With The Walking Dead -- TV's No. 1 series among adults 18-to-49 -- executive producers Kirkman and Nicotero kicked off TV's modern horror renaissance and proved there's a home for the oft-ignored genre on the small screen. Photographed by Austin Hargrave on Oct. 1 at KNB EFX Group in Chatsworth, Calif.
Austin HargraveThis story first appeared in the Oct. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Julie Plec: “About three years ago, after Thanksgiving dinner and 15 bottles of wine, my friends made me watch The Human Centipede. I have never been so completely repulsed.”
Rick Baker: “The Jackass guys cutting the webbing between their fingers.”
PHOTOS: ‘Mad Men’s’ Kiernan Shipka as the ‘Shining’ Twins and Other Hollywood Horror Delights
Rob Zombie: “There’s this movie called Cannibal Holocaust — even the fake events that take place are incredibly brutal, but within the film there’s a lot of torturing and killing of actual animals. You’d be thrown in jail if you made a movie like this now.”
Oren Peli: “A Serbian Film, by Srdjan Spasojevic. It’s really, really, really horrible. I’ll give you one example: There’s a newborn-baby rape scene. The rest of it is not much better.”
Eli Roth: “I remember watching this film Buried Alive, and there’s a close-up of this old woman eating rice. Still freaks me out to this day. It’s the simple things.”
R.L. Stine: “The Shining. The kid is weird. The dad is weird, plus being isolated in that enormous hotel. The whole thing is terrifying.”
STORY: From ‘American Horror Story’ to ‘Walking Dead,’ How Horror Took Over Hollywood
Robert Kirkman: “There’s a scene in either Saw II or Saw III where there’s a bunch of rotted pigs that are being ground up in a vat that this person is tied to the bottom of. And there’s just this gray liquid that these pigs are being turned into. That’s probably the most disgusting thing I’ve seen.”
Kevin Williamson: “My good friend Eli Roth’s movies: Hostel, Hostel II, the Hostel he hasn’t made yet. The girl’s eyeball scene in Hostel really was just enough already.”
