The Dick Cavett Show Horror Masters Stephen King, Romero, Straub, Levin 1980

[Music] I hate to think how many people my guests have killed among them but I can explain that with fear very big these days and with Halloween and all that we thought it might be good to get together some of the people who produce horrible books and movies that sound very complimentary that might have been worded better but they have scared all of us at some time or other and I would like to introduce to you now these gentlemen who specialize in fear and horror and terror either on the printed page or on the on the screen will you welcome first the author of Carrie and the shining mr. Stephen King and next to him the director of the classic films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead mr. George Romero the author of Rosemary's Baby The Stepford Wives boys from Brazil the play deathtrap mr. IRA Levin and finally the man who wrote ghost story Julia not to be confused with Lillian Hellman's Julia and a new book called shadow land mr. Peter Straub that's our group there's several ways to go at this we could all tell scary stories or we talked about where they come from if I were to say what's the worst thing that you've ever done would that ring a bell with at least one of you and somebody explained that get me off that hook I use that as the start of a novel called ghost story and it's it's keyed into a group of older men who tell stories about the worst thing they ever did or the worst thing that ever happened to them and the ghost story evolves from that you know well what is the appeal do you note is it worth analyzing I should we just say it's just fun to be scared you given any thought to why horror is something people willingly subject themselves I think people enjoy seeing a horror film or reading a scary book the way they enjoy going into a laugh in the dark or on a rollercoaster ride and you go in knowing are you going with high expectations and I think the ones that work on that audience are the ones that really pay off in other words the ones that give you that little zetz and you hear that involuntary response reaction to it that you went in hoping to get I think something else that horror does is society gives points you know for good emotional behavior so we get points for exercising those emotional muscles that society approves of love friendship loyalty humor that sort of thing but for every one of those good emotions we have a dark one as well we have if any error we have aggressiveness we have anger we all have I suppose urges that sometimes tend towards sadism that sort of thing and a horror story or a horror movie gives us a chance to exercise that side in a comparatively harmless way exercise exercise yeah what do you fellas happen to specialize in this field and could just as easily be in another one or if not then mustn't you be weird in some way I work in a car wash yeah I mean I really wonder about that I was trying to tactful way to put it I think Steve enjoy the things we produce I think the same thing we're just producers and their consumers but we're subject to the same emotions and I'm working with has to be some reason that you're in this field and not another one no I think you have a predilection toward it Ira Levin and I discovered that as children we we entertained other children by telling ghost stories to them and so it was there and I think I made mine up but I'm sure he made his up and it was a just a way of exercising our imaginations that we came to very young mm-hmm I was warped as a child a lot of horror comics in my past and a lot of of horror movies and that sort of thing and it did it warped me as a kid and I said yeah yeah seriously warped me and the thing is I think that see they know in the world as it is today though I think if you don't have a few warps in your record you can't get along and that's one of the great appeals that the horror story has has been a lot of analysis a lot of it almost ludicrous it seems to me about horror in the wake of the big hits like George's Dawn of the Dead and and ghost story and The Shining and all of that sort of thing and and really I think what a lot of it is is this sort of harmless blow off for anxieties and bad feelings you know where would we have seen your warp for younger I get rid of most of it through this sort of thing people say well do you have bad dreams and the answer is no I give them all somebody else I sleep well and it works that way for the writer I think of the filmmaker as well I guess there's a kind of blow off and if you didn't have that blow off would you be haunting graveyards and I think you're tapping another another emotion I mean I I've often felt that to some extent with me it was accident there were John refills that I loved of all different types I loved jungle movies and had my first hip in a jungle movie I might be a great jungle movie but so to said that extent it was accidental and but it's I think there's a list of those involuntary emotions laughter if you can make an audience laugh cry startle those are the things that you're really trying to do and that's what you're honing your work down to try to accomplish to get that involuntary response out and it's those involuntary responses that make people say gee that was that was great but when people say about Salem's Lot geez I loved it they're they're basically saying it scared the hell out of me it's it's very it's clear-cut they don't you know it's a it's basically a different response that you get from a reader that read Salem's Lot or Rosemary's Baby then you get from a reader that read the winds of war when they if you ask someone did you like the winds of war they'll go into ten minutes about you know but if you ask someone did you like Rosemary's Baby they they what they immediately respond to is ya scared I mean is it scared yeah I think it goes beyond that I really do and that when people say that I love Salem's Lot I think also besides the wonderful wonderful scares I think they're saying that the scares worked because they they felt involved at a gut level with the people and that the characters convinced them and when they say they liked Rosemary's Baby the same is true and they responded also to the because horror has a great it offers great entree to a social observation and to Center and I think there's a lot of fun in it yeah yeah there's that wonderful moment in in Kubrick's film where Nicholson looks through the door here's Johnny my kids run around say that now I have a three-year-old and a Chinese yeah I have a three year old boy who goes around saying Manny's not another thing is not one of the things that all these genres do I responded to what George said about if his first hit had been a jungle picture because you take all of these things and it's that there's honor this is horror there's for instance the crime picture my god can this be the end of Rico jungle pictures all of these things and what all this genre fiction does mysteries is they make the writer or the filmmaker tell a real story you know and I think in a lot of ways you just gravitate toward that idea of story you want to tell tell tales that's very important I think I think that's the heart of it really that there's a that there is a that there's a story which can engulf you and grab your lapels the way a fairy tale did when you were six years old and you can't but his story you can't tell a story I mean you can't scare anybody less there's a story what's little character scares don't exist in a vacuum so you're forced even it's just now that clipboard moved and no one was near it and you're better I don't know what this is relevant to but Groucho Marx once in Hollywood dinner introduce Barbara says the only man who had never made a horror movie invention anyway well so much for the appeal of it we know that I are wondering if being exposed and immersed in the world of horror as you are numbs you to it in any I think yeah little in the beginning and we're in good hands but then when we see that it's being done right we'll go along with it more and more than anyone else yeah less I mean you're you're immune to things that don't work I think that's what you're saying because you see exactly what they're trying to do or what what isn't working about them but when it works it works better for you because you probably basically cuz you're saying gee why didn't I think of when those of you who didn't write this shining read it where you get it scare you I was I thought it was a great book and it just it bowled me over and I was just I pay thank you it's a there are many people who feel that that book has given them the scare of their lives and you know it's funny because when an interviewer says to me well what scares you you know this is one of the questions you come up against I'm a little bit flabbergasted because my immediate response is let's try to think of something that doesn't scare me you know and in one form or another I can remember for instance my mother when I was just a little kid that they used to have these machines and shoe stores and you look down into the machine and you saw your bones inside it you know in your shoes yes and I had my feet in one of those machines and she gave a scream and said don't do that that that will give you cancer and four weeks after I would look at my feet see if they started to rot yes you know and I put that in a book and I think one of the things that you do after a while unless you you begin to search out the things that scared you the most and try to get rid of them you know that's that's interesting because obviously our first horrors come in childhood in various ways and whether it's the older kid who convinces you that a bogeyman lives in a building that really houses a pump or something or whatever it is and I wondered it maybe it'd be interesting to learn in each of your cases if you had ones like that that you remember that we're striking or maybe were unusually susceptible as cancer I was pretty susceptible but in addition to the boogeyman outside the window I was susceptible to war scares I remember propaganda comic books and things like that that scared the hell out of me and I remember John Cameron Swayze announcing that the Russians had the bomb you know the from when I was first watching the tube those were the things that got to me and I remember that the bombers flying over the Bronx where I grew up and blackouts and things like that yes and those scared the hell out of me inordinately I think I was scared by those ingeniously racist posters that show Japanese with rat bodies coming out of sewers remember those during the world posters well these comic books had people bursting into homes and terrorizing the kids and eventually shooting everybody in the place while dad was often wear those things scared the hell out of me which is maybe why I think that at least in my with my zombie films I I have a kind of a socio-political underbelly and you know in other words I find it I don't know if I find it necessarily frivolous to just go out and be scared don't really because I'm looking forward to a creep show which is a project that yeah we're gonna do together which is just very scare ya just get in there and try scare people no that's fun that's 11 were you scared remember as a kid what's there he was trying to think but I don't recall being scared at all I think that was a very brave kid whereas now yours now [Laughter] I remember never being afraid of the dark I don't know what people were but I never understood sometimes why they kids had to sleep with the lights on I had evil night did you yeah what did you think would get you with the light I didn't even really want to consider it but what it might be but I was sure that I would see it before it got me and that probably my mind would crack open I think it's a kid I was really you know worried a lot about going over the high side and into banana land and never getting back I was very afraid of that as a kid it wasn't so much being grabbed by something from the closet so much she's seeing it sort of coming toward me you know and knowing there would be no escape what it turned out to be my father [Laughter] getting you to admit that can remember when you first read something that made your hair stand up well I couldn't remember something I remember this great Bennett Cerf anthology that I got when I was about 10 called great tales of Terror and the supernatural and I really burrowed into that book and there was some was so scary I could I you know I could barely read it I was prompted to go read the HG Wells version of War of the Worlds after seeing the movie and yeah and the the description in wells which of course the the wells was at first disappointing because it was nothing like the movie but then I started to get into that in the description of the aliens in and in that was the first thing that really scared me on the printed page I closed Dracula yeah sure sure sure you mean the movie that's a great thrilling much scarier than any of the movie versions to do it is isn't it yes they're wonderful things the book you wonder why they didn't do it for the movie there's a wonderful scene that captain les boat comes ashore and a dog is seem to meet Bob which all those incidents have been included one time or another thing they've never been put together I don't think in more show dad version was pretty true to content yeah I thought that was of us yeah mood there was a there was an interesting one with parents a kind of I've never seen that one now the one that you were talking about was the one that was the PBS one right well that was the elephant nice job do you envy people who have seen ghosts as I do I don't know not at all no I do I wonder if if for any reason you would going out of your way to stay overnight and long lead or one of those we go on we go away not to places I really envy people have seen them I can do without seeing a UFO but I certainly would like to see it goes I might see a UFO yeah yeah I'd rather see a UFO I think it goes but you see an army bases we saw one of those things we'd never tell them anyway because they just say who is the the market to put it crassly for for her other age groups that you're playing to if when i when i began i I had an idea that it was mainly younger people mm-hmm but I don't think that's true anymore and I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the book if the book is adults and sophisticated and has the elements that readers look for in in fiction then I think people of all kinds can read it but generally I think it's 18 to 25 or 15 to 25 foot window 15 to 25 and you can see that in the line outside the theater and just for the film case of movies it's yeah yeah no it's it's a lot tougher to scare young people I think yeah why is that it's pretty hard to shock them which is I think probably one of the elements that you that at least has to be lurking around in there and and and it's also I think just on an ex-con an experiential level and I don't I think the more experience you have with things I don't know maybe I'm going too far off the deep end maybe it's just that for those of us that were around before there were all the answers that there are now there were more fears so maybe that I think young people tend to grab on to horror in a more natural way because it does have that quality of the roller coaster ride this sort of big harmless scare you don't see too many little old ladies getting off the bullet or Magic Mountain that sort of thing and there aren't very many say senior citizens that use their golden age or pass to go see zombie your honor or something like that they want to see something else I think that young people can go see a horror movie or pick up horror novel and not feel personally assaulted by it because they feel safe in their own sense of health and and well-being and at the same time I think that a lot of kids feel like outsiders they may feel a little monstrous themselves and they can go see a movie like for instance Night of the Living Dead and they may feel that you know that they have some problems or their peers or whatever it is but the sheriff and then moving somebody says well chief are they are they hard to kill and the sheriff says are now there they're dead they're all messed up [Laughter] what about the so-called moral content of our films and books do you ever consciously put one in or concern yourself with that at all I think it's in general horror is almost by tradition highly moral in fact to the detriment of a lot of it because it people spend too much time bringing things back to a kind of normality which possibly shouldn't have existed in the first place but I think that it's I always been viewed as allegory and there's always a kind of a moral statement underneath it somewhere we're always exercising something that's either been a part of the monster gets destroyed monster gets destroyed unless you want to make a sequel the celebration of daily life really because when the intruder comes in or the bizarre element comes into daily life then it's frightening must be pushed away I think that one of the things that's so unsettling about Rosemary's Baby is the fact that a kind of normal normality surfaces again at the end that makes it either very uneasy because this is motherhood and yet the child is the devil I don't like to keep a little element unreconstructed at the end a little of the horror still loose because I think that makes it work sort of stay in the mind more yes I was not sorry I'm quite tight I realize they're only 30 pages left you don't want everything all right Rosemary's Baby was really landmark in that way terms of thank you really turned a corner in terms of as he said new a new normality at the end rather than what was normal in the first twenty pages coming back to that where and when we realize what's happened and that the child is not going to be used for human sacrifice as Rosemary's thought along at that point I begin rooting for rosemary to throw the kid out a window and is that that moment in the book where the silence and rosemary says you're rocking in too fast and you say no because you know she's gonna just take over and raise the kid yeah I couldn't have noticing the three of you are what might be term heavy smokers can you relate that to fear that anybody can quit smoking but it takes a real man to face lung cancer some for me like Nomar which way it goes tragedy is pessimistic often optimism and comedies optimistic pessimism or is it the other way around it is her writing optimistic finally yes Janek you made an interesting remark ins somewhere that he had to think a minute and then he said will affect it there are ghosts and so much of it indicates that it at least points to a survival of death I don't know but usually unless the author is unduly perverse the heroine survives of the hero and is a better person for the experience yeah it's optimist like it's a affirming really you know most of them when you come down the conclusion London can survive Dracula right you think maybe the humor would would not be compatible with with horror but everybody knows I guess the opposite is true one of the scariest movies I ever saw I was not one of this supposedly scary movies but was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein says you have to follow all that tension with a good laugh I think you can shuffle it right in there and put him in the same stew you know I think it allows it to breathe yeah there's an air hole in there yeah well if you go see a horror movie and something really frightening happens the audience will scream but always following that scream is this nervous laughter which says TRC made ice cream mostly because I needed a stretch and I wasn't really scared and so they work together it's a big difference - between startled and and creating real fear and and most of the effect but I'm again I'm talking movies more than you guys have a lot tougher time because you don't have sound and you can make something jump out but it's a lot easier to startle people with the film and unfortunately you see a lot of that you see a lot of films that rely almost totally on that kind of thing and that's always the nervous laughter kind of that's the real left in the dark experience you know what jumps out at the next corner yeah that doesn't kind of different than kind of too easy it's very easy and anybody can do that just by cutting the right way yeah a quick movement synchronized it's very counting sounds well it's great I mean it's part of the traditional experience you know and it's great but Dawn of the Dead is really just that I mean Dawn of the Dead if if there's any kind of an experience that comes off it it's much subtler or more intellectual other than that it's just kind of a celebration of that kind of experience because that is fun I mean that's yeah that's interesting of what you can do in a film and can't I think it's a Polanski film in which a character moves the bathroom medicine chest mirror and just for an instant it registers that someone is standing in the road and I gives me goose pimples as I think that that could you write that same thing and get the same effect that thing I think you could there are other things that I don't think you can do very effectively there's that thing that De Palma does at the end of the film of Kerry yeah where the hand shoots out of the ground and and grabs Amy Irving and it's not in the book and I think if it was in the book that it would have nowhere near the effect that it has in the movie reading the word is suddenly a hand shot out of the ground is not as scary as do it another way perhaps you know get interesting exercise wasn't it - exercise exercise we have to get that out of here exercise it well there's a lot more to talk about and we're gonna have to talk about a lot more of it next time so George Romero Peter Straub Ira Levin and Stephen King and myself will join you tomorrow night are you afraid to join us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back we thought this is the appropriate season to get together some masters of horror not the people who act it but the people who create it on both the printed page and on the silver screen so that's what we have done and it's been most interesting and if I hope you saw last night's show if you didn't I will reintroduce to you the the gentlemen surrounding me and they seem to be moving closer who's the first to use the moving with the forest moving in closer anyway well you welcome please the author of Carrie and The Shining mr. Stephen King and next like you to meet the director of the classic films cult classic films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead among others mr. George Romero the author of Rosemary's Baby The Stepford Wives boys from Brazil and the play the deathtrap mr. IRA Levin finally man who wrote ghost story julia has a new book called shadow land Peter Straub that's my panel of horror producer you know there's an author that I don't hear much about and it's not very well known I think and if I had to pick one story that I read at an impressionable age that scared the hell out of me it would be the Windigo by Elgin and Blackwood and I can remember right where I sat when I read it and how I what's the two-bit word for when your hair stands up / epilate and you all know that story I don't know I remembered vaguely see you see a well-known the Windigo is the spirit of the North Woods and the idea of it didn't sound promising was misguided to me and it just I think would scare me today if I read it do you all have favorite writers not among those here we assume these are all your favorites of horror yeah he thinks that our masters this well I always go back to Dracula on Bram Stoker I think that is the masterpiece of the John yeah it's silly question I suppose but did he write anything else some short stories and the few other novels that weren't didn't have anywhere near the impact but that's why I named the house and Rosemary's Baby the Bramford for Bram Stoker anyone else have a particular favorite writer who's guaranteed to scare you or did is at an impressionable age I think if you read mr james at the right age he can be very scary he's a little stuffy for a modern tastes to his language is little old fashioned and there's always Lovecraft that's another one my turn to read as an adult I think but yeah allergic fear yeah and other stories that got to me but it's a it's a special kind of weirdness that you have to you know really be ready for that too you have to be ready to sit down with that sort of take that experience from those kinds of you have to take as much to love craft I think is love craft will bring to you and if you can do that you're pretty successful I liked a guy named Richard Matheson I think that he was the first guy that I ever read as a teenager who seemed to be doing something the Lovecraft wasn't doing it wasn't Eastern Europe it was like the horror could be in the 7-eleven store down the block or it could be you know just up the street something terrible could be going on even in a you know a GI Bill type ranch development near a college that it could be there as well and to me as a kid that was a revelation that was extremely exciting he was putting the horror in places that I could relate to did he write I am Legend yeah I am Legend and I've always been telling he's dead and in the shrill yeah sort of in that time in that early 50s was particularly in American rubber block yeah but that's when we as Americans started to sort of blame ourselves yeah and that's when the horror came home it no longer was from Transylvania it was you know I mean once in a while it came from the outer reaches but preyed on on us I'm because I'm speaking from an American perspective but I think that was one of the maths and was one of the first people that was really of course what why don't one of the things that Matheson did that's got to be a classic is that story about the the fellow who's just driving upstate in California and the truck gets on his tail and you never see the driver you never know exactly what his trip is but he's trying to murder this fellow who's played in the movie by Dennis Weaver we're gonna with an oil tanker truck very frightening Spielberg that was first Phil that's the pure thing - yeah really right on target do if a book is good I almost never care where the author got the idea doesn't interest me but in this case I I know that part of survival for you is coming up with ideas to me that would be the toughest part it's a field that's been worked and worked yeah do you mind telling where some of the ideas come from I've gotten most of mine from things I've read newspaper articles nonfiction look something will spark anything of the example of where what when will the Stepford Wives I got the idea for that reading future shock Alvin Toffler book there's a section in there on domestic robots and he speculates on how well they will work then a couple of years to think about it really a couple of years yeah I find with me an idea has to stew for a long time mm-hmm and with the shining can you point to well that was a case where I had half an idea that I got from reading Ray Bradbury and I think some the Dark Carnival stories and about a little boy Bradbury he's got a story called de Velde which is set in the future and there's a nursery where the walls the your mind projects movies on these walls and at the end of the story the monsters inside the walls come alive and eat up the parents who go inside lions and tigers yeah lions and tigers and bears oh my and it seemed to me that okay let's have a kid who can make things real that was half of the idea and then my wife and I were in Colorado and we went up to a hotel called the Stanley in Estes Park and I said this is the place and when I had the place to go with the you know the idea of the little boy everything came together and really I'd had half of that idea just sort of kicking around inside for maybe two years or something not knowing exactly where the drive shaft was that that's something I found and I think it probably applies to all writers not just in this John but every really good idea is the coming together of two half ideals so if suddenly you realize that you've been thinking about project a and project M and if you put those two together suddenly there's a spark and sometimes I think you don't quite realize how parasitic it is to work particularly in a genre like this because the things that made impressions on you that you read or that you saw are in something very often impressions that are really deeply in there somewhere and and I know I find particularly with the filmic style that I very often catch myself being parasitic of some you mentioned the moment with the mirror in in the Polanski film you know those things lay in the back of your head and you walk on the set and you see something and you decide well have a light at this way and shoot it this way and you realize and obvious I know I've seen this back to George that it's a really narrow sort of field and you can't help but step on other people's feet or go over what other people have done don't you think that's true I think it is yeah well I am Legend really is what I wrote and I've living-dead be because I read I am Legend I think and I just want a time I know I wanted to just lay a little more socio-political stuff into that and make it very frontal and overt because rather than just a pure terror piece and I know that that somewhere in the back of my mind it came from that from having read that and saying wait that's not exactly this is more like what it should be you know and it it comes from a kind of a conviction I think knowing that well I can accomplish one of two things I can I can be scary in this way and I can tell that story which is what you were saying before once you have the guidelines you can see you your tendency is to tell the story in a streamlined way because you don't ramble as much you keep bringing it back to that whatever it is that's going to target hopefully the audience in onto something that's going to be frightening do you believe in any of these things do you believe the people who have seen weird things happen do you believe in is it called telekinesis or telekinesis the reasoner can clear a bookshelf of books by his mind or cause the ashtray to leap from the table yeah I don't believe or disbelieve I've always thought that there is such a body of evidence now from people who have no good cause to lie that almost surely I say almost you're only things of that nature do go on from time to time but I don't think that anybody has any real control over it but until I actually see something myself I gotta say I'm just sort of an agnostic that means toward a certain amount of belief on the other hand Steve haven't you had people come up to you and tell you about ghosts they have seen yeah and and they're not liars and they seem perfectly reasonable rational people that's right and you think if this guy's has seen us you know that there is something there something in fact has happened and they don't want anything do they don't want anything what they want to do is tell you because they think that you're a kindred spirit no I suppose this is a real fly [Laughter] [Music] a small yes I don't like to contribute to the fear of spiders because most of them are our friends and someone bring that up here what's the greatest compliment you can get if someone tells you that they couldn't sleep or that they had nightmares you know they have nightmares for a week I think that's a great kind proud of that so there is some little sadism or side ISM where said you know you know somebody Kingsley Amis the very British writer said that what's McDonald's first name who writes the titles that always have a color John Dee John Dee McDonough John Dee McDonald yeah that his book is worth any number of Saul Bellow's there's everything I don't know what and what he were dismissed as the other true to the human heart boys the idea being I guess that for one thing this is not a John were to be ashamed of although many people would say highbrow people don't reread that stuff you ever feel defensive that you have to justify being in this field that is not quite up to say Henry James even though yeah of course Henry James wrote wonderful ghost stories and Edith Wharton wrote wonderful go stars yeah but the field is so filled with junk at the moment that it has it's the sub-basement of writing but actually instead of being defensive I think one should be happy about it because you can do anything you can think of and no nobody the partisan review is going to notice I think it's one of the men sitting here is publisher said that he is in fact simply the biggest selling author in the world would it embarrass him if I pointed him out and I know you have a cult following to the point where when your name appears on the screen it gets a hand and the credits know that people are just so grateful of the way you've terrorized my children into the night people like to be scared I as far as being defensive I think the first thing that you have to get over is that that immediate reaction well just how weird are you are you alright can you be taken out in company what are you going to do what have you done that sort of thing and when you get around that then I think in most cases people will accept you as a rational man who does sort of an irrational thing in his spare time Robert Bloch who wrote psycho said that he of course one of the things that Bach said that I always loved was he said he really had the heart of a small boy he kept it in the jar on his bed he said that the writer of this sort of thing is a Jekyll and Hyde he's a werewolf creation and you're good to your children and you're good to your wife and you answer your mail and you don't snore them at the milkman it's just that when you go in the study you put on that other face I've known George Romero for what two and a half years I guess now and George really is the nicest fellow that you would ever want to meet he's he's big hearted warm kind all of that stuff I get paid for this you know you put on that face and you're going after people we talked about Creepshow this project that we're involved in and this is not a park or anything like that the idea is when we talked about it we talked about a lot of ideas and George would kind of go well yeah George would say something and I came yeah but and we started to talk about this concept and the idea was just to get people into a movie theater close the doors and see if we couldn't get them to actually krama with your jubie's and popcorn in their hair and some high his eyes because that's what you want to do and if you're gonna do it you want to go do it that it's sort of instead of kicking the chair that's right does anyone remember the Tingler yes am i right or wrong about this that some place they had the idea of and then did in fact install some little electric device and so the scenes which reached out and grabbed people or give them a [Music] mild electric shock produced that film and he bought Rosemary's Baby and I remember the day when he called and said that he had decided not to direct it himself even Roman Polanski and was I terribly unhappy are those gimmick things remember the fright break in homicidal there's a all of a sudden there's as the movie approaches its climax a big clock comes on the screen and then the announcer says this is the fright break and if you're weak of heart you're supposed to get out of the theater you have 60 seconds to do it then there was the house on Haunted Hill which had the skeleton that came out of something you know was dropped because it is screening it the skeleton fell on and executives had and so it was kind of drunk but he was also the guy who had you do an insurance policy in the lobby that was before macabre yeah I was about ten then all my friends called it Macbeth and that was the big movie everybody wanted to go see me bear that some of you had to sign an insurance policy and if you croaked you've got thousands was worth it I often wonder when you're reading a really good and complicated thriller or horror but you think if my life depended on it I couldn't figure out how to end this or where it's going or what's going to explain what's going on does anyone ever write that way by writing you themselves into a corner and then figuring out a way out the way some magicians will decide what effect they want and then figure out a way to do it I always have to know where I'm going to ends I don't know how I'm going to get there but I have to at least have the end in mind and then I sort of take a chance on being able to find my way there yeah what would rosemary be an example of that did you yes and I really didn't know what what the resolution would be or no I really couldn't get started on it until I knew that she was going to accept the baby in the end but then I didn't much care about the middle because I figured I would take care of it I got there and I did yeah but but I couldn't start I literally could not begin it and I realized that it was because I wasn't sure how it was going to end and once I made up my mind on that it seems like one thing that would separate the good from the bad either in film or fiction was obviously the ending is a disappointment at the end and you know I've been had all along again that I don't that depends as you say if he knows if you know really where you're going I think that for example the ending in the birds was disappointing to a lot of people forget the ending they just sort of go out of the house and drive off to get Tippi Hedren to the hospital and then there are birds all over the place and they just sort of drive away and and a lot of people felt there was really no resolve to that you tell people started to dig into it a little bit and find out what the attitudes of the film were towards the whole idea of family and all that how did the story isn't it from de Maupassant they look so much alike you ever every basic characters oh and real people even relatives or friends I think that most writers not just horror writers do that to a degree and I found myself in a lot of cases stewing together two or three people that I may have met or I may have seen to make a completely new character it's a little bit like those flip books that my kids have where you can make a thousand different faces from you know three two series of segments you know the hairline and the eyes and the rest so and usually that works pretty well and then every now and then you will see somebody that you don't know and you'll just say what's this guy about and then character becomes a kind of adventure as you try to to figure out exactly who they are what they're doing Hitchcock was a great one at that wonderful character studies there in those films what about the erotic side of it to some people fear itself is an erotic stimulant I think there's an erotic subt most supernatural fiction and then maybe some of the fear is a sexual fear but the most most I don't think Stephen King has ever written a sex scene in the book have you I don't remember any Wow I'm trying I need more experience they're not as a realism in Salem's Lot I find I find so you know in a way with no Harold Robbins yeah oh no I'm talking about Dracula earlier and Dracula is a tremendously sexy book and of course Salem's Lot came from my wife saying one night at supper I was teaching that book in high school and she said what do you suppose it would be like if Dracula came back today and it was one of those ideas that you'd forget about it for a while it would pop back up and one of the decisions that I made in that book pretty consciously was to use a little bit of that but not to try and use that sexual sub current a lot because I thought in a world where we've got not only the Penthouse Forum but god help us penthouse variations and every other thing that in a way that might be an empty car now then a lot of the sex that was in Dracula came from a repressed Society of saying this is okay it's alright for this man to come into your bedroom and give you a hickey in the middle of the night because he's a vampire and you can't help yourself okay but there are people who theorized that that that repression and oppression are really at the root of all of the horror experience totally and related to very closely to repress sexual you know I don't know whether you were saying before that some of the stuff that's been written about why why are is pretty low goes over the edge you know how does it Center into the rating system of a film whether it gets an R or well does it ever get an X for recently recently the rating system as we presently know it has been rating violence as toughly if you will as they rate sex it's it's a difference of two monsters cut each other's heads up that would seem to be more okay than if two normal people do well I feel that it's more okay or I don't feel that it's I don't feel that it says traumatizing I also happen to think that that whether it be its sex violence whatever that they should be well rated is as an unfortunate word but maybe there should be at least information passed out to the audience which says this contains this this contains this language whatever I don't I think that unfortunately the rating system in this country thank God it's something short of censorship but it's it's confusing X rated as a phrase has entered our vocabularies meaning sex before having a sexual connotation and unfortunately the X rating is not copyrighted it's not a copy righted trademarked as the PG the G and they are are so the X says was kind of thrown out there for you know people who were making Motel mooney movies anybody can use it and you're not infringing on anyone's copyright so there are problems with the rating system enemy but yes they are Xing violence Dawn of the Dead was probably would have been an X but we went out without a rating simply because we felt that it would have been confusing to put an X on a picture we put information on all of the advertising material which said this film is very violent everything else but we didn't want people to confuse it as having a sexual or a pure are a purely sexual has no sex in an erotic overt sex no overt change maybe sex between monsters do you get weird though male sex with dragons Dracula's Bride of Frankenstein right a Frankenstein but that doesn't come off the two of them don't get along at all she say when she sees him [Music] we always suspect the Dracula's off there with this no pun intended I want to go into this too deeply but you know it it the section in most vampire stories is all a kind of oral thing it's all a kissing thing in the novel there's no we have no idea that he's a certainly a great lover he almost seems dead from let's say the those parts were censored out back in that Victorian I believe he has a moustache in the novel which bothered me because I wanted to picture Bale to go see as I read it do you get strange male track who's strange letter writers what sort of strange mail I get asked if I can put people in touch with covens of witches if I can explain mysterious events that have taken place on the other side of the world I can remember getting a letter from a fellow who wanted to come up he said he had a magic Polaroid camera and he standing behind me in a diminishing mind would be my father my grandfather his you know on and on presumably back to primordial but I don't don't answer that sort of later movie just as well as a filmmaker you get sure pretty much the same kind of thing again I think as Peter mentioned and what you're talking about with people that write about strange Polaroids people do expect you to be kindred spirits so most of the strange I've never gotten any sort of hate mail or anything like that it's usually the strangest things are people who expect that you're going to understand Iren I met a guy well we tried not to meet him the fellow who said he could tell a future by not using not by using est another way if we had a technique and he he told I read there's a shirt this thing a great book could be made of it something we re we scare it away I'm sorry we're we're out of time again thank you gentlemen for being here and George Romero Peter Starr Strava me Pyrrha Levin and Stephen King the fly has gone into my head strangely and I'm care we'll see you next time [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: VCRRepair76

Views: 56,927

Rating: 4.9457994 out of 5

Keywords: Dick Cavett, masters of horror, Stephen King, George Romero, Peter Straub, Ira Levin, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Rosemary's Baby, It, Carrie, Christine, Cujo, Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary, The Shining, The Dark Tower, Gerald's Game, Misery, The Stand, Needful Things, Ghost Story, This Perfect Day, Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, Day of the Dead, Creepshow, Martin, The Crazies, interview

Id: Rk4bKL328Lg

Length: 55min 59sec (3359 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/metalgear1355]

Such a great roundtable. Also, RIP George, you're missed...

[u/[deleted]]

This creeps me out because The Dick Cavett Show is before my time and the only association I have with it is from Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors.

[u/mieiri]

Give us talisman 3 =(

[u/WinWithoutFighting]

Hey thank you for sharing. I saved it when I realized it was an hour long and just now watched. Fun to see these legends sit and talk.

Also, so many cigarettes. I kinda want one.

[u/PofiePofie]

How come his teeth don’t look like that anymore it looked good