Joe Dante And Mick Garris Talk 'Gremlins,' 'Hocus Pocus' Sequel And 'Nightmare Cinema'

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Horror veterans Mick Garris and Joe Dante have given us some of Hollywood’s best nightmares and most iconic genre movies – Dante’s films alone have made almost $500 million at the worldwide box office, unadjusted for inflation.

Now, the two are reteaming, along with three other standout filmmakers, for the highly anticipated, Nightmare Cinema. It’s an anthology of five short horrors which all share a common thread and protagonist played by Golden Globe-winner and Oscar-nominee Mickey Rourke.

I caught up with Garris and Dante to discuss Nightmare Cinema, why Hollywood sees horror as big box office business again and for their takes on the legacies and futures of Gremlins and Hocus Pocus.

Simon Thompson: Nightmare Cinema is an anthology that you have been working on for a decade. With the change in distributions models and growth of platforms, which could work in your favor?

Mick Garris: I hope you're right. The idea for Nightmare Cinema originally came to me right after Masters of Horror ended. I thought it would be great to do something international in scope and do an anthology with a different story in a different country with a different director from each of those countries. I guess my ambition exceeded everyone else, I also thought of it as being an umbrella for a series of feature films, each one is a self-contained 90-minute movie for theatrical release, and eventually, it morphed into this. It took 10 years to get the Nightmare Cinema concept together and we finally found our Angels in Good Deed Entertainment and Cinelou who financed this rather adventurous idea which we ended up shooting entirely in town with two American directors, one Cuban, one Japanese, and one British of whom live in Los Angeles.


Joe Dante: Like you say, everything has changed especially the delivery systems and what gets made and what it gets made for that, it's a different landscape out there. However, one thing that seems to have always been popular it is horror films. The idea of not having to sustain a feature story for 90 minutes is also very liberating, the idea of having to keep a story going for all that time can cancel out some of the more interesting short stories that became so popular on The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. I've done a couple of these anthology movies, my third movie was The Twilight Zone Movie, a bunch of stories put together and with sort of a framing story around them - it's the framing stories that are actually the kicker. The challenge is, of course, to try to be able to tell stories that are interesting and diverse within a framework that that makes sense to me to the audience. In this case, you know it was Mick's idea to do a haunted movie theater with a possibly malevolent projectionist who was showing people stories of their lives that may or may not have already happened.

ST: Episodic films have always been popular but do you think that one reason they are so popular again now is that people's attention spans are so short these days?

JD: I think there's some truth to that. I think the audience's attention span has been fragmented by, frankly, the invention of remote controls even before cell phones. It used to be that in order to change the channel, people would have to get out of their chairs to do it by hand, there were a lot of shows that were popular simply because they were following another show and people were too lazy to change the channel. People now are watching while multitasking so typing or doing something else or clicking around to see what else is on and it's difficult to hold them. That's one of the great things about movies in the theater for me is that you know you've put your money down, you've put yourself in your seat and you get to sit there and look at the screen and it's all dark with nothing else to look at so you do get the audience's attention. I think the idea of telling a story that resolves itself fairly quickly is probably more attractive than it was before.

ST: A lot of studios are reticent to put out horror films, is it fair to say that many don't know what to do with them?

MG: It's true that the studios don't like or understand horror and can't tell a good horror movie from a bad one. There are some exceptions with some of the executives who do care about it but that's a relatively new phenomenon. I think the best you can do is make a really good movie and people who are passionate and knowledgeable about how to make a horror film. There are a huge number of horror film festivals around the world today and that's a great proving ground where you can get the buzz to go. In the case of Nightmare Cinema and what I did with Masters of Horror was to do my best to recruit the best possible people in the genre who know this stuff and encourage them to do whatever they want without interfering. There wasn't a bunch of studio notes to make it more like some other big hit, more like IT or more like The Purge or more like Insidious. It's a crapshoot but this project is something that did not have a giant budget and had a lot of passion. Here five filmmakers who had stories they wanted to tell and delve into it because nobody was telling them they couldn't. That was the whole basis for Masters of Horror and the basis for Nightmare Cinema which I hope comes to create more demand for more Nightmare Cinemas either as feature films or as a TV series which we're trying to get going as well.

ST: I was going to ask if that is something that you've looked at?

MG: Yes, very much so. My original concept of this was as a television series but we've found that its best voice right now is as a feature film. The idea of an anthology series where you do offer the best filmmakers in the genre from around the world the opportunity to tell their stories their way, I'm hoping we will have the same sort of luck that we did with Masters of Horror. We pitched it to three people, all three of them said they wanted it and the first one who said, in the room, 'That sounds great. When can we start?' we went with. Maybe we'll have the same fortune once we're finished with the movie.

ST: We are going through something of a renaissance with horror. Is that because attitudes, from audiences and studio executives, are changing and they are taking it more seriously?

JD: I think horror films are often a reaction to the world around them. If you go back into the history of various countries and look at the politics and look at what was going on socially you see it reflected in the horror films because people are afraid they're afraid for their lives, they're afraid for their future, they're afraid for their children. I have to say that the times we're living in right now are certainly as fraught with fear since the scariest time that I remember as a kid which was the 50s. I regret to say that we are in a position where I think there are a lot of people who are now experiencing that kind of fear.