s mine! I’m no longer their child. I’m my own human being.” And that’s part of the process. “I can go see this movie. My mother’s going to hate when I go see Saw VI.” I think that has a lot to do with it, too. And I just feel like it’s a breaking away thing and a sense of immortality that, particularly in youth, you embrace. And then, as you mature – if you mature – when you are confronted by the mortality of people you know and love, then, it deepens you, both as a human being and, if you’re a creator, as an artist as well. I know a lot of the people who create this stuff have lost loved ones. I’ve lost two brothers and recently a sister, both my parents, a couple of friends, and I think it takes me deeper into the horror world, in a more protective way.

Clasen: Because it deepens your understanding of the emotional responses of your characters?

Garris: The emotional responses and the emotional connections. That you realize how short and insignificant life can be, and that you want to make more out of it. And you want to appreciate the people around you as much as you can, while you can. To me, the most effective horror is the horror that you feel and that hurts, and it doesn’t just gross you out, but it hits you in the heart and the brain as well. And so that’s what I mean about deepening, is understanding how little there is to life, and that that line between life and death can snap like that [snaps his fingers].

Clasen: You’ve also said that you like the recreational slasher as much as the next guy.

Garris: Maybe not as much as the next guy, but it’s fun! It’s a palate-cleanser, and you want to scream and jump and have a good time, and enjoy the viscera that’s splattered against the screen. It’s not my favourite kind of horror, but it’s recreational, and I’ve done a little bit of that, but mostly my work is much more character-oriented and humanistic. But it is fun, just like a screaming, heavy metal guitar solo is a blast. I don’t want it all the time, but it’s really fun to just kick back and, “Argh! Look at those eyes popping out in 3D!” Things like that. It’s just really fun, and, again, it’s whistling past the graveyard. “Yeah, I’m gonna die, but this guy’s being ripped to shreds!”

Clasen: The guy with the spine in “Valerie on the Stairs” (one of Garris’s episodes for the anthology series Masters of Horror) …

Garris: In “Valerie,” exactly! I’m not averse to doing that stuff. But, you know, that’s not the meat and potatoes of it. Even with that story, there’s more to it than the eviscerations.

Clasen: Yes. So, one of the things you’re famous for is having adapted so much of Stephen King’s work and collaborated with him. But that must be so difficult. I love what you did with The Shining. I can see the aesthetic qualities of Kubrick’s film, but I can’t not see it on top of King’s novel, which is about characters, and about development, and about family dynamics–

Garris: About a familial, parental guilt? And alcoholism.

Clasen: Exactly. All of those ghosts haunting him: literal and metaphorical ghosts. But how do you take a story that goes so deeply into the characters’ minds and their emotions, and translate that to an audio-visual medium?

Garris: Richard Matheson once said something that is obvious but profound to me. He said: “Fiction is internal, and film is external.” And how you take what’s inside and bring it outside on film has a lot to do with actors, it has a lot to do with the writing, and what’s not necessarily on the screen. It’s how to bring it to that. And the good news is that for The Stand and The Shining in particular, King wrote the screenplays himself. But I always want to be in their heads. So much of what takes place in The Shining, as you said, is internal: It’s inside Jack Torrance. And there are ways, there are lenses that you choose, because it’s going to be more evocative to either throw him in perfect focus, and have your foreground, background, everything else, in a soft focus; or the opposite, where everything is in focus, and you’re shooting from high, and he’s insignificant in the frame; or you’re shooting from low and giving him more power. The colour choice, the palettes, the greenness of illness that you can use in your lighting patterns; or you warm it up and put it by a fireplace. There’s a long sequence with him and Wendy where it’s “sane,” and it’s a very quiet thing for a long time, and we kind of change our coverage: sitting by the fire is nice and warm and normal, but coming through the window is blue, cold moonlight – winter moonlight – and it’s that contrast between the cold and the warmth that is making you feel something more than just hearing something. And then the performances of the actors, as well, is important to that. But you try and use the tools of cinema to heighten the psychological impact and emotional impact of the film, and on the viewer.

Clasen: So that’s the scene where Wendy [Torrance, portrayed by Rebecca De Mornay] is trying to seduce Jack [Torrance, portrayed by Stephen Weber], and he’s busy with his manuscript … That’s maybe my favorite scene.

Garris: I’m so happy to hear you say that, because it’s so quiet, and so insignificant. When people remember The Shining, they remember the more extreme moments. That one scene took a lot of work to make happen, and it’s in-between commercial breaks: there’s nothing on either end of it but commercials, and it’s eight minutes long. And nothing really happens, other than this emotional connection, or disconnection. And there was a lot of thought and work put into that, and it was all shot in one day. It was tough, and to know that it connected with you really makes me happy.

Clasen: I also loved the jump-scare at the end of the scene in Room 217. It really worked, even though I could see it coming.

Clasen: But you’re not one to dish out a lot of jump scares.

Garris: No. You know, I’m not above it, but I don’t think that’s what horror is. I think that’s shock, and that’s a jolt, but it’s gone and forgotten in moments afterwards. To me, horror is something that you feel inside, and that you carry outside the theater after the credits roll, or outside the living room after the credits roll. But something that makes you feel something genuine, that truly invokes fear or tension or some kind of emotional response, beyond just a jump and a scream and a “Oh, wow, that scared me!”

Clasen: Do you still get so frightened by something that someone else made that you carry it into your life outside the theater?

Garris: Yeah, occasionally that’ll happen. I thought Hereditary did a good job of it. The Autopsy of Jane Doe I thought was very disquieting. Those are both movies that aren’t about just a sudden jolt and moving onto something else. I’ve never really been that frightened by a movie, but I have felt “the fear,” and I really love it when that happens. You know, back in 1978, when I saw Halloween, I loved it. It’s more than a slasher movie because the characters are so interesting. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character, Laurie Strode, is really great and believable. She’s eighteen years old, and she’s really good, and you care about what happens to her. And there are jump-scares in there but there’s also this constant dread. When I’m doing a film or a television show, I try to find a key word to use, to share with the crew, and the composer, the director of photography, the editor, and with The Shining it was “dread.” I wanted every scene to evoke a sense of impending doom or “something is around the corner waiting for you to turn that corner and experience it.”

Clasen: So how is dread different from the other common negative emotions like fear, anxiety…?

Garris: Well, fear and anxiety are more specific, I think. “I’m afraid of spiders; I’m anxious because I have to go to work tomorrow and I haven’t finished what I need to do.” Those are all frightening things. But dread is something that’s a little more unspecific, and it’s an anticipation that doesn’t necessarily have a cause or a reason: it’s more ambiguous than that. For me! And it’s just a sense of something that’s encroaching, something is going to happen. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel it in my heart: that something dark is under the stairs, waiting for me outside,” or who knows what. But it’s much more ambiguous. And I think sound has a lot to do with it, as well as visuals. I remember when The Shining first aired, a friend of mine said: “My wife couldn’t watch it, because the sound scared her too much.” Good! We don’t need her! [Laughs.] But that sense of something coming is really important to successful horror. And that it’s happening to people that you feel some kind of union with.

Clasen: Right. So that connection between you and the audience and the characters who are exposed to terrible things, that’s very important?

Garris: Absolutely! The people are the most important thing, and I think that’s why King is so important and so great, is that he’s so human. About The Shining and Kubrick’s film … Kubrick is a cold filmmaker, and King is a warm storyteller. Kubrick is more mechanical and kind of a clinician, and King is a humanist. It took me years, but I recognized that The Shining – Kubrick’s The Shining  – is a great Kubrick film, but it’s a terrible King adaptation. It misses all about the alcoholism and the parental guilt and the family, and all of those things, and it was such a personal book to King. It’s well known that he was an alcoholic, and he was drinking at the time he wrote the book, and he’s been sober for at least thirty years, and he wrote the screenplay for the miniseries when he was not drinking. So, there’s a perspective there that enhances it a little bit.

Clasen: The characters in Kubrick’s film, you’re kind of just hoping that they’ll die.

Garris: [Laughs.] Well, I remember, David Cronenberg told me once that the problem with Kubrick’s The Shining is that he cast the ending. And Jack is crazy from the beginning, and it’s not about the descent into madness that King wrote.

Clasen: And that’s what’s so powerful about the novel, I think. I think there’s that element of relatability. The internal struggle that Jack goes through, even if you’re not an alcoholic, even if your dad was not abusive; still, trying to navigate between your own ambition and care for your family, that’s …

Garris: It’s a schizophrenic life. We all lead schizophrenic lives. And Jack Torrance is a very sympathetic character, despite breaking his son’s arm, despite doing horrible things, because he means well, and it’s a tragic novel. And the Kubrick film is not tragic; it’s quite a feast for the eyes. If I could divorce it from the book – which I’ve learned to do – then I can appreciate it. It’s kind of an “anti-horror” movie. He takes a lot of the tropes of horror films and intentionally does not do them, and does the opposite of them. It’s a fascinating exercise to watch it. And obviously he’s achieved far greater cinematic heights than I have, so I am never in judgement of Stanley Kubrick.

Clasen: So what does the horror genre offer to you, as a filmmaker?

Garris: Well, I think horror is the most cinematic genre there is, because it’s expressive. It’s an impressionistic and expressionistic form. A good horror film has to be a good drama first, or a good story, or a good character study, or whatever. And on top of that is all the technical stuff, as well as the amorphic things. You can create them; you can create nightmare images that don’t have to be realistic. It frees you up with your imagination to take dream imagery and make it shareable, and not just internal. My dreams, as soon I wake up, they’re smoke, they’re gone. I don’t ever remember my dreams. Horror cinema is a way of dreaming awake, where you can take fears and imagery, and create them in ways that you can’t do in a more mainstream genre. It’s very cut and dried what you show in a Western or a drama or a comedy; it’s about reality, and horror offers a really interesting mix of reality and surreality, and so it offers a lot to someone who has control of cinematic tools – the language of cinema. I think it’s done more for the expansion of cinema than any other genre because of that, because you can create things that aren’t real, but convey a powerful emotional response as well.

Clasen: Yeah, I guess that goes back to the birth of cinema, with the Méliès brothers, and–

Garris: Exactly. Tricks, you know? But they’re tricks that have a point. There was something that was in vogue for a while called the “squishy lens,” a silicon-filled plastic lens that you put over your camera lens, and it would put things out of focus and warp them. And warping reality is something you can welcome in a horror film, but which feels wrong in something more mainstream. Using the Steadicam in The Shining, that was kind of the first time it was done, and now it’s become a general tool in filmmaking. But then to have this camera gliding … It’s not on the dolly, you can tell it’s free-floating, and there’s a sense of float to it that feels impressionistic, and not just rock-solid, the way a dolly would make it look.

Clasen: Speaking of horror and the mainstream, is horror cinema becoming more culturally recognized as a genre that has real value? I mean, with the success of Get Out and Hereditary and so on?

Garris: Yes and no. There are so many people who say: “Oh, I can’t watch horror movies” or “I don’t like horror movies.” They’ve only seen the shit, you know? [Laughs.] There’s great stuff out there: really good, interesting things. But the studios, I don’t think, like or understand them, but they love the money that they make. And in the United States where – that’s the film capital of the world, other than maybe India – the studios are run by people who think horror is for teenagers. And around the world – I’ve discovered in my travels to festivals like these and the like – it’s not: it’s for adults as well. But because it deals with our baser instincts, because it deals with death and blood and viscera, it is thought of as rude, and it is a gutter genre. So it will – I hope not! – but I feel like it will always be lesser; it will always be the bad kids in school, you know? “We are the bad kids, ‘cause we’re the naughty ones breaking the taboos.” But if you don’t break taboos, it’s not really horror. So I think it has gained some respect. I think Get Out  is a really great example because of its huge, mainstream success. That you don’t really have to like horror movies to like that one, and maybe it’s your entry drug. [Laughs.] “The first one’s free,” you know? And then the next drug comes in, and it’s a little tougher, and a litter harder to shake, and then you’re hooked.

Clasen: So maybe horror will remain at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy.

Garris: I think so. And I don’t mind that, you know? I was always kind of a non-conformist at school and everything else, so…

Clasen: So if it is to retain that “outsider appeal,” maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Garris: When The Exorcist was made, they don’t get more rude than that, and they don’t get more successful in the mainstream than that. It broke so many taboos, and it was a monstrously successful movie.

Clasen: Including the line: “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell.” That’s about as rude as it gets.

Garris: Yeah, imagine that. And taking a crucifix – a 12-year-old girl! – and jamming it into her vagina, bleeding, repeatedly … I don’t know how they got an R-rating! It’s impossible. That couldn’t happen now!

Clasen: For a lot of people, if you say the word “horror,” what they have in mind is the most stupid kind of slasher from the ‘80s. And there is a fairly common idea that horror writers and horror fans are …

Garris: Weird!

Clasen: Weird, emotionally stunted, strange mother relations …

Garris: And some of that is sometimes true. [Laughs.] But, in general, I find that particularly the creators of genre material are incredibly sweet and well-adjusted people, because they don’t repress and suppress. They get it out. They don’t have bad dreams: they dream awake. They put it on paper; they put it on film; or they put it on digital media. And they’re often incredibly well-educated people; maybe well-adjusted, maybe not? But people who are often very thoughtful people.

Clasen: Right. And people with a keen sense of empathy, maybe?

Garris: Yeah, if you’re sharing your fears, that’s incredibly intimate. And “empathy,” I think, is a great word. I would definitely say that makes for a good story-teller, is having empathy.

Clasen: With the characters, and also maybe for envisioning the reader – or viewer – who is eventually responding to your story.

Garris: When I’m making a film, it’s not so much thinking about an audience as just telling the best story that I can in the best technological way that I can, and the best emotional way that I can, with the realisation that it’s universal. Fear is universal, whether their specific fears may not be the same, but fear as an emotion is universal; as is love, as is sorrow, as is pain, you know? Those things, we share them, and if you can connect in a way that feels personal to you, it’s going to feel personal to someone else.

Clasen: If you didn’t have any financial restraints, or any kinds of constraints, what story would you really want to adapt into a film or a television show?

Garris: Well, I’ve written a couple of novels, and I’ve got a new book that I just finished that’s four novellas. My novel, Salome, it’s not a horror novel; I describe it as a “Hollywood-desert-noir-murder-mystery.” And I would love to do that. It’s not an expensive film to make, but noir is not particularly popular now. And my work has mostly been in television, and to be able to set up a feature film is complicated under the best of circumstances. And so far, that hasn’t happened yet. I would love to do that one. A new novella I just finished called “Free,” which is the lead story in the new book, is something I would love to do. It is a sort of ghost story. None of the things that I want to make really depend on a large budget: they’re not very special effects-heavy. They’re more King-like, in the regard that they’re stories that involve real people, regular people, in real life. And they just have one foot in the supernatural.

Clasen: Right. And there is more of a sense of sensuality and eroticism in your work than in King’s, wouldn’t you say?

Garris: King’s is not very sexually-oriented, you know? The closest is Gerald’s Game, which goes there. And I really wanted to adapt that, but everyone said it was un-makeable: you can’t have a naked lady handcuffed to a bed for eighty of your ninety minutes of movie. I figured a way that I could do it, but it was way before Netflix was doing this sort of thing, and so then Mike Flanagan had great success with it, and he did a great job of it. It would have been different in my hands, but there was a time when King wanted to direct it himself, and have me produce it for him, and that would’ve been great too. I would love to have seen what he’d have done with that.

Related: See Ethan Robles’ article on how sexual assault is represented in Gerald’s Game.

Clasen: How would you have done it differently?

Garris: Well, I wouldn’t have left the cabin, you know? There are places where you go away from it, and I think, for me, I would want to keep the heat on, and not defuse it by going away from what’s in there. I think you had to put her in underwear, which made sense, and I don’t want to feel slimy when I’m watching it. In a book, it’s just really uncomfortable to read it; in a movie, you feel exploitative, having a woman splayed out there like that. So I think that was a good decision: to take the creepy sex out of it and just leave it to the story. And the creepy sex is with her husband, and then it’s not just leering. So I think Mike made the same choice I would’ve made in that regard, too. But I would’ve just kept it in the pressure cooker and never left it.

Clasen: Is there anything that you wouldn’t touch as a filmmaker? Any theme?

Garris. Oh, yeah! You know, I’m not a fan of cruelty in films. I hate rape-revenge movies as a matter of course. I think Coralie Fargeat did a brilliant one with Revenge. Have you seen that?

Clasen: No.

Garris: She was on the podcast. She lives in Paris and we did a Skype interview. She’s a very good filmmaker, and the fact that it’s a woman making a feminist rape-revenge movie … Most rape-revenge films are eighty-five minutes of rape and five minutes of revenge, justifying their feminism, and it’s bullshit! It’s titillation, you know? I’m really uncomfortable with brutality for its own sake. There are films that are just too mean-spirited for me. I’m a bit cleaner than a lot of genre filmmakers. I don’t revel in the mean-spiritedness of gore, but I don’t shy away from gore – as you mentioned before, the spine being pulled out – but there’s usually a point to it, other than just “this is what I’m capable of doing on screen, and I want to make you squirm!” I like that, but I don’t want to do it in an ugly, mean way.

Clasen: Right. So maybe that view of using gore and nasty stuff in the service of a story that has some kind of …

Garris: Yeah, there’s a point to it. And it can be really fun, like we talked about earlier. But, in that spirit, when it’s just done to exemplify how horrifically nasty and ugly a rape/murder can be, I don’t like that. One of the most uncomfortable times I ever had shooting was in Bag of Bones: there’s a rape/murder scene in that, and it’s horrendous. And it was really tough to shoot; it’s hard on the actors, hard on everybody, and you have to make choices what you show and don’t. This was made for television, so some of those choices were a little easier to make. But the whole process of a rape is so ugly; I don’t want it to be titillating in any way. And to a lot of people it is, no matter how carefully you do it.

Clasen: That’s true. You must’ve followed the whole “Woman in Danger” film discussion [in the early 1980s] with [film critics] Ebert and Siskel and their whole crusade against those films. But they didn’t include Halloween in their crusade.

Garris: I think that they both really appreciated Halloween. But I do remember, at the time, they were very anti-slasher movies. I’m not a big slasher movie fan. There are some seminal ones like Halloween that are great movies. But I remember when I was doing publicity at Avco Embassy, they did a show all about all these horrible slasher movies coming up. And they didn’t know what The Howling was, and they included it. And so Avco Embassy actually flew me to Chicago to meet with them and show them the trailer of The Howling, because “this isn’t a slasher movie; this is something very different!” And, at the time, people would have thought of a werewolf movie as very old-fashioned and square, so that’s why they kind of hid it in the campaign. Ebert was much more open to the genre. Siskel was very conservative in his film tastes, but Ebert had a class – film class – at the university. I mean, he wrote for Russ Meyer, for God’s sake! [Laughs.] So he had to be a bit more open about what film was. But yeah, it was a campaign against slasher movies, partly because of it always being the woman in peril. The “final girl!”

Clasen: So what’s your biggest ambition?

Garris: It’s just to be able to keep doing this, you know? How can you have a bigger ambition than working with Steven Spielberg or Stephen King … and having directed more Stephen King adaptations than anybody else! A big ambition would be to have something that’s really successful that’s entirely my own creation. Whether it’s from my book or an original screenplay, or something like that. Having created Masters of Horror, and being ringleader to all these wonderful filmmakers, doing things they’d never been allowed to do before, and that they were so happy to have done, that’s a huge ambition that I didn’t even know I had, and which was fulfilled. So my ambitions are creative rather than career-oriented. I don’t get to do feature films very often. Nightmare Cinema is by far the lowest budget I’ve ever worked on. But everybody involved did it out of love, and they made a movie that looks like it costs five times what it costs. My ambition right now would be to be able to turn that into a series of international, one-hour horror shows by filmmakers from around the world.

 

Mathias Clasen is associate professor in literature and media in the English Department at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on horror media from a cognitive-evolutionary perspective (e.g., Why Horror Seduces, OUP, 2017).

Interview kindly transcribed by Stephen Bjerregaard and Daniel Ingemann Kroier Pedersen.