I met author John McCarty (Splatter Movies) at the recent Fangoria Weekend of Horrors Convention in New Jersey, where he showed clips from his documentary, Fearmakers.
I was fascinated by his determination in chronicling the notable creative people that have made horror cinema a passion for horrorheads everywhere, and asked him the following questions.
What led you to create the documentary Fearmakers?
Around 1994 or so an editor at St. Martin’s Press approached me to do a book on the directors behind the cinema’s most enduring – i.e., classic – horror, SF, and suspense films. I called the book The Fearmakers and it profiled around twenty of them, from Benjamin Christensen to Stuart Gordon.
A year or so after The Fearmakers was published a Texas-based filmmaker with whom I was working on another book called The Sleaze Merchants suggested turning The Fearmakers into a television series. He got a Texas-based production company interested and we selected a baker’s dozen of the filmmakers profiled in the book for the episodes, and taped the series in 1996, interviewing actors, directors, film technicians, and so forth on both coasts. I served as on-camera host (a mistake I always believed) and narrator.
When the series was completed, it was shopped around, and sold well overseas, to Japan, the Middle East, France, Britain, etc, where each territory was able to substitute me with an on-camera host of their own speaking their own language. The series never received any domestic play in the States, and was never released on DVD here, probably because it lacked a “name” as host, even though the shows themselves were filled with name interviewees, from John Carpenter and Richard Matheson to Joe Dante and Stuart Gordon.
About a year ago, I contacted the production company in Texas and made a deal with them to take over the show and re-do it on my own, cutting them in on any domestic distribution deal I might make. I retained myself as narrator, but eliminated myself as on-camera host so as not to have a host at all. I’d always had a fondness for making films and not just writing about them, so I was not unfamiliar with the filmmaking and editing process. The digital realm had opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us would-be auteurs so I acquired some heavy-duty movie editing software programs and went to work, completely re-fashioning the baker’s dozen original episodes into the package of ten half-hour programs available now, which I am taking to market. It’s a labor of love, aimed squarely at us fans of the genre.
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