Hard to believe it’s been 30 years since that unforgettable tagline bellowed forth from late night TV ads. Ads broadcast after the kiddies were meant to be tucked in and sent to slumber. But I was awake, ten years old, lying in bed, unable to sleep, hearing it all. Wishing I was downstairs actually seeing the monster baby I could only imagine in my mind. For years I wondered what that terror toddler looked like. How it must have scrapped the floor crawling on its infant talons. Lips smeared with blood in lieu of Gerber’s. My poor baby sister was victim to my imaginings. Fitted with wax fangs I bought with my allowance from the Five and Dime, she would do her best to play IT’S ALIVE with her big brother. It usually ended when Mom walked in, horrified that she might have not one, but two monster devotees on her hands. She got over it, though, trekking both me and sis to a Drive-in double bill of IT’S ALIVE and IT LIVES AGAIN upon the latter’s release in ’78. Maybe it was the headlights constantly washing out the outdoor screen. Or maybe it was the film’s discretion to imply rather than exploit the titular creature. Regardless, in the quarter of a decade hence, my mind's eye still outweighs my actual recall of that deadly little one. And that is all due to the artistry of its biological daddy, writer/director Larry Cohen. Choosing suspense over gratuity, Cohen created a classic film and a classic creature. Thanks to the current release of IT’S ALIVE and its two sequels on DVD (finally!), a whole new generation of film freaks can enjoy the lifelong nightmares that Larry gave me all those years ago. A true Master of Horror, Larry is one of the elder statesmen of that esteemed tribe. A man as adapt in the gangster genre (HELL UP IN HARLEM, BLACK CEASAR) as he is in the horror (Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT). A man who, no matter what the genre, always imbues his films with an admirable social consciousness, whether it be consumerism in THE STUFF or religious fanaticism in GOD TOLD ME TO. A man who was just as at ease in the independent realm of yesteryear as he is in the Hollywood mainstream of today (as screenwriter of recent hits PHONEBOOTH and CELLULAR). But it’s that darn demon offspring for which Larry will most be regarded. And once again, it’s Alive! Alive, I tell you…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At the time you made IT’S ALIVE in 1974, your previous directorial work had been in the blaxploitation genre. How did you go from thugs to monsters?

I was doing cycles of movies. BLACK CEASAR was a tribute to LITTLE CEASAR and PUBLIC ENEMY and the great Warner Brothers gangster movies of the 40’s that I had so loved. And I loved horror movies to, and always wanted to do one, and this story just came to me, and I thought, this is a subject I’d like to do and no one’s ever done this kind of story before. At that time, there had been no monster babies. Since then, everybody’s used monster babies. Tim Burton, on the second BATMAN movie, had a whole sequence showing the Penguin as a baby in his crib that looked very much like the ad campaign for IT’S ALIVE. In the ad campaign for GREMLINS, also a Warner Brothers picture, you see a box with little claws coming out of the edge. So the picture had tremendous influence on advertising and on pictures that came later. Freddy Krueger was reborn in one of the subsequent nightmares as a monster baby. They even did a direct rip-off in England called THE CREATURE WITHIN with Joan Collins…

Talk about a monster baby…

Tell me about it (laughs)... So, yeah, we have seen monster babies recycled since IT’S ALIVE, but I really don’t think any of them ever had the same effect on an audience.

 Why do you think that is so?

Well, it’s a very visceral subject matter. It hits home. It all happens mostly in a house, in somebody’s place of residence, with a kid and a father and mother, and this alien creature, this mutation, finding its way into their midst. If you look at it, it really is the reverse side of ET. Only it was made way before ET. I know Steven saw the picture, and probably, subconsciously, was influenced by it. After all, it is the same story; An alien creature being hidden in the house by certain family members which other family members don’t know about. In this case, it’s dangerous and deadly, rather than sweet and benevolent. There are so many parallels between ET and IT’S ALIVE. Even the beginning of ET, with the flashlights going thru the forest… The whole opening sequence in IT’S ALIVE is also with flashlights blinking on and off. Also, the sequence which is so memorable where ET is seen sitting in the closet amongst all the toys… That scene is in IT’S ALIVE in the school room where we pan along the toys that are lined up against the wall, and the monsters in the room somewhere. Actually when I shot it, I did shoot the monster’s face mixed in with all the toys, but I didn’t use it in the final cut. I had the exact same gag, but I didn’t use it because I thought it was too funny and too disarming. I wanted to keep the monster scary. I didn’t want to make fun of it. I didn’t want to relieve the audience of the tension, so I cut it before we panned to the face of the creature.

Not only that, but you also predated Spielberg in JAWS by photographing scenes through the creature’s POV. Putting the audience in the monster’s perspective.

Yes. that was the first time where you saw scenes thru the eyes of the monster. You personified the monster. That way we didn’t have to show the monster, and again, that was picked up in JAWS where the first half of the movie you see all thru the shark’s point of view. Economically, it’s great when you don’t want to show the creature, or can’t afford to, but I always feel that less is more anyway. The more you see of any kind of monster, the less scary it becomes. Sure, you get all excited about how beautifully executed the special effects are, and how well the creature has been modeled, but you’re not afraid of it anymore. And that’s the problem with everything that’s being done digitally today. It’s so perfect, so extraordinarily well crafted, and yet the more you see of it, the less scary it is. Nothing’s left to the imagination. Whereas with IT’S ALIVE, it really plays a lot on the imagination of the audience. It allows the audience to participate and create images for themselves rather than throwing everything in their face.

You’re right. I think my memory of the IT’S ALIVE baby is more of what I imagined I saw, than what I actually did see.

That’s exactly right. Rick Baker designed the creature, and it was good. And we could have put a lot more in there, but the more of it you show, the less effective it is. The more you let the music and the sound effects and the illusion carry it, the more memorable it becomes in the minds of the audience. They think they saw a lot more than they did. Like you (laughs).

You had two greats working on IT’S ALIVE. One, Rick Baker, at the beginning of his career. The other, music composer Bernard Herrmann, at the tail end. How did you get those guys?

Well, the way you get people is to ask (laughs). I had inquired of Warner Brothers whether they could make contact with Bernard Herrmann, who was my favorite composer, and they said, “Well, he’s not available. He’s working on THE EXORCIST for Friedkin.” Then a few weeks later, the music department called me and said, “Well, Herrmann is not on THE EXORCIST anymore. He had a fight with Friedkin and he’s available.” Apparently, William Friedkin showed him a first cut of the picture and after the lights came up, Friedkin said, “I want you to write me a better score than you wrote for CITIZEN KANE.” To which Bernard Herrmann replied, “Then why didn’t you make a better movie than CITIZEN KANE?” Well, having no sense of humor, Friedkin thought he was being insulted, and that was pretty much the end of their relationship. So… Bernard Herrmann was available. So we did a black and white dirty dupe of the picture and put it on a plane to England… That’s the way things were done in those days. There was no videotape. You had to send an actual 35mm dupe which had to be projected in a screening room … And he called me up after a few days and said he really liked it and was interested in doing it. He thought he could bring a lot to it.

That’s amazing that you got a guy like Bernard Herrmann to score your low budget horror film!

Well, he had done other pictures like that. He had done THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. He had done a low budget picture in England called TWISTED NERVE. Not to mention all the movies he did for Hitchcock. So he was the perfect composer for me to have. You know, Herrmann had begun his career in radio doing the music for Orson Welles’ Mercury Players. He did the radio version of DRACULA. Now radio was a medium particularly attuned to stimulating the imagination of the audience. You didn’t see anything, you just heard it, and you had to supply the images in your brain. So you really got to participate. So Herrmann thought this was something that harkened back to those days, and that the music would create an atmosphere and a mood and a leit motif for the creature. So next thing I knew he was excited about it, and I was excited about it. I remember, he said, “Why don’t you come up with some kind of titles for the beginning that I can write an overture for, a minute and a half of music where I can give the audience a taste of what the movies gonna be like.” So he set out to write an overture, and I set out to come up with a main title sequence design. And that’s where I came up with the idea of the flashlights. I got a couple of people in the basement here in my house, we had ladders scattered around at different heights, and everybody had a flashlight which they turned on at a different time, and then we shot another version of it, and another, and eventually we multiple printed one on top of the other, so in the end, it looked like there were 40, 60, 80 flashlights moving around, rising and falling and blinking on and off. So I shot all this film, and eventually went to London to meet with Herrmann, where he was scoring the picture. He had rented an ancient church in the city of London in order to use the sound of the particular organ they had… So all the projection equipment and musicians were there, it was freezing cold, he was conducting with an overcoat, and we recorded this suite. And when we played it back with the film that I brought, amazingly, all the beats came at the right time. The beats and the flashlights popping on and off seemed to be perfectly timed. And so, Bernard Herrmann and I immediately fell in love! We were inside each other’s head and had done something separately which turned out to be perfectly matched. We were lifelong friends after that.

Music is so important, so crucial to horror films. It can really make or break them. I think of the story of John Carpenter showing HALLOWEEN before it was scored, and how everybody thought it was crap. And then he added the music…

Yeah, the same thing happened with PSYCHO according to Bernard Herrmann. When they first put PSYCHO together and looked at it, there was a question of whether it was even going to get a theatrical release. They were talking about recutting it and doing it as a television special. Hitchcock had shot it with the same TV crew he used on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, and there was a question whether the picture was good enough to be theatrically released. Then Herrmann put the music on it and it was a whole different story. The music really pepped the picture up and make it feel like something more than a TV show.

Now today Rick Baker is pretty much a household name, but back then, he had really only done SCHLOCK with John Landis…

That’s where I got him from. I was friendly with George Folsey Jr. who was very friendly with Landis. And so I knew Rick Baker through them, and I used Rick on BONE, my first picture, doing burn victims. And then on BLACK CEASAR, I hired him to do all the bullet wounds. Then when I decided to do IT’S ALIVE, I called Rick and said, “Here’s a chance for you to create a monster. Something innovative, maybe something that will be a signature piece.” Of course, he’d been fooling around with making monsters all the way back to when he was a little boy, when someone gave him a FAMOUS MONSTERS make-up kit that was put out by Dick Smith. Using this kit, you could create the monster that looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Now this was a make-up that Dick Smith had designed for a TV Show that I wrote called WAY OUT on CBS, hosted by Roald Dahl. The episode I wrote was called FALSE FACE. It was about an actor famous for doing bizarre make-ups on himself, and he’s appearing on Broadway as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he patterns this false face after a derelict he sees in the Bowery. Well, he goes on to success with this grotesque make-up, but when he goes backstage, he can’t get the make-up off. It’s frozen to his face, and he has become this creature that he exploited. So he rushes back to the Bowery to a flophouse to find the real derelict. And when he finds him and rolls him over in his bed, the derelict has HIS face, and the derelict is dead. So the actor never gets his face back. Well, Dick Smith decided to put this make-up out commercially for young people interested in playing make-up artists. So I guess literally hundreds of people who are now in the profession, started off their career by getting this kit for Christmas. Which Rick Baker did get, and which probably helped propel him in the first place. So not only did I inspire him indirectly to get into the business, I gave him his first chance to do a big time monster on the screen. Today, I couldn’t afford to hire him. Seven Oscars later…!

Besides being a director, you’re also a very prolific screenwriter. How do you decide which scripts you’re going to direct, and which you’re just going to sell?

Well, for awhile, I didn’t want to direct. Directing is rather disruptive of your life…

Oh, I can relate to that…!

Well, then you know. So I was trying to enjoy life a bit, but I can write, five or six scripts a year, yet there’s no way I could possibly direct five or six scripts a year. So, if I write five or six, obviously I will direct one or two, and that’s it. Then I have the other four. What am I gonna do with them? I might as well sell them to other people and hope that they’ll make a picture that is some semblance of what I had in mind. Why not? You can’t just have these script sitting around forever. Otherwise you’ll see someone else coming out with a similar idea eventually and you’ll have nothing. So I’m always cooking up new ideas, and then I feel an urge to write it, get it out of my system. And then eventually everything more or less sells. It may take a while, sometimes the scripts don’t sell right away. Maybe they sell the following year or the year after that. Sometimes you can’t get a picture made or a script bought unless somebody’s attached, like an actor or director, but it all comes about. Eventually.

You’ve done so many types of films. What’s your favorite genre to play in?

Well, obviously, I like to do thrillers. Whether they have a supernatural aspect or whether they’re just pure suspense or whether they’re science fiction. I like to do thrillers. And I like to do thrillers with some comedic overtones to them. You can see from what I’ve been writing lately with PHONEBOOTH and CELLULAR that I’m continuing to do that. I’d like to experiment with some new forms. Lately, I’ve been trying to do films that all take place within a few hours. A very tight limited range, people trapped in some kind of situation they can’t get out of, staying with them in real time and seeing what happens. I just feel movies are getting too big and too sprawling and too filled with SPFX and no suspense. That’s the problem. You just go from one big action sequence to another with one more spectacular special effect or explosion or car chase, but no suspense. No tension leading up to anything, cuz they don’t give it anytime to develop. Everything has to be Bang, Bam. On to the next one. There’s no lead time for the audience to get into the situation. Now, if you look at the famous crop duster scene in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Hitchcock spends twice as much time setting it up and building it before the crop duster plane even arrives. When Cary Grant gets off the bus in the middle of nowhere, there’s lots of time spent building that sequence. And then finally, it all bursts into the pursuit from the crop duster. But by that time you’re really involved in the situation. And I don’t think many moviemakers today give the audience time to get involved. They just throw all these big FX sequences at them.

I shudder to think of an IT’S ALIVE remake without your involvement.

Well, I’m going to both write and direct the remake. I want to make it my way, and this is the best way to do it so it will be kept under control. It’ll be fun. I haven’t directed a picture in about five years, actually, so it will be nice to get back into it. Certainly we’ll use CGI, but I expect to use it in a more creative way. I’ll keep the creature in the shadows so you won’t get a good look at the thing thru most of the picture. And when we pay it off, of course, it will be excellent. But it could hardly be better than some of the shots of it in the original. They were few and far between, but what you did see made it look like it was real.

Which made the whole movie work. If that creature hadn’t delivered the goods…

I used to like to walk in the theaters and watch just to see the scene where the piñata falls in the basement and lands on John Ryan. Its nothing, except it just scares you, and then you realize it’s a piñata and you laugh. It always worked. Every show. They would all scream, and then they would all laugh. I loved that, cuz we made them believe that there was really a monster baby lurking around. I mean, it’s an absurd subject, and I’m sure the audience would walk in skeptically. “I’m not gonna let this scare me. Who’s gonna believe in a monster baby?” But after watching the picture for twenty minutes, suddenly everybody in the theater screams at once and acknowledges to everybody else that they really believe that this story is happening. They’re really caught up by this subject and they’re really scared. And that’s what’s great about a horror movie. It’s a unifying force for the entire audience. Everybody’s joined together in a mutual experience. They’re all being scared at the same time.

What’s also great about horror, particularly your horror films, is that in the guise of an entertainment, you can deal with social issues in an indirect manner that you wouldn’t be able to get away with otherwise.

Yeah, well IT’S ALIVE had a lot to say about the period during which it was made. Indirectly, it’s about the issue of abortion. You can’t make a movie about abortion and have it be a successful commercial film if it was just a polemic. You have to embody the theme in a thriller. A motion picture that has entertainment value and suspense value. And then you can deal with the theme and explore it as deeply as you want to. So that’s what I did. That subject matter is very important and probably one of the most crucial being debated in our lifetime. And I think its certainly worthy of continued examination as people’s attitudes change. Now, with the remake, we’re living in a time with DNA and genetic research where people can have custom designed babies. They can pick and choose hair color, eye color, they can pick and choose the sex. And if they find out there’s gonna be certain defects with the child ahead of time, they can abort the pregnancy. They’re even saying they’re at the verge of being able to define homosexuality, which a parent might say they don’t want to get in to raising a child with those tendencies and they won’t have this child so they’ll abort it… I mean, this is pretty horrible when you think about it. If it was up to parents to make those kind of choices, some of the greatest people that ever lived would have never been born. So that’s what I’m exploring with the remake.

I think this might actually be the first time a director has remade his own film! Pretty cool. Has the current DVD release helped to make this to happen?

 Actually, it had nothing to do with it (laughs). It’s just coincidental that Warner Brothers held up the DVD release until now, hoping to make a Halloween event out of it. And the DVD quality is so good. The transfers are so excellent. Warner Brothers did a wonderful job. But the timing does happen to be perfect, because the promotion of the DVD and the release of the two sequels will certainly give us a brand new audience who will anticipate the remake. They look better than they ever did. Also the fact that it’s been off the shelves for quite a few years, even on VHS. There are a whole lot of people who have never seen it. Ever.

Of all the films you’ve made, where does IT’S ALIVE sit on your creative shelf?

Well, it was my most successful picture at the box office. It was number one. I think it grossed 39 million in 1974, which makes it well over a hundred million by today’s standards. You don’t get too many of those where you can make a picture… I mean, I shot it in my home! So when can you shoot a movie in your house that makes over a hundred million dollars, call all the shots and get to work with Bernard Herrmann, who became like a grandfather to me, and of course, Rick Baker… Well, I had so many nice memories of the film and the experience of doing it. It’s got to be the most memorable in my career.

It’s funny. I remember almost a year and a half ago, when I first met you at the Masters of Horror dinner. I put you in touch with my friend, Will Hackner, at Warner Home Video, which led to you doing the IT’S ALIVE commentary…

That’s right. That’s exactly how this all came about. Because of you. Now here we are, back again, talking about IT’S ALIVE! It’s always a cycle, Tim. We’re back where we began…