Mick Garris on good horror, Stephen King, and search histories

Mick Garris is a writer, director, podcaster, and novelist, whose work spans over four decades. His excellent podcast, Post Mortem, is an essential listen for anyone interested in the art of filmmaking. Naturally, I was extremely nervous to interview someone so esteemed as a journalist. Luckily, Garris is a kind, thoughtful, and exceedingly charming conversationalist, who I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with.

Our hour-long interview has been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I only realized this when I started going through your filmography, that I saw your version of The Shining first. I had read the book, but at that time Kubrick’s version wasn’t really around because of Finland’s archaic video laws.

I was really terrified by the book, and my uncle, who smuggled uncut videotapes into the country, he brought a double VHS box of your film for us to watch. I think I was seven or eight at the time. So it terrified the hell out of me in turn.

Mick Garris: Oh, good!

I watched it again just like last week, and I was really happy to see that it’s just as effective even now. That’s really rare, because, of course, time takes its toll on everything. But, in your version, there’s this mundane terror to it. That’s what really unnerves me. Can you tell a little bit about how the adaptation came to be, and were at all trepidatious about it after Kubrick’s version?

MG: I was naive. Being trepidatious is the first thing most people would think of. I had just seen the Kubrick film, three days before it came out in screening Warner Brothers. I had never looked forward to a movie so much in my life, because I love the book so much. And it’s Stanley Kubrick, one of America’s greatest filmmakers ever.

Coming out of that film, I was so crushingly disappointed. That’s something people don’t remember about this. But in 1980 and 1981, almost all the reviews were bad. It had to do with expectations – people who had read the book, mostly young people, were really disappointed. It was the connection of the parental unit, everything that Danny and Jack Torrance go through, that I loved in the book so much. I was so crushed that it didn’t maintain what it was about. But, over the years, I’ve learned it’s a great Kubrick film, and it’s a terrible Stephen King adaptation.

That’s the perfect way to put it. I would agree with that. My issue with it always was the fact that Stephen King wrote it in the midst of battling alcoholism.

MG: Absolutely; and he wrote the mini-series script when he was drunk.

Right, and I have seen my share of addiction that we’ve had in my family. So, for me, the book is scary because it feels like we get to witness someone battling these demons in the bottle.

MG: Absolutely.

And while today I can watch it as a separate entity and all, it did leave a mark back then. There’s also the case of Jack Nicholson, who is amazing, but he is Jack Nicholson. The moment he walks in and you see his wild eyebrows, you just know something is going to go down.

MG: He starts off crazy and goes crazier.

Exactly, so I have a hard time seeing past him. But, if you take Steve Weber, it’s a very different performance. Because he’s the kind of person who I would expect to see next to me at a grocery store. I think that’s the key to making it so scary. Just having an ordinary person, who has a facade that begins to crumble.

MG: He’s also feeling a sense of responsibility. He’s broken this little boy’s arm, because of his failings as a father and as a human being through his alcoholism. So he turns to the bottle because he’s unable to accomplish writing that great play he’s been trying. It starts with the book. All of that was in the book, and King wrote the teleplay. So that helped. But King is warm, and Kubrick is cool. Kubrick is very technical and very surface. I mean, his stuff has a depth, but it’s as if being inspected by someone from another planet. King, on the other hand, is very much from the heart and very emotional, not technocratic.

So that parental unit is so fraught and so filled with fear. I want to be the best man, I want to be the best father that I can. I’ve failed, and I’ve got to make up for it. His whole life has now turned to trying to make up for the sins of the father. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, certainly one of my favorite books.

I never went into it feeling like I’d better watch out for comparisons to the Kubrick film, because, first of all, he’s Stanley-fucking-Kubrick, and I’m Mick-fucking-Garris, you know? They’re not on the same level. But, secondly, I never thought we were remaking The Shining. I thought we were doing The Shining for the first time.

I think that’s a good way to look at it as well. Did you end up ever seeing Doctor Sleep?

MG: Oh, yeah, yeah.

I loved both the book and Mike Flanagan's film. They both deeply moved me in the way that King can at his best. I think that it’s a remarkable feat of strength to return to something like The Shining and making it about recovery. And I think Flanagan captured that catharsis extremely well.

MG: I didn’t realize it then, but Flanagan had his issues. He just announced on one of the social media sites that he has been dry for five years. And it shocked me because he’s a friend. I’ve known him for a long time, but I had no idea what he was dealing with.

It’s remarkable how well we can hide things, especially from loved ones and friends.

MG: That’s what these movies and books are about.

I think that that’s why, now as an adult, it scared me in a whole different kind of way. So really, thank you for that. It wasn’t the big scares anymore, but the quiet shame that did a number on me.

MG: Well, it’s interesting. My favorite scene in the movie isn’t scary at all. On the surface, it’s just this one full act between commercial breaks of Jack and Wendy talking. She’s trying to seduce him, and he turns away, and they’re both so good. It’s so well written.

The job of making a movie is to try to heighten through visuals the emotion of the script. So, I was able to play the warm light on her from the fireplace, and, on the other side, the cool light from the moon on his. Just the way those two change places. It’s an 8-minute scene, nothing happens, but they talk to each other. I was completely spellbound watching it happen.

As a kid, I couldn’t understand it. But now, watching it, and having been married for 10 years, it’s heartbreaking feeling the kind of vast distance between them. Even though they’re forced to be close together by circumstance.

MG: Yes, geographically it’s the hotel forcing them together.

I have never been an alcoholic trapped in a hotel, but I can understand the emotional feeling of feeling trapped in a situation, and not finding a way of communicating forward. It’s a wonderful scene.

MG: Like I said, it all comes from writing, and that writing comes from a very personal place.

I’m fascinated by King because he’s written so many books, but he can still put so much of himself and so much personal stuff into the story without fear.

MG: Good writers are really brave. If you can’t reveal something of yourself that you’d rather not reveal, then you’re not doing the work. He’s such a brave man. I admire him in so many things.

I really hope to one day have a chance to interview or just talk to him. I’ve interviewed so many people who I admire, but I’ve always found those opportunities are most interesting when I can learn something from people. And I think he would be an immense source of inspiration.

MG: It’s why I do the podcast. I have learned something from every single one of my guests. There are a couple of them where I don’t like their work, but you’d never know it from the conversation. Because that’s not what it’s about. I always learned something because everybody has a different approach to what they do.

I like interviewing people whose work I don’t particularly like because it forces me to step outside of myself and at least understand that even if they’re doing something I don’t enjoy, they still share the same love. They’re not doing it with different passions.

MG: That’s a really good point.

You’ve been interviewing people and you’ve been writing as well for a long time.

MG: Since I was 12. I was doing interviews at 15 or 16. My first ones were Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling, and when I got into music journalism I did Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

That’s quite a place to start.

MG: You know, I’m really lucky to have been born when I was.

That’s also a point in history where America was going through some major cultural changes.

MG: Huge. Ours was the first generation where we weren’t going to do what our fathers had done before us.

That time and attitude also led to a bunch of very daring kinds of films. Of course, we remember the big ones. We remember Star Wars. But I’ve been trying to look at films that weren’t considered successes. It’s fascinating to see that even those that did not work had some really wild things in them.

MG: And sometimes naive things, too. They weren’t necessarily intending to be transgressive, but they were doing it because that’s just their creative process. There was no money instinct.

I try to imagine someone attempting to pitch, say, Coppola’s first film, Finnegans Rainbow. Like we’re going to be making a movie like that. It would never get made today.

MG: Truthfully, it was a flop then, too. But there were great studio films in the 70s. Because the studio heads realized they didn’t know. At the same time, Dennis Hopper’s movie with Peter Fonda, Easy Rider, the same year that came out, the studio put out Doctor Dolittle. And that’s what they thought the audience wanted to see!

So they realized, we don’t know what the fuck they want. We’re a bunch of old farts who don’t know what the young people are swarming in the theaters for. So, suddenly, you got Harold and Maude, and Easy Rider, and you got The Last Movie. Really, you got Martin Scorsese! Taxi Driver was done for Columbia Pictures, and it works like a studio film. But it sure doesn’t act like a studio film.

It’s almost like a Roger Corman hybrid.

MG: Yeah, but with a real sheen to it because of its technical mastery. But it’s also because of Paul Schrader. Who is so iconoclastic on his own. It was an exciting time to grow up musically too, people were being inventive. There was progressive rock, and all kinds of things going on at the time, that aren’t going on now. It’s all polished and perfect.

A part of me what wonders if that’s why people are clinging so hard onto the past, and why we have so many of these old film revivals and remakes. It’s weird, because all the films they’re trying to remake and bring back, almost all of those films were about letting go and moving on.

MG: And not doing the same thing!

It’s always been a business to make money from the very beginning of movies, but never more than now. Because the stakes are so high, you can make so much money, that they don’t even try. There was a time when the studios were making mid-range thrillers, romances, and different expressions of various filmmaker’s personalities. But it all went into the blockbuster in the last 20 years.

Something has gone terribly wrong when we can’t make even a couple of 5 to 10 million films from all the money that tentpoles are generating.

MG: Well, that’s what they should be able to do with all the billions of profits from things like Marvel. Roll a little bit of that into more experimental things. The fact that there are so many platforms now, should be a boon to creativity. But even those platforms have become obsessed with chasing the big dog. The studios won’t theatrically do number eight of this franchise, so we’ll do it on a streaming service.

But, there’s still so much because of the streamers, and because of A24 and companies like XYZ and Magnolia. Real independent film. We’re still getting great stuff like Talk to Me. It’s fantastic. It’s my favorite movie of the year. I think it’s a masterpiece. it’s genuinely scary.

I remember going going in blind, and 20 minutes in, I realized I was gritting my teeth because I was so scared. I can’t remember when that happened last time.

MG: Same here. I mean, it was genuinely tense.

I’m glad you mentioned streaming services. For all the good they are doing with original content, I can’t help but worry about the lack of ownership and lack of physical media. So I was wondering how you, as someone who has worked on behind-the-scenes materials and documentaries, felt about it? Is it something that’s affected your work at all?

MG: Yes and no. I must confess that most of the movies I consume, I’ll watch on a streamer, I’ll rent on VOD or something, but the important movies, I want to own them. I want to have them on 4k and that sort of thing. Personally, I almost never watch supplemental materials or listen to the commentary tracks. I think they’re really valuable. But for me, I’ll watch and love the movie. I just don’t want to watch it again with a commentary track under it. But I think they’re really important and I think they’re great to have.

But it’s definitely a problem because people don’t want to hold onto them anymore. But the good news is that the horror genre fans, they’re the ones who want to own their favorite. The films are a part of their personalities, and it’s the whole concept of the outsiders being bonded together by the genre.

I talk about this a lot. But you know, you don’t have Western conventions like Night Visions. You don’t have romantic comedy festivals. I think it’s mainly because, until recently, outsiders were the primary people drawn into films of a darker nature. And, by definition, they are not people with a lot of others that they’re bonded to.

And they’re the people who go to something like this, where you are surrounded by people of a similar mind, who share this interest in renegades of cinema, that is not advertised on every billboard. People seek things out. Sure, we have streamers, and they’re not the kind of place where you can find everything. Thank goodness for Shutter!

But it’s a personality trait of the true genre fan. I mean, there are tons of people who will say they love horror. They love Saw. But, you know, those are franchises and they’re fun to enjoy with your girlfriend and popcorn, and a gang of buddies goes out to see it. But the people who really know and love genre stuff are into it deeply, and they feel personally connected to it in ways that other genres don’t attract.

I’m autistic. So I have a hard time relating to certain things. So, it’s thanks to genre cinema, like horror, that has always been about the other. It allows me to have that empathetic experience of enjoying a collective trauma within an audience.

MG: That’s who we identify with: it’s the other, not with the heroes.

When I’m in a movie theater, I know that I’m on the same ground as everybody else, because the emotions are very pure. And I think that is always what drew me to cinema.

MG: Well put.

Tangentially, this relates to your work on Amazing Stories.

MG: Yes! My first job was as a screenwriter.

This was something I didn’t realize, but I had seen No Day at the Beach. And I think this was something you’d written.

MG: Story by Steven Spielberg, script by me.

I thought for the longest time that it was a Ray Bradbury story, and then, watching it again, I was surprised to see it was yours. So I thought that was just a fascinating coincidence, once again.

MG: One of my biggest influences as a kid, and the reason I became a writer, was Ray Bradbury.

Do you think we will ever see that kind of a compilation of talent in a TV series, both in front and behind the camera, again?

MG: Amazing Stories is what inspired me to make Masters of Horror. Ours was horror-specific, whereas Steven’s show, it was much more family oriented. It was an eight o’clock show. And networks only programmed more family-friendly things. So it had a much broader umbrella. But that was what inspired me to do it in the first place. To get the best people in the business together. In our case, it let them run full steam ahead, and we encouraged everybody to make movies that reflected their cinematic personality. That’s the whole purpose.

I read somewhere that Psycho was either the first horror film or even the first film, you ever saw.

MG: It was not the first film. It was probably the first true horror film I saw. I’d seen on television the first movie I remember. And I probably saw the universal classics on TV before I saw Psycho, but that’s not the same.

I saw Psycho at the drive-in theater. I must have been eight years old. So there were the four Garris kids in the back of a station wagon watching. I was the second of three boys, the youngest. And it blew my mind.

But I was the weird one in the family. The elder brother was a very popular athlete, all that stuff. My younger brother was very intelligent and very social as well. My younger sister was a girl, so that made all the difference. In the 50s and 60s, you didn’t hang out with your sister. But watching the film, I was the one that was most affected by it, never realizing that 30 years later, I would direct the sequel!

Was that something that you pursued? Were you just incredulous when it landed on you?

MG: The latter. I did not expect it. I did not know it was in the works. It was made by a division of Universal that was making television programming, but not for the major networks. But for the new cable, which would include pay TV like HBO.

This was made for Showtime and theatrically. So they came to me with the suggestion of Psycho IV, and I just said, this is the one luckiest days of my life. I’ve had a lot of those kinds of days. The Spielberg connection, and the King connection, and all of the things that I’ve been lucky enough to do. But a lot of people would have been intimidated by it. But I already had this naivete of taking on something that had been previously done by Stanley Kubrick.

With Psycho, there had already been a two and three, and it was 30 years of difference. Two was really good, but nobody thought of it as a classic. Three was a critical and financial disaster. So there was so much distance between us and the first film, that I didn’t even think about stepping into those shoes.

It did cause one critic to give me the best worst line I’ve ever gotten in a review: “Director Garris is to Hitchcock what Peoria is to Paris.” Ow. But it was clever.

It’s annoying when it’s clever.

MG: Because it stings!

What struck me about Psycho IV is how ahead of its time it feels. Because now we’ve had Bates Motel, and we have all these shows about the origins of villains, but you were already doing this way back then, and you had the writer of the original Psycho with you. I thought it was an absolutely fascinating character study, full of great moments, like where Norman has burned the house down and it’s still just lingering around him. That’s a very Stephen King kind of moment.

MG: That happens in The Shining, too, where they burn the hotel down.

It’s also the whole case of exorcising your inner demons. I thought that there was a really great connection between those two films. Like the story of Amanda struggling with what is innately a monster inside of her.

MG: Absolutely. And it brings the gender issues into play, which nobody was doing in 1990.

Then there’s the whole discussion of nature versus nurture. How your illness doesn’t define you, which I thought was progressive for the time as well. It’s something that we’re only just now getting around to when everybody’s trying to go back and rewrite how we perceive monsters.

MG: Writer Joseph Stefano did such a great job. I loved the script. When I read it, there were things that were a little old-mannish, and that required a little massaging. But it’s a great script. Because it’s about these characters that are so tortured, and particularly Norman, who is tortured above all, and being able to spend his childhood with him. His teen years, even younger with flashbacks.

Henry Thomas was so fucking good in that film. When I met him, he lived in San Antonio, Texas. I went out there with our producer to meet him. I saw Henry, who stood up and he had those broad shoulders but was also very narrow. He looked just like Anthony Perkins. The same kind of stature. And that was it. We became good friends, and I cast him in the role. But I stumbled on it, just like with Steven Weber. I just stumbled on the right actor.

What strikes me with Henry’s depiction of Norman, and especially in the depiction of Bates as a younger man, is that so many others would be inclined to immediately give him the sunken eyes and a hunchback to emphasize from the very beginning that —

MG: “He’s a monster!”

Yeah, just other him entirely. I thought that it’s an incredibly empathetic story that the film tells.

MG: And it’s the right actor to be empathetic with. Not every actor would bring that quality. But that was Elliot from E.T.! Henry’s so good he makes you forget that.

I can’t help but wonder why we keep going back to explaining old characters.

MG: Well, I think that to non-creative people, like the people who run studios and networks, it’s the only idea they have when they go make a franchise. Well, let’s explain it in the next one. And then let’s explain it further. It’s just kind of a bankrupt endeavor.

I noticed that you also work with another one of my favorite filmmakers, Sam Raimi, and you have a small part in The Quick and the Dead.

MG: Yeah, and he’s in The Stand and The Shining!

He had just done The Stand, and he was doing The Quick and the Dead. So, he said, hey, do you want to come out to be in my movie? I don’t have a line in it, you know, I’m just laughing.

I had just worked with Gary Sinise in The Stand, and Sam had been there, too. So he thought it would be a great idea to have me hang Gary! So that’s basically what it was.

The Stand is another one of those King adaptations that I saw as a kid. It scared the hell out of me. I have an immense soft spot in my heart for it.

MG: It just came out on Apple TV, and you can rent it now in HD. There’s also a Blu-ray, for which they did a fantastic job.

I never thought there’d be a Blu-ray because it was shot in 16mm, and never finished on film. That was done in standard definition video. Nobody conformed the negative, nobody cut the negative or anything. It was all just back and forth digital file. Not even digital. Just standard definition video. But they went back to the negative and reconformed it perfectly. They even color-timed it to look better than it ever.

There are so many scenes in there, like the opening long take that, especially after the pandemic, feel even more terrifying.

MG: It’s amazing how many things in it are so prescient.

It’s also got the same thing that, at the risk of reading into things, seems to repeat in your work. The horror stems from grounded elements. Things that you could imagine happening in your driveway.

MG: What I’ve always said is good horror has to be good drama first. And not all horror films are approached in that way. You get good actors, and they take it seriously. They treat it like it’s real, but that has supernatural elements or elements or whatever it is. Unless it’s Critters 2! But even there you play with it. Play comedy for comedy.

I’d imagine it’s the same thing with Sleepwalkers. At its core, it’s a very sincere and dramatic story, despite everything else that happens.

MG: Despite all the pulpy aspects!

I think this leads back to it being a good drama. Because The Stand is a King story, which is his Lord of the Rings in a way, there’s still a sense that this person could have been a cashier at my store. Whether it’s Norman Bates or Laura San Giacomo’s character in The Stand. I appreciate that you have crafted this kind of career of telling stories that are, ultimately, about the terror of normality.

MG: Thank you. I mean, I try and do it with the writing, as well as when I’m directing somebody else’s material. When you’re writing, you are the character. You are an empath, and you understand them from the inside. You gotta be kind of fucked up. But in the best kind of way.

There’s a very fine line between creativity and madness. If you do it productively, you’re creative. If it’s not productive, that will get you in trouble. You’re nuts. There’s a very, very fine tightrope to walk.

I did tell my partner that one of these days, one of the things I’ve written is gonna get made, and then nobody’s gonna care about my search history anymore.

MG: Or they’ll care even more, and that’s gonna be a problem.

It’s research!

MG: Exactly! “I’m not interested in that stuff. It’s purely on an academic level.”