American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium

HOW THE MASTERS OF HORROR MASTER THEIR PERSONAE: Self-Fashioning at Play in the Masters of Horror DVD Extras

193 how The MaSTerS of horror MaSTer Their PerSonae Self-Fashioning at Play in the Masters of Horror DVD Extras —Ben Kooyman Masters of Horror (2005–2007) is a television anthology series that debuted on October 28, 2005, on U.S. cable network Showtime and ran for two seasons. Each season comprises thirteen self-contained hour-long episodes, each directed by a different “Master of Horror”:a director deemed to have made a significant contribution to the horror genre. The show and the special features attached to its subsequent DVD releases (director interviews, tributes from past collaborators, commentaries) are exercises in self-fashioning for contemporary horror filmmakers; that is, they provide a site where directors can fashion and master their public personae. The Masters of Horror project is an attempt to bestow prestige upon genre practitioners: it asserts that auteurship exists within horror cinema, and that the genre deserves greater critical respect. However,the DVD special features are sites of tension between self-fashioning and self-sabotaging impulses that materialize throughout the self-fashioning process , while the selection process behind the series—who is involved and why—calls into question the legitimacy of the title of Master of Horror. This chapter offers a deconstructive analysis of both the Master label and the self-fashioning motifs that run through the DVD extras, and will explore tensions circulating around and within the project, with a particular focus on directors Stuart Gordon and John Landis, their season-one episodes, and the accompanying DVD paratexts. Ultimately , I wish to suggest that the assortment of tensions constituting the series is dialectical.1 ben kooyMan 194 Sir GarriS and The GriSly kniGhTS The following promotional passage is an example of typically hyperbolic advertising for the series that appeared in a trailer for the show’s second-season DVD releases: They are possessed by the dark . . . They share an obsession for terror . . . 13 all new terrifying tales . . . 13 visionary directors . . . 13 hours of mind altering fear . . . From the Emmy Award winning anthology . . . Masters of Horror2 This passage proclaims that the Masters of Horror are visionaries obsessed with terror and possessed by darkness who will, if given the opportunity, alter your mind. Such exaggerated assertions position the filmmakers as real-life equivalents of the director of La Fin Absolue du Monde, the fictional film that triggers insanity at the center of John Carpenter’s episode “Cigarette Burns” (2005). This sort of hyperbole continues a tradition of horror movie advertising dating back to the Universal monster movies of the 1930s starring the likes of Boris Karloff; while the appropriation of this style is perhaps deliberately ironic, when taken at face value it complicates our consideration of the Master denomination, especially given its incongruity with the more tongue-in-cheek origins of this denomination (and, indeed, a number of the episodes). Masters of Horror arose, humbly enough, from a series of bimonthly dinners in which horror filmmakers got together and, half-jokingly and half- knowingly, labeled themselves the“Masters of Horror.” The series itself was masterminded and spearheaded by one of these Masters, Mick Garris, best known for directing the television miniseries of The Stand (1994) and The Shining (1997). Garris recalls how the dinners came about, and by extension how the show came into being: For a long time, a lot of us who worked in the genre, film directors, had been saying,“Oh, we ought to get together sometime, it would be great [to] do this” [. . .] It took weeks to schedule a night where everybody could make it. So we had a dozen guys—John Landis, John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, and so on—and we all had such a great time, that a couple of months later we did another one and it took me an hour to put it together. I’ve been wanting to do an anthology series for a long time, so this kind of eased the way. (Wilson) Self-faShioninG aT Play in The MASTERS OF HORROR dvd exTraS 195 The directors who contributed to the show’s first season were Garris,John Carpenter , Stuart Gordon, Don Coscarelli, John Landis, Lucky McKee, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante, John McNaughton, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, William Malone, and Takashi Miike.3 While each episode of the series is completely distinct, the episodes are linked together as a series by the same introductory credit sequence, which features drops of blood raining down on...