Masters of Horror

Did You Know?

• Series creator Mick Garris stated that Showtime opted not to renew the third season and that Lionsgate had begun funding the series.
• A new show called Fear Itself was created with the same premise as Masters of Horror, premiering on NBC in June 2008.
• IDW Publishing produced comic book adaptations of several episodes, with the first two covers painted by Jeremy Caniglia.

Origin

It all started with a dinner. In 2002, filmmaker Mick Garris gathered ten director friends at a Sherman Oaks restaurant: John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli, Joe Dante, Guillermo del Toro, Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, John Landis, William Malone, and Garris himself. Those dinners became a regular thing, and soon other horror and genre directors were invited, including Dario Argento, Eli Roth, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, James Gunn, Ti West, and many more.

In 2005, Garris turned the idea into a TV series for Showtime: an anthology of one-hour movies, each written and directed by one of these masters. It premiered October 28, 2005, to strong reviews, with Don Coscarelli’s “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” (based on a Joe R. Lansdale story) leading the way. New episodes aired Fridays at 10 p.m. Eastern across two seasons. The show later found a home on Chiller’s Sunday lineup in 2009, and in 2010 the Reelz Channel broadcast edited versions (still TV-MA) with commercials.

Episodes

The fourth episode, "Jenifer," was mistakenly released on-demand at the same time as the second episode, "H. P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House," for a limited group of viewers. Its initial TV broadcast was edited to remove graphic violence; those deleted scenes appear only in a separate featurette on the Region 1 DVD. The thirteenth episode, "Imprint," was pulled from its scheduled January 27, 2006, premiere by Showtime because of content worries. Series creator Mick Garris called it "the most disturbing film I've ever seen." The episode is exclusively available on DVD and Blu-ray from Anchor Bay Entertainment, and it aired in the UK on Bravo on April 7, 2006.