Director Mick Garris had been a passionate horror devotee since he was a teenager, so it makes sense that he’d choose to gather his filmmaking friends for a dinner in 2002. During the meal, Guillermo del Toro, a man whose passion for monsters and the macabre has yet to be matched, stood up in front of a crowd that included horror luminaries John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, and Stuart Gordon and wished a guest at the restaurant a “happy birthday” from the “masters of horror.” Three years later, Garris would create and produce a Showtime anthology series with the same name.
Garris’ premise for Masters of Horror, which debuted 20 years ago, was optimistic and nostalgic: let legendary genre filmmakers tell stories without the restraints usually imposed by Hollywood. The budgets wouldn’t be exorbitant, but they’d be enough to tell proper, terrifying, and most importantly, creatively liberating stories. And while not all of them would be classics, one can see why many of these directors are regarded as cinema legends.
