VF Exclusive: Interview with John Kenneth Muir
John Kenneth Muir’s Official Website
KF- I’ll start with the general. First off, one of my best friends is Chris Muir, and he is related to John Muir the naturalist. Are you?
JKM - I think so but I don’t know for sure. My ancestors were in Hoboken, New Jersey. One was a fire chief, in Hoboken, New Jersey in the 1880s, his name was John Muir. I have his fire lantern as an heirloom. I like to claim I’m related to the other John Muir, but that might be a lie.
KF - I’ve read other interviews and things, and I don’t want to step on info that’s already out there, so…
KF-…what sorts of educational interests did you pursue in school and did they inform your choice to eventually quite your day job and write about film, or were they always toward that goal?
JKM - I wanted to be a film writer/critic ever since second grade. I’ve said I’d wanted to be a film critic ever since sixth grade. I remember doing things like “what do you want to be when you grow up” and I always said I wanted to be a film critic. Certainly, and this sounds stupid, but one of the most important classes I took was “Touch Typing” in middle school. Because it enabled me to write, I got to be able to type like 90 words a minute.
KF - That’s what instant messenger taught me, AOL Instant Messenger. I used to hunt and peck. But because I had to have eight conversations at once…
JKM - …right, you learn a useful skill. In high school I was the editor of my paper for three years. That helped a lot and I wrote the film reviews, so I got a taste of it, as well as being the “editor” and reporting. Then, when I went to college…wait, let me go back a little bit. I really wanted to be a filmmaker, I practiced filmmaking in high school and made a lot of amateur films. I wanted to go to a film school, but my parents felt very strongly that I should go to a liberal arts school. I got waitlisted at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. I eventually got in, but I got waitlisted. I did go to University of Richmond, where I met my beautiful wife. It was a liberal arts education , I was kind of bummed, but my academic advisor was Bert Cardulo. He is the protégé of Stanley Kauffmann, who writes for The New Republic. Stanley Kauffmann taught him and he taught me. He learned of my interest and he got me, in my Freshman year, into Sophomore-level Drama classes that he was teaching. Then, in my Sophomore year, he got me into his film class and he started doing independent studies just for me. That resulted in what my whole course load was. I had “Masterpieces of the French Cinema.” He did a film program every Sunday where he would show two films. My education, while not formally geared toward film, became that. I was just incredibly lucky.
KF - I felt that way to. I’ve been able to swindle a lot of independent research. Following that, though I garner that you’ve been a life-long fan, what is it specifically about the series Space: 1999 that made it the topic of your first published book? How did your relationship with that series make you get to the point where you could write a novel about it?
JKM - Well, Space: 1999 is my first entertainment love. It aired when I was six years old. My parents put me down in front of it and to me it was absolutely what the future would be. Unlike Star Trek, which is really bright and full of primary colors, gaudy, and fake (but I love it), Space: 1999 was sort of minimalist white, they actually had to worry about fuel. They had to wear space suits, which were very detailed. It seemed very realistic to my six-year-old mind. The stories they told were all these things that left questions in my mind. The stories never ended up very tightly, they always left with questions - how did this happen, why did it happen? The characters all could ruminate on that. The whole idea around Space: 1999 is that space is a mystery, that sometimes its wonderful and sometimes its horrific. We’re technologically and psychologically unprepared to go there, so our reactions to it are sometimes as much a danger as the things we encounter. That really stuck with me. I think it was Nicholas Meyer, who directed some of the Star Trek movies, who said that the essential qualification of art is that there is some aspect missing of it that you fill-in yourself. Music you don’t see, so you put the images in your head. Art (painting) doesn’t have movement in it, but you put that in. For me, Space: 1999 is that because its not neatly wrapped up. It lead me into thinking about all of these things. What kind of universe is it where these kinds of things can happen? Its so weird, some of their stories were very circular and odd, the end is the beginning/the beginning is the end…
KF - There’s ambiguity that a lot of television didn’t have…
JKM - It left that blank spot in my psyche, for me to fill in. I actually began writing my Space: 1999 book in 10th grade. It wasn’t what I ended up using, but I thought “Man, no one has written a book about this, I’m going to watch them and I’m going to write about it.” In my 20s I was pretty aimless, I simply didn’t know what to do. I thought to revisit Space: 1999. I became an obsessive collector, had all of the episodes on laserdisc despite at first not even having a laserdisc player. I finally got all of the episodes and had finally achieved my dream. I started writing the book again and Kat said “why don’t you send that to somebody?” Space: 1999 is something, that for me, has been totally wonderful. I did interview Catherine Schell who played Maya. I didn’t really know, even though I had been in journalism, how to get in touch with people. I’ve done a lot of learning in my career. I was able to meet and interview a lot of the cast members. We ended up going to conventions - I met Barry Morse, I met Nick Tate, I got to interview Martin Landau, I met the writer Johnny Byrne. What was wonderful was that Johnny Byrne was a scriptwriter and he “validated” all of the things that I had said, you know? I felt that there were some things maybe I don’t get. Ken Russell for one - I’d like to read your (KF’s) takes on his work. He’s tough and I’m sort of intimidated by him. Space: 1999 is something that I feel like I totally and completely “get.” That’s why I feel that I was able to transform that into writing a novel.
KF - Now you say that each of the books you write are about a series, filmmaker or films that you’ve been interested in and love. Have you ever started to dislike a filmmaker, series or subgenre once you started being critical of it and looking at it in a different light? You’ve done some diverse things - have you ever, after a while, started to say “this isn’t all that special?”
JKM - Yes, I have. I don’t want to say who, but that has happened to me. What I’ve also learned is that there is nothing that can potentially destroy your idols for you more than having to interact with them, interview them, and speak with them. Or attempt to speak with them. Unfortunately, as I’ve tried to integrate more and more interviews into my books - and I’ve had lovely interviews with people like Fred Willard, all the people involved with Kevin Smith (all those people are great, as is Kevin Smith) - but there are some people out there who you realize are terrible, terrible people.
KF - Best left on the screen.
JKM - Its better to interpret their art than to interface with the artist. It is better for me to have my interpretation of their art than it is to for me to know what they think about their art. There’s a conundrum in what we do. Its better for me to theorize, sometimes, than it is to “know.”
KF - You’ve accrued a lot of experience doing freelance film writing. Most people, myself included, will probably never be able to do that. (Solely, as I want to teach as well and other have similar programs in mind). What is a typical day like as a freelance writer, and what sort of variety is there? I imagine that typing for 8 hours straight is not what a days is like. You obviously watch a lot of films and series. How does your work day go?
JKM - How I work right now is that I get up and am “at work” by 7:00 am. I spend an hour or so doing my blog and working on my website, keeping up-to-date there. Then I go into the book-project I’m currently working toward. Because I’m on the East Coast, I wait until the afternoon to make my calls, to networks, agents, managers, whomever, to try and set things up. I do that for a few hours. Then I go back into the writing: I generally don’t do the heavy lifting writing in the afternoon - my brain works much better in the morning. I relegate most of my viewing to the evenings, as I do it with my wife Kathryn. Also the weekends. Right now we’re watching 10 or so films a weekend, 5 films a day.
KF - Geez. That’s a lot.
JKM - It is.
KF - When I worked at a video store, I did the three-films-a-day thing, as I got the free rentals, but that’s invariably a lot of time.
JKM - The saving grace is that most horror movies of the 1980s are 90 minutes or less…
KF - …Sleepaway Camp II being 75 minutes. I just got the box-set, so…
JKM - Right, right.
KF - Continuing with that, then…pictures from your website illustrate your huge memorabilia collection. Really briefly, how many films do you own, how much money goes into collecting items related to them, and how much do you spend on acquiring materials for your work?
JKM - Oddly enough, my collection of toys and memorabilia is something that I’ve carried with me my whole life. Some of the toys I have are the actual toys I had in my youth. I don’t actually put a lot of money into it. Probably the most money I ever put into it was in the early 1990s when I was getting back “into” Space: 1999, and at that point those things were collectibles. Kathryn’s very nice: for our first or second wedding anniversary she got me the cardboard playset of Moonbase Alpha from Space: 1999. It was $75.
Kathyrn Muir - What romance!
JKM - Yeah! I think for the next one she got me a Planet of the Apes lunchbox and a Space: 1999 stungun. About ten years ago I was spending a good deal of my excess income, but that was before I quit work to start writing. I don’t have that much excess income now!
KF - With films, do you rent most of them or do you buy most of the films you examine? If you write a book on roughly 500 films, how do you get access to most of them?
JKM - I’ve learned to be better about selecting my material. If I’m doing a book on Christopher Guest and there are five films, I’ll buy them. (I’m a Christopher Guest fan and the fact is, I already had them).
KF - “I can write a book based on what’s on my shelf!”
JKM - Right! For Horror Films of the 1980s or Horror Films of the 1970s where there are so many I see what I can rent. What I can’t rent I look for used on half.com or Amazon. They often have titles that you don’t expect to find anywhere else. If I like the movies and they’re really interesting - I’ve got a thing for Night of the Comet - I’ll keep them. Other ones I sell. I have no desire to keep Blood Hook or something like that. I try to sell those right back into the book, meaning that I turn around the money and get more materials. I do have a large collection, I even have a large collection of laserdiscs.
KF - George Lucas! My uncle is the same way: he had a projection T.V. and laserdiscs before they were big, but then all that was eclipsed in one year. He had spent a lot of money.
KF - We were talking about this a little earlier, but do you have any favorite film critics or writers on film? Also, are there any with whom you constantly or consistently disagree and whom you think a spot on the community (or a stain)?
JKM - I really like Pauline Kael.
KF - She’s contentious.
JKM - She is contentious, but she was able to see quality where there was quality. For instance, she said that the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was like the best movie of the year…I respect that. I thought it was a great movie. She won me over with that. I quibble with her, but in general I like what she does. To tell you the truth, I really like Roger Ebert. I don’t like film criticism to be reduced to the binary decision “yes” or “no.” I used to think that Roger Ebert had a really good sense of how to appreciate stuff that isn’t art, but was entertaining. Lately he has been off a little bit.
KF - The joke now is that he likes everything he sees. He’s on “happy pills” or something.
JKM - I said that to Kathryn last year - I think he needs to go into a corner by himself and recalibrate a little bit. I mean that in the most respectful sense. I grew up watching him on T.V. I always liked him better than the late Gene Siskel. That’s not to dismiss Siskel…
KF - They hated slasher movies.
JKM - The reason I like Roger Ebert, you know, is that he liked The Last House on the Left.
KF - He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
JKM - He defended Dawn of the Dead. He like Aliens…he was able to take a film for what it is and say “its good at what it does.” That’s his philosophy of a film “working.” I very much like Stanley Kauffman. He is probably the best film critic working in America and probably has been for 20, 25 years. I like Bert Cardullo’s stuff even though he only writes on a very slim grouping of films. Much more on “art films.” That is where he and I differ very much: I am more the school of you-name-it-I-want-to-be-involved (horror and exploitation especially). To him, most of that stuff is beneath the threshold. I really like Stanley Kauffman.
KF - I agree, I’ll sometimes just pick up The New Republic just to flip through and see what he reviewed that week.
KF - Now, what has been your most difficult book to write (for any number of reasons)? I’m sure that some of them have been harder than others.
JKM - I’ve discovered that the books that are hardest for me to write are the ones where I’m not organized enough at the beginning. The books that are easiest for me to write are the ones where I know going in what I want to say, what I want to do, and how I want to organize it. That’s really the work that should be done on every book. I’m delighted with my Tobe Hooper book (Eaten Alive at the Chainsaw Massacre), I think its one of the best books I’ve ever written, but I basically had brain spasms writing it - I had to go wild to write it. Beforehand, I don’t think I really accepted what his whole canon is like, I don’t think I saw what the quality was. I got a little nervous for that book, because some of his films were really…well…then I started digging deeper and realized that I was coming up with these impenetrable theories…
KF - on Spontaneous Combustion? I don’t know what I think about that film…
JKM - (laughs) Then I started to see all these things and how they fit together and I came up with the thread of surrealism, the Alice in Wonderland feel and it seemed to fit so well with his work. Then I knew the way to write it. I wrote about half of the book and then I was in crisis because I thought “I’m not doing this man justice, I haven’t understood his work enough.” I had to go completely outside of myself, a Hail Mary pass. Its one of the books I’m most proud of.
KF - Describe your relationships with McFarland and Applause, who you’ve written for many times. Do you still submit things for them or do they say “we want you to write a book on this?”
JKM - It is a little bit of both. I have been incredibly blessed and basically - I don’t want to take them for granted - they have been incredibly open to me. I pitch an idea, they generally like it. Applause is a little more toward the “performing arts” aspect, not so much towards horror. McFarland very much lets me do horror.
KF - I love McFarland because they’re willing to print a lot of books that should get out there but just don’t have the widespread appeal.
JKM - Right, exactly. I get to do my “niche” books with McFarland, which is wonderful. With Applause I get to work on very interesting filmmakers. Both houses are very collaborative. I have a good friend who is a publisher at Applause, we talk about what we want to do. They did come to me with the idea for the last book I wrote, they wanted someone to write a book about Mira Nair.
KF - I was going to ask about that, because she seems very “different” than lots of the topics you’ve written about.
JKM - Right. It was nice of them to give me that opportunity. What I really like is that I have the best of both worlds: McFarland lets me do the things that I absolutely love and Applause allows me to stretch… I want to do everything…I just did a book on musicals, for God’s sake.
KF - Your larger books often have the central thesis that films can be primarily about the zeitgeist. With Terror Television, being that there were more transgressive shows in the 1970s embodying angst or what have you…recently, in the Encyclopedia of Superheroes, you talk about the resurgence of the superhero in the post-9/11 world. In writing these texts, did you come across many films or shows that just entirely either denied the zeitgeist or were particularly naïve, or were of artistic intent such that they didn’t stand as reflective?
JKM - Sometimes its not a perfect fit. Sometimes a film that is pertinent with regards to something came out like 3 or 4 months before the incidents you think it refers to. I believe there is a “prevailing feeling.” There are films that don’t fit, which is why I’ve been developing this theory of trends and back-trends. There are all kinds of different alleys, ways you can go: there are some that fit the prevailing theories and some that don’t. I’m also a really big proponent of the idea of us mis-reading things as simple and out of place now, but upon reflection 10 years down the road thinking “oh my God, we completely missed that.”
KF - I was going to ask something about that too…
JKM - Like The Exorcist.
KF - Especially about films of the 1970s, where they seem like anomalies in there time but 10 years down the road feel brilliant. A lot of films don’t age well at all.
JKM - I agree.
KF - With Terror Television, you watched a lot of T.V. How did you get access to a lot of these older titles?
JKM - That was a very interesting book for me. I found a tape trader. If I wrote it now it would have been a hell-of-a-lot easier because all of those shows are one DVD. DVD had not really come out when I wrote that. I found this tape trader in I guess it was Philadelphia and he had a lot of the things I needed to see. From rental stores, I was able to get Twin Peaks. I had taped all of the X-Files off of the air. The Sci-Fi channel had Night Gallery. It was a combination of cable and knowing where to look. There were very few in that book that I was not able to see. One of the things that really bugs me about reviews who deal with TV series is that they review the first episode and judge the whole series based on that episode. You cannot do that.
KF - It usually gets a lot better or a lot worse. So, I just finished The Films of John Carpenter. What do you think of Ghosts of Mars? What do you think of the fact that he’s going to be in the Masters of Horror series and directing Halloween: Retribution?
JKM - I hadn’t heard that.
KF - I don’t know what it’s going to be like. Still, what do you think of Ghosts of Mars and also the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 (that’s my favorite Carpenter movie).
JKM - I love Assault on Precinct 13. I didn’t care for the remake because it took out what drove the original, the notion of the “randomness of life.” The girl stops, get shot…no one knows who they’re fighting for or why. Everything in the remake had psychological motivations, everybody knew what everybody was doing. It took out all relations to real life, it was Hollywood b.s. I think that John Carpenter is a master of horror, and I’ll tell you what, the world was completely wrong about Ghosts of Mars, that was a great movie.
KF - I liked it, that’s why I asked. I thought that it was a lot better than Vampires.
JKM - I did too. I could watch John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars literally every day for a while after it came out on DVD, and I did.
KM - It was horrible, horrible.
JKM - She hates it. It’s a great movie. All you have to know is the context: its Zulu, its Assault on Precinct 13, its Rio Bravo, but its done on Mars. We watched it the same night we watched Underworld. I said, “look at the difference between a director who knows how to use space, rhythm, to have them build scenes and utilize the frame, and somebody who does not.” Underworld is a muddled piece of nonsense.
KF - It just looks like CGI gone awry.
JKM - Its edited in such a horrible way that I don’t understand where people are, etc. John Carpenter is a classicist. The clarity of Ghosts of Mars is amazing. I think it’s a great movie, I think its much better than Vampires.
KF - Have you always been a fan of comic books or was it the fact that you undertook the Encyclopedia of Superheroes retroactively go to comics?
JKM - I liked comics as a kid, but oddly enough, the comics of my time that I liked had to do with toys. I liked Rom the Space Knight, I liked the Micronauts from Marvel. I did like some superhero comics. I enjoyed Star Trek comics, Star Wars comics. The only way I felt qualified for the Encyclopedia of Superheroes was to focus on the film and television part, not the comics. It was not going to be “the history of these characters in print.” I have a passing familiarity with that. I know stuff, I have my ears up, I keep abreast of what’s going on.
KF - It’s so daunting to get into a new form of media. As you know, I am an especial fan of An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith. What do you think about Jersey Girl? What potential is there in The Passion of the Clerks?
JKM - Jersey Girl blunted too many of Kevin Smith’s edges. I liked what it had to say, I loved the message, and I know that it came from his heart. I thought the script was good but it got caught up too much in trying to be a typical Hollywood romance. Kevin Smith is much better than that. It didn’t deserve the bad reviews it got - I thought it interesting and a good film. But when I see a Kevin Smith film, I want to go into his world, I want to get his point of view, I want to hear his dialog. There were only moments of that in the film. Its like when I see Woody Allen movies - I want to get my fix of that specific sort of world. I think he learned all the wrong lessons: he made a film that was much more like a Hollywood film instead of something that was interesting. I think Mallrats is better…
KF - Mallrats is my favorite. I have almost come to blows a couple of times. But Mallrats and Clerks rock. As for Passion of the Clerks…
JKM - I’m completely excited about it. It is the right thing for him to do. It is not a retread. To deal with the same characters ten years later will work. As I talk about in my book, Kevin Smith is following the path of Generation X. To catch these characters in their 30s will be great. I was excited about Jersey Girl, about the idea of us becoming parents and all, but I felt that it was a little too smaltzy and not realistic enough.
KF - Jersey Girl is what happens to the baby boomers who once were revolutionary. I like the idea of him still championing his disenchanted generation.
JKM - He should direct The Green Hornet. He learned the wrong lesson from Jersey Girl’s failure. I feel bad that he believed what people said about it. He’s not a bad director, he’s got his own style, his own thing, and he should not walk away from it. He should be confident in his skill.
KF - “That was the worst project I’ve ever worked on.”
KF - I’m looking at transgressive films of the early 1970s (transgressive being the blanket term for exploitation, soft-core porn, horror, sci-fi, drive-in fodder, art, trash). The way in which these sorts of movies affect a small community (especially Williamsburg, VA) is my primary concern. In your view, removed of financial success or even content, what are the most important films of the 1970s? Since it was a neo-Golden Age for horror, why did the decade finish so poorly?
JKM - At the beginning of the 1970s, there were the New Freedoms in cinema. People were going wild trying things. To me, the really important films are ones like The Exorcist, Dawn of the Dead…
KF - …and Dawn of the Dead is an anomaly being from 1978, but then again, all of Romero’s films are anomalies.
JKM - Also of importance are Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left.
KF - You write about Don’t Look Now and have convinced me to really want to see it.
JKM - Don’t Look Now is great. Its very experimental but its not really transgressive: though frightening and suspenseful, it is not really shocking.
KF - Its not like Performance, the Mick Jagger film with excessive drugs…
JKM - Right, it doesn’t exactly attack your sensibilities. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is obviously a perfect example. Those are basically the ones I would list. You could put The Hills Have Eyes on there, but that’s just more like another version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You really must give The Exorcist its due, even though it was a mainstream entry.
KF - Mainstreaming things that most people would never see was a pretty important step made in the 1970s. I’ve read things that have said that Jaws ruined the freedom of the early 1970s. There were these great American filmmakers doing very experimental things, getting bankrolled by studios, and benefiting from the climate of mainstream film production. Jaws invented the modern blockbuster mentality. Because of that, many filmmakers could no longer get interesting films made due to their inability to guarantee a blockbuster. It was part of that “animals attack” subgenre, which was decidedly 70s.
JKM - Well, Jaws was a great movie so I don’t hold all that against it. If you’re going to get mad at somebody it should be the marketers, the people who…
KF - …they made it an “event” and that’s what set off the chain reaction.
JKM - It was the prototype for how to release movies. Instead of releasing it into 500 theatres and gradually adding to the release, we’re going to dump it everywhere opening week. There were people who thought that there was no way to make any money off of Jaws. If you’re going make any money off a movie like that, you have to do it really quickly. Now that’s the paradigm for Hollywood. Star Wars was certainly the death knell. If you’re going to blame Jaws, Star Wars is what killed the personal cinema. It’s not the film’s fault, you imitate success. Its funny that we don’t blame The Exorcist, which was certainly a big success.
KF- It was marketed brilliantly. The poster, in my mind, is very haunting and minimal. The film takes fear in a different direction.
JKM - Absolutely. I think, too, by the end of the decade, I’d have to say that the 1970s were in a different place. The early 1970s were the “hangover” from the 1960s. Suddenly there is no longer the same idealism. It’s Alive is an exemplary title. “Why is our baby like this??” That movie is about abortion, about Roe vs. Wade, about reproductive rights, about everything in our environment that could be poisoning us and killing us. The early 70s was obsessed with all of these crazy things, these dark feelings. My friend calls it “the wakeup after the hippie dream.” I think by the late 70s, everybody was burnt out and in the mood for nostalgia. Everything was too complicated. The mentality was of a return to movies as entertainment and less as social problems.
KF - Star Wars.
JKM - It really dovetails with the Reagan era. Simple answers to complex problems: the sweep toward conservatism. The 1960s is idealism, the 1980s is conservatism. The 1970s is the decade that sees the shift from one place to the total retrenchment of conservative values.
KF - What follows is a complicated question that doesn’t necessarily warrant a complicated answer. Changes in film censorship and interpretations in obscenity laws meant that many films were bridging the gap between soft-core porn and horror. Though the liberalization of films in the wake of the liquidation of the production code is a good thing, what is your take on the perhaps decreased line between exploitation and sexploitation/horror/art? Which films got it “right” and which got it “wrong”?
JKM - Don’t Look Now has one of the best sex scenes every put on film…
KF - …because it is not orgasm-oriented?
JKM - That was a film that “got it right,” it was both scary and sexy. I’m inclined to believe that there should be virtually no censorship as long as everybody is of age. I don’t want children to see these films and be upset. Topics such as sex and horror should be intermingled. How can we forget Shakespeare?
KF - Why did it take people (scholars and critics) so long to understand films like The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Could they only be understood when distanced from their direct historical contexts?
JKM - In a sense they were just ahead of the curve. Criticism compares to what has come before. What does a critic do when they are confronted with something new?
KF - They run away!
JKM - They run away, they dismiss it, and they dislike it. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the ten most important film titles in American history, not just because of its subject matter, but because of how it is structured. The film is more shocking than psycho, because there is no learning or movie decorum. The same with The Last House on the Left. You go into the theater and there are no rules. No movie stars…
KF - …no glamour.
JKM - There is the feeling that anything could happen to you while watching this movie. I don’t think that critics could handle that. For The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, most people couldn’t get past the title. Critics walked out of these movies. They were not staying and engaging them on their own terms. As a critic I often now reflect on this. A lot of critics often can’t do that when they are confronted with something new.
KF - Would you revise your list of favorite picks of the decade given what you’ve seen in the last three years that could be pertinent?
JKM - That’s a really hard question. I’m feeling that more about the 1980s because I’m watching all of those films again. With the 1970s, it is almost as if my ideas are a little cemented. I feel very strongly about the quality of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House, as well as with Dawn of the Dead and Don’t Look Now. Also Jaws, and films like the original Stepford Wives, which has a very shocking ending. I don’t know that I would change a lot of my list, I might mess around with the order because it is arbitrary to an extent. Halloween I like a great deal. Outside of the horror genre I’d say yes. I’ve recently seen All That Jazz, Caberet, O Lucky Man: these are amazing films.
KF - You’ve mentioned that one of your current projects is The Horror Films of the 1980s. Will it be presented in a similar way as the 1970s book?
JKM - What I’m doing for this project is do well in what I succeeded with in the 1970s book but get rid of some of the excess stuff. I’ll have the same appendices, such as the “conventions of the genre” and the “Hall of Fame,” the rankings, things like that. I’m also going to shorten the synopses so that I can include more films. I’ll do the same thing with history, but it will be much more expansive (perhaps done in charts), because so many of the films are of the slasher paradigm and they all have red herrings/an organizing principle/the deadly preamble. I want to categorize these things and make them really clear as to where it all fits in. I would like to be even more detail than I was before.
KF - What other projects do you have planned for the near future?
JKM - I’m very close to wanting to do a rock and roll movie encyclopedia, I know that I’ll be writing a novel of The Prisoner T.V. series, another Space: 1999 novel. I very much want to do The Horror Films of the 1990s. Those are the short term things. I’m also writing some screenplays and things like that.
KF - Here’s the last (fun) question: recommend one obscure film, one obscure book and one good food dish.
JKM - I think that you should really see Don’t Look Now. It shows you what you can do when you’re not stuck to conventions. It has an artistic director who is able to make visual connections, conjure a spell of inevitability, to show intimacy in a sex scene rather than just plain orgasm. Unfortunately they’re remaking it, I hear. As for a book, one of my favorites is The Zombie That Ate Pittsburgh (all of my books are based on that). People should read my One Step Beyond book.
KM - I have a recommendation. Try To Have or to Be? by Erich Fromm.
JKM - As for a dish, probably something Indian.
