Background

Mick Garris was born on December 4, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, United States. His father was an artist. At age 12, his parents divorced, and he grew up with his mother in the environs of San Fernando Valley region, Los Angeles, California.

Career

Mick Garris began his career already as a child. Garris was making his own 8mm home movies. And when he got older, he became a freelance critic for a number of film and music celebrities. He wrote publications for various bands and movies for newspapers and magazines like "The San Diego Door", "The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner", "Cinefantastique" and "Starlog" through the 1970s.

For eight years he was the lead singer in a band called The Horsefeathers Quintet, which disbanded in 1976. In 1977 Garris was hired as a receptionist in George Lucas' newly formed company Star Wars Corporation where, through industry contacts, he created and served as the on-screen host for a Los Angeles cable access interview program show called "Fantasy Film Festival," which aired on L.A.'s legendary Z-Channel. Guests included filmmakers like John Landis, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg and actors like William Shatner and Christopher Lee.

In 1980 Garris began working as a press agent for the newly merged Pickwick-Maslansky-Koenigsberg Agency. He also began making a name for himself with photographing and directing features for such films as Scanners, The Howling, Halloween II, The Thing, Videodrome. In 1982 Garris was hired by MCA/Universal to write the script for Coming Soon, which was a collection of horror movie trailers featuring Jamie Lee Curtis as the hostess and directed by John Landis.

While struggling to find more work, Garris was hired by Steven Spielberg to be one of the writers and story editors for Spielberg's sci-fi anthology series Amazing Stories. Here, Garris not only had the chance to write regularly, get paid well for it, and see his work produced for a large audience. He also got to work with top directors, including Robert Zemeckis and Joe Dante, and to become something of a protege of Spielberg himself. Perhaps Garris’s largest audience has been that which saw the long-awaited television miniseries, Stephen King’s The Stand.

Then Garris and King teamed up for a three-part made-for-TV rewriting of King's novel, Shining. Later that year Garris oversaw the directing for Quicksilver Highway, based on a pair of horror stories by King and Clive Barker. Garris directed Höst (later changed to "Virtual Obsession"), based on a novel by Peter James, with a screenplay written by P.G. Sturges, about a computer genius stalked by a female colleague bent on digitizing her consciousness. Taking a break from horror films, Garris directed The Judge, an adaption of the mystery novel by Steve Martini. Garris and Stephen King reunited for Riding the Bullet directed by Garris and written by King, based on internet short about a hitchhiker being picked up by a soul-searching angel of death driving a 1959 Plymouth. They also collaborated on Desperation, based on King's 1997 horror novel.

In 2005 Garris was able to assemble a group of his fellow horror film directors in the anthology horror series Masters of Horror, which he created and executive-produced. Garris' own contribution, "Chocolate", was based on his own short story, written 20 years earlier.

In 2011 Garris directed the miniseries adaption of Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones and the documentary film Pure in Heart: The Life and Legacy of Lon Chaney Jr., about the life and work of Legend actor Lon Chaney Jr., which screened on the Horror-Rama in October 2015.

He has a role, as Himself in the Horror film Digging Up the Marrow, from Indie Director Adam Green. One of his most rewarding experiences, however, was a screenplay that was never produced: All the Western Stars. It was Garris’s first film writing an assignment and was completed for producers Richard and Lili Zanuck. On January 16, 2018, it was announced that Mick Garris’ horror podcast Post Mortem would be joining Blumhouse's podcast network.

Achievements

• Mick Garris has achieved a lot in his long career: he is director of feature films, television series, episodes for television series, television movies.
  
  In 1987 he was nominated for The Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Children's Script for the made-for-television adventure film Fuzzbucket, in 1997 - for International Fantasy Film Award for Best Film with Quicksilver Highway. He is also the winner of many film festivals.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Development Hell

    (This is the Bermuda Triangle of art, sex, and commerce. T...)

    2006
  • A Life in Cinema

    (A Life in Cinema is the first book from Mick Garris. It i...)

    2012

• movie

  • Psycho IV - The Beginning

    (It is an American made-for-television psychological horro...)

    1990
  • Virtual Obsession

    (A terminally-ill computer tech downloads her brain and pe...)

    1998
  • Critters 2: The Main Course

    (They're back for seconds! The nasty little aliens with th...)

    1988
  • Sleepwalkers

    (Stephen King's twist on the legend has mother and son sta...)

    1992
  • Fuzzbucket

    (An invisible creature befriends a 12-year-old boy. Of cou...)

    1986

• novel

  • Salome

    (This is the story of a young Hollywood actress, Chase Wil...)

    2015

• TV series

  • The Shining

    (The Shining is a three-part horror television miniseries....)

    1997

Views

Fantasists Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, and later, hard-boiled novelists Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Budd Schulberg were major influences on Garris, as were such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, and Preston Sturges - the last three of whom were, significantly, writer-directors. Directors Spielberg, David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, Sam Raimi, and the Coen Brothers, and writers Jim Thompson, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Clive Barker also influenced Garris.

Quotations: "I was twelve years old when I started to write short stories; they were all scary. I was a big Famous Monsters kid. I was always drawn to it. The first movie I remember seeing on TV was Son of Kong. It was always in my blood and my blood has always been all over it" - Mick Garris about his interest in horror

Membership

• 

  From 2015 Mick Garris is also a member of the board of advisers for the Hollywood Horror Museum.

  Hollywood Horror Museum , United States

  2015

Connections

Mick Garris was married to Cynthia Garris on May 13, 1982.

Wife:

Cynthia Garris

Brother:

Craig Garris

colleague:

Stephen King

colleague:

Steven Spielberg