How to get into horror movies, according to Joe Dante

It’s possible that no director has introduced more young people to horror movies than Joe Dante. His Gremlins films blend Looney Tunes humor with gore that could only be deemed “family-friendly” in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Those movies inspired countless toys, lunch boxes, and novelty T-shirts. And the series continues to lure kids into the world of slightly scary media: The latest cartoon spinoff, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai, premiered on Max in 2023, and a second season, Gremlins: The Wild Batch, was just announced for fall.

Dante’s later films never quite achieved Gremlins’ pop-culture dominance, but he continued to invent ways to place horror in front of younger audiences, including 1993’s Matinee, set in Key West against the anxiety of the Cuban missile crisis and the thrill of a horror movie director setting up shop with his next big project. The film is a showpiece for the lovable John Goodman, embodying elements of Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman, and William Castle as he promotes an all-time-great movie-within-a-movie: Mant!

Matinee — for too long underappreciated and hard to find — is now available on Blu-ray and 4K UHD. To mark the occasion, I had a chance to ask Dante, who introduced so many kids of the ’80s and ’90s to horror, where he would recommend a young newcomer to the genre start today. What follows is an edited version of his guidance:

I would send them to William Castle. My favorite Castle movie is House on Haunted Hill, because it’s got such a good script. You can go back to early John Carpenter [The Thing, Halloween]. You can go back to Wes Craven [Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street].

It depends on how old they are, and what they’ve already been exposed to. [If they’re younger] they probably haven’t seen the Universal [Monster films]. Those movies were gateways for me, because I had never seen them when they hit television in the late ’50s. They hadn’t been theatrically shown in many years. I was unfamiliar with all of them. All of us kids were new to this. The Famous Monsters magazine came out purely because there was a whole audience of kids who were suddenly fascinated by these movies that they hadn’t known existed. And these actors, many of whom had passed away, were now very iconic. And [kids] wanted to see more pictures with those actors.

[Now] becoming a member of the horror movie community is probably a great way to bone up on what’s out there. Also, you can sign in to my website, Trailers from Hell. There’s like a thousand trailers on there that are narrated by people who are filmmakers in various ways: writers, directors, editors, and actors. You run the trailer and they talk about the movie. And they suggest that if you liked this movie, you might like this [other] movie. It’s been very rewarding when people come up to me and say, “I just saw this movie, and I never heard of it until I saw it on your website. And now I really want to see more pictures by that guy.” So it’s been very helpful. It’s like a mini film school.

Matinee - 4K UHD + Blu-ray

• $33
• $40
• 18% off

Prices taken at time of publishing.

• $33 at Amazon