Director Mick Garris had an idea. Why not invite some of his horror director friends out to dinner? He made a reservation at Café Bizou, a nice French restaurant over in Sherman Oaks. Mick quickly assembled a guest list, and I was lucky enough to be on it.
I had no idea what to expect as I arrived at the restaurant. I had been friends with Mick for a while but had only a passing acquaintance with a couple of the other horror directors. Here was his guest list: John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape from New York), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Stuart Gordon (Reanimator), John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), Larry Cohen (It’s Alive), Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone), and Bill Malone (House on Haunted Hill).
I was excited as I entered the restaurant to find Mick and John Landis waiting by the bar. Cries of “Don, Don!” came from the two and I was warmly greeted by them both and offered a drink. This pattern would repeat itself as each invitee arrived; quickly it was like a gathering of old, dear friends. As we sat down to dinner I noticed a remarkable thing—no one wanted to talk about themselves. Everyone was asking questions about the other directors’ films. It quickly became apparent that more than just horror directors, I was sitting with a group of diehard horror geeks!
Also in attendance were a young director friend of Mick’s, Robert Parigi, and the greatest movie prop collector on the planet, Bob Burns. It was fitting that Bob had been invited, as his home was a world-renowned museum of sci-fi and horror geekery containing rare memorabilia and props from all of our favorite genre films. I had recently visited what is referred to as “Bob’s Basement” and was fortunate to be allowed to personally sit in the actual Time Machine prop from George Pal’s epic 1954 film. This original time machine was lovingly and meticulously restored by Bob and was a stunning work of art. Sitting in this amazing craft made me feel as if I was Rod Taylor traveling back through time. Bob’s home museum, which was a large two-story addition onto his modest Burbank home, was packed to the rafters with cool stuff. The front section was filled with screen-used Alien and Terminator props. Digging deeper were pieces from the original Outer Limits, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the absolute prize of Bob’s collection—the original armature model from Universal’s 1933 King Kong. While wandering through Bob’s massive collection, I also managed to accidentally trip over something in the passageway. I suddenly realized I had kicked the one-of-a-kind “Mankind” sphere prop from one of my favorite sci-fi films of all time, Invaders from Mars. I gently put it back in its place and nobody realized I had dislodged such an irreplaceable and valuable prop. Sorry about that, Bob!
This directors dinner was the first time that I had met several of my favorite horror movie directors, including the irrepressible Larry Cohen, who was one of the great indie writer-directors from New York working in the genre in the seventies and eighties. Larry created the terrific low-budget 1974 film It’s Alive about a killer baby, which was a personal favorite of mine. He told some great stories about the difficulties of shooting the opening sequence of that film, in which a woman gives birth only to watch her newborn slaughter all the doctors and nurses in the delivery room.
We did not only talk about movies. John Carpenter had recently been taking helicopter flying lessons and taught me the ins and outs of levitating the whirling contraption using the “collective” and other flight controls. And I told him about my misadventures with helicopters on The Beastmaster.
Tobe Hooper was the antithesis of what one would expect for the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He was such a sweet and gentle man, with a deep baritone Texas drawl. I told Tobe about how much I loved his Salem’s Lot miniseries and what a great series of scares he created with Austrian actor Reggie Nalder as the vampire master.
I enjoyed meeting Bill Malone, who had recently done an excellent job directing the remake of House on Haunted Hill. Like Bob Burns, I was fascinated to learn that Bill had a large collection of movie props himself, including major pieces (Robby the Robot) from the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet.
John Landis was the raconteur of the bunch, with wild stories of major Hollywood legends that he had met over the years, from Alfred Hitchcock to Don Rickles to even Jerry Lewis. John was a student and a fan of movies his entire life and made a point of meeting as many screen legends as he possibly could while they were still alive. He knew everybody!
Stuart Gordon and I had met previously and I was a huge fan of his work on great films like Reanimator and From Beyond. Stuart had a great sense of humor and I was surprised to learn that he had been collaborating on theatrical productions with writer David Mamet since their college days.
I had never met Guillermo del Toro. He was a very sweet guy with an ebullient and gregarious personality who had started his career as a makeup effects artist in Mexico City. He was about to depart the next day for Prague to direct a new film entitled Hellboy so the dinner also served as his send-off. I told Guillermo what a fan I was of his early films, including Cronos and especially The Devil’s Backbone. I was extremely flattered to hear from him that Phantasm had been an inspiration for him and that our sphere prop had influenced his design of the scarab-shaped mechanical objects in Cronos.
Mick’s dinner was such genuine fun for all of us that Mick would go on to schedule many more of them over the next decade. Along the way his dinner list grew to include some of the greatest genre filmmaking talents of our time, including James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring), David Cronenberg (Scanners), Dario Argento (Suspiria), Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary), Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead), Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects), Ernest Dickerson (Juice), Quentin Tarantino (From Dusk Till Dawn), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Eli Roth (Hostel), James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), Tom Holland (Child’s Play), Katt Shea (The Rage), Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror), William Lustig (Maniac), Lucky McKee (May), Joe Lynch (Mayhem), Adam Rifkin (The Dark Backward), Adam Green (Hatchet), and many more.
At the end of the night when it came time to pay the dinner tab, I think Mick was stunned to find that when he counted up the contributions from everybody he had a couple hundred dollars in overpayments. His guests were having so much fun that all the directors kicked in way more money than we had to. Out of gratitude, we insisted that Mick keep the overage money, but Mick dutifully promised to hang on to it and apply the additional funds to the next dinner.
Some might say that the moniker applied to this group of directors is unseemly and smacks of Hollywood ego. Not so. Let me tell you where the name came from. At that first dinner there was a table nearby with the family of a young woman celebrating her birthday. It was getting a bit raucous over at the directors’ table and the laughter and hilarity probably impacted her birthday dinner in a negative way. At the end of the evening, as this woman’s birthday cake was being delivered to her table, Guillermo interceded. He jumped up and, with a deep chivalrous bow and tongue placed firmly in cheek, profoundly announced to her, “Please accept our felicitous best wishes to you on your birthday from the … Masters of Horror.” The woman blushed and we all burst into cheers. The name stuck.