IT’S THE BOOZE TALKIN’: Bring Back Masters of Horror!

Last Updated on July 23, 2021

Bring Back Masters of Horror!

A while back I wrote one of these columns begging for a truly great horror television show. It seems I might get what I asked for in Frank Darabont’s ‘The Walking Dead’ when it airs on AMC in the near future. Until then we’ve got ‘Happy Town’ which could possibly be canceled before I finish writing this sentence. I’ve decided to focus my efforts on one project that had everything going for it when the producers decided to repackage the concept and sell it to network television. Sadly, the day ‘Masters of Horror’ turned into ‘Fear Itself’ was the day I stopped watching.

There was something special about giving these directors the power to do anything they wanted to on Showtime. The gore, the nudity, the language – it all has it’s place within the perfect horror short. Network television has nothing to offer me in the genre. Off-screen kills and random blood-splatter can’t even measure up to the lowliest of straight-to-DVD efforts anymore. The scares might be there but everything else that made these episodes special was taken away before the fans of the show even knew what happened. Hit or miss, you knew every new hour of this series was going to attempt to get under your skin in ways ‘Happy Town’ could only dream of.

It wasn’t all about the boobs and bloody carnage either. It was about getting to watch unfiltered new material from the likes of John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, and John Landis, guys that seemed thrilled about the chance to release some of the fucked-up images stirring around in their heads for the last 2 or 3 decades. All of them helped define the genre not too long ago but have been pushed to the back of the bus in order to let the modern American horror film continuously shit all over itself.

Maybe it’s the booze talking but I’m not asking for perfection here. I just want an hour a week that I know won’t pull any punches (unless you’re Takashi Miike, who’s too fucked up for anything involving a television) and be true to fans of the genre, not to whoever still might be up waiting for Leno to start.