amed directors Joe Dante and John Landis managed to make 1981 stand out as the year of the werewolf with their separate projects, The Howling and American Werewolf in London. Now, nearly 25 years later, these Masters of Horror find themselves directing two of the 13 episodes in the original Showtime mini-movie anthology series that premiered Oct. 28 with Don Coscarelli's "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road."
Created by Mick Garris, Masters of Horror offered 13 well-known horror directors a chance to follow their own vision to make a one-hour movie of whatever subject matter they wanted. Dante chose to go with Homecoming, a political zombie movie, which airs on Dec. 2, while Landis took on an ancient Indian legend with Deer Woman, which airs on Dec. 9.
Dante is no stranger to the low-budget feature. He started his career working for Roger Corman, going on to direct Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins and a host of others before doing Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Chicago's Landis followed Schlock up with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, ¡Three Amigos! and countless others. He has just begun work on Bat Boy.
Dante and Landis chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about making a movie in 10 days, creative freedom and werewolves.
What's different about Masters of Horror that takes it beyond other anthology series?
Dante: The original idea of the series was to corral a bunch of horror-movie directors who are usually used to doing features and get them to do television for, you know, not a lot of money and 10 days. But the key was creative freedom. They said no censorship. You can do whatever you want. You have final cut, and that was obviously very enticing to all of us.
Landis: It's director-driven. Every show is directed by someone who has made a classic horror film. All the shows are between 55 and 60 minutes long without commercials, and it's unrated. The wonderful irony of cable television is you can do things on cable they wouldn't let you do in a movie. Most of these shows would definitely be NC-17.
Dante: They're getting away with things I don't think you ordinarily get away with. I mean, there are standards. Showtime has a set of standards that you obviously have to adhere to. But, in general, they're not pulling very many punches. I think the word is unadulterated. This stuff is unadulterated.
Have you seen any of them?
Landis: I've seen a bunch of them now. I saw Carpenter's the other day. It's pretty nuts. Dario Argento's is really nuts, and the one that I think is terrific, really the one that stands out for me, is Joe's episode. Because it's extremely political and very timely. I'm very pleased that he did that show, and I'm jealous because he really took advantage of the opportunity to make a very political show.
Dante: I've seen a couple of them. I saw Dario Argento's, which was very weird. I mean, Dario is a fairly unique filmmaker, and this is no exception. And I've only seen pieces of the others.
Landis: It's a fun project. I think it's fascinating. I've got to tell you they're very, very different. It's interesting because Don Coscarelli's, which is the first one, is probably the most traditional kind of horror movie in terms of contemporary horror movies. It's very, very stylish, and it has lots of horror. It's interesting because it's radically different than mine and radically different than Stuart Gordon's and radically different than Joe's, and they are all different from one another. Which is what's exciting to me. I'm a little worried. I hope people don't watch one show and think that's what the show is, because they are so different from one another. ... I can't stress, they're very different from one another.
Dante: My career has seesawed between doing horror movies and comedies. The idea of doing something that you're going to be able to take from the beginning to the end and say at the end it's exactly the way you wanted to make it, whatever's right or wrong with it, you can take complete responsibility for, was very refreshing after my last picture, which was Looney Tunes: Back In Action, which took a year and a half to make and had many cooks. So this one only has a couple of cooks, and I think it's probably better baked [laughs].
Joe, tell me about your movie, Homecoming.
Dante: I decided to use the opportunity to do something that I felt strongly personally about, and that led me to do an episode of a political nature, which I'm not sure the others are as overtly political. Well, all horror movies are political. In fact, if you ever want to see where the country is at any given time, all you have to do is run the horror movies and/or comedies that were being made at the time and you'll find all the information that you need to find out what was really going on, because they're really the most subversive genres.
And so we ended up doing a story [written by Sam Hamm] about deceased Iraqi war veterans who return from the grave to vote out the people who sent them there. The zombie genre is actually a fairly disreputable one. Early on there were some films made, White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie, and they were creditable. But they were always the West Indies zombies. To me, when I was growing up, that's where zombies came from. But then once George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, the word zombie started to stick to anybody who was a ghoul, anybody who was a walking corpse. So the whole genre took a sort of a gruesome turn. And there were increasingly violent and graphic movies made in Europe that basically led to the idea of what people think of as a zombie movie today. And it's obviously regained some currency with 28 Days and some of the other pictures that have been done.
So with all that background to draw on it seemed like the world didn't really need another zombie movie per se. But if it could be done in a context that had some contemporary resonance, then it would be worth doing.
Homecoming is social satire. That's something that I've always enjoyed and never feel that there's quite enough of, and there's a reason for that, which is the old adage that satire is what closes on Saturday night. I've managed in most of my movies to stick a jab here or there at various institutions and government policies and things.
John, tell me about your film.
Landis: Mine is called Deer Woman. It is kind of an homage to The Cat People. I'll tell you how it came about. When Mick asked me to do this, I thought about it, and I knew a lot of guys would be dealing with zombies and serial killers. And so I thought, "I don't want to do that." [Laughs.] "Let me try to come up with a monster, because I really believe that people are scary. And people kill people all the time. Monsters rarely kill people [laughs], if ever." And so the suspension of belief required to make a monster movie, it's much more challenging to me. So my son, Max, who is now 20, he was 19 when he did this, he's been writing screenplays since he was, literally, 7. You know, it's a new world with computers. He's always been a fine writer, even as a little boy, but he's very influenced by Stephen King, and his stuff is often too gruesome for me. But he really creates terrific characters and good dialogue, and so I said, "Max, you know what? I was 19 when I wrote An American Werewolf in London, so this is good." So I said, "Why don't you write a show for me? You're 19. I know that this show is going to be shot in Vancouver. So what's a monster that we can do in the Pacific Northwest that's not Bigfoot?" And he brought me a book of cryptozoology [the study of legendary animals]. ... So I'm looking through, and then I see this thing called the Deer Woman, which is a Native American myth about a Deer Woman. She's essentially a succubus, I guess. She's this beautiful, beautiful woman who is a woman from the thighs up. But from the thighs down she's a deer. She has deer legs. And she seduces warriors, and then after she seduces them she murders them brutally in a very creepy way.
I really thought about it and I just said, "You know, this looks like something that would be hard to come up with. Let's do this." [Laughs.] So Max was extremely aggravated because he said, "I hate this idea." And I said, "Tough, that's what I want to do." He said, "Well, I think a Deer Woman's stupid." And I said, "Here's the plan, just make it real." So Max wrote this script, and I have to say he did a terrific job. I actually did do a polish, but I would say the script is 80 percent his. He created this great character, this detective Faraday. It's very sexual.
What was the biggest challenge with your movie?
Landis: The hardest part of making it was finding the Deer Woman, 'cause I needed someone who could be Native American and drop-dead gorgeous and beautiful and seductive and then frightening. It's a very interesting show. We were very lucky to find—she found us, actually—a Brazilian model named Cinthia Moura [seen at right]. She is gorgeous. She's wonderful. I'm very pleased, because it's kind of an outrageous premise, and we tried to make it real. And she's just this beautiful girl who really delivers. She can be as sensual as you want and really creep you out [laughs]. It's shot in 10 days, so it's a 10-day wonder. And it's kind of more ambitious than some of the other shows in that it has lots of locations and lots of characters. So I would really have rather had 20 days, but I had 10.
Dante: The biggest challenge is always to do something good in 10 days. It's an hour film. We're used to making 90-minute movies over a period of months. It takes a certain kind of discipline to be able to do this kind of thing in 10 days. But, interestingly, most of the directors started out in low-budget films where, indeed, you do have to make your movies in 10 days. My first picture was made in 10 days, and now my last picture was made in 10 days [laughs]. So I don't know what that tells you, but it doesn't sound good, does it? [Laughs.]
I understand you did that first movie on a bet?
Dante: I was working for Roger Corman at the time, making trailers, and my friends and I, who were in the publicity department, wanted to make a movie. And so the only way Roger would make the movie is he said, "You have to make it on a lower budget than anything that's ever been made here, and you only have 10 days, and I bet you can't do it." And, in addition, we had to work on the trailers at night. They couldn't afford to lose us on that. It was a very hectic time, and frankly people say, "So, what do you remember about that movie?" And I go, "I don't know. I don't remember much." It just all went by awfully fast.
John, what about doing a movie in 10 days?
Landis: There is no difference between one-camera television and making a movie. It's the same thing. And money, in terms of budget, is really about time. It's how much time you have to do it. And so television now is quite an expensive proposition. You know, HBO, what they spend is the same as features. But most television is done like low-budget features. So I've done a great deal of it. I mean, I don't regret having the 10 days, I just wish I had more. But I'm pretty happy with Deer Woman. It's pretty silly. All monster stuff is pretty silly, like religion ... it's pretty silly. Anything that requires the suspension of disbelief.
You guys both have made significant contributions to the werewolf genre, with The Howling and An American Werewolf in London.
Dante: They both came out the same year. When we did The Howling there hadn't been any werewolf movies for a long time. And in fact the genre was considered kind of old-fashioned and sort of was lumped in with the villagers-with-torches type movies. So we just treated it like it was a contemporary picture and didn't even give away it was a werewolf movie until halfway through the picture. And that seemed to be a more modern take on it.
And An American Werewolf in London?
Landis: That's a movie I wrote in 1969, and I didn't get to make it until 1981. And I only got to make it because I had success with Kentucky Fried, Animal House and Blues Brothers.
They're very different movies. They do share [Oscar-winning makeup artist] Rick Baker, though. I gave Rick this script of An American Werewolf in London in 1971, when we made Schlock, and I told him, "Figure this out." Because I wanted it all on camera, all in bright lights. And Rick pretty quickly came up in the early '70s with the idea of what he called chango heads, these morphing things. And I could never get the money to make the movie. And years later I called him up and said, "OK, we're making the movie." And he said, "John, I'm doing a movie for Joe. I'm doing a werewolf movie. I've already started." And I said, "You m----rf----r [laughs]." So what happened was, Rick's very gifted assistant at that time, Rob Bottin, took over Howling, and that's why they have different conceptions but similar kind of effects.
You have both made movies which have become classics in their genres. Do you see your movies as classics?
Landis: Peter Bagdanovich said many years ago that the only true test of a movie is time. And it's very gratifying that after all these years people still enjoy them. It's very, very funny, because now that you have these anniversary DVDs and stuff, the same critics who sh-t on the Blues Brothers when it came out are calling it "an American classic."
What do you look for in a script?
Dante: I always look for some kind of social relevance. Some kind of comment about some satirical take on not necessarily the material but the world. And barring that, if it's just an out-and-out thrill ride, that's good too, as long as it can be made for the money. A lot of times you get a script and then you talk to the producers and they have no idea how ambitious all this stuff is. Then you tell them if you take out this and this and this and this, then what's left is kind of conventional. Those are the expensive things. So then you've got to figure out a way to rob Peter and pay Paul and still keep the highlights. And nobody wants to spend a whole lot of money on these pictures, especially after Van Helsing.
Or the The Brothers Grimm. ...
Dante: Again, Van Helsing with fairy tales. Get it, guys. You can't put together a movie that looks like a compilation of trailer moments. It's got to be a story. It's got to have characters. It's got to have something that will keep the audience going. You can't just keep throwing a new monster at them every five minutes. ... That's one of the reasons you're able to be subversive and under the radar in these movies, usually, is they don't cost much.
What's your next project?
Dante: I'm not quite sure. I'm doing the wraparounds for a horror film called Trapped Ashes, which is going to shoot at the end of November. And I may have a TV pilot but I don't know yet, because they haven't told me whether I have it or not. Then I have another pictured called Life and Death at 17, an indie that I'm supposed to do in March.
Landis: I'm working on a lot of things. Bat Boy, the script, was just turned in, and now we have to try to raise the money. It's based on an off-Broadway show, and it's a musical. It's pretty outrageous. You know the Weekly World News? They created the Bat Boy. They always print these bulls--t stories as real. They write about Bigfoot. They write about all this stuff, and they found this half-bat/half-man in West Virginia. Anyway, they report on it from time to time, and these writers and composers and lyricists wrote a musical based on the Bat Boy, and it's a very eclectic, edgy, funny, romantic, gory piece. And it's kind of like if you crossed Beauty and the Beast and Rocky Horror and Nosferatu and Little Shop of Horrors and Frankenstein. A real mixture of stuff. I'm really happy with it and it's going to be hard to get the money to make. I like doing unusual things, and the problem is the industry is very conservative, so you're only allowed to do unusual things when you have some kind of box-office strength. The one thing, if you look at the films I've made, although it doesn't seem that way now, but when they were made they were radical. They were very different than what was being made. Now, because they were commercially successful, they were then imitated and copied, and so now they are mainstream.
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Peter Straub
