Mick Garris dug into a stack of listener questions yesterday on a new “Ask Mick Anything” edition of Post Mortem with Mick Garris. A big one: “Michael, Freddy, or Jason: Who is your favorite of the big three and why?”
The director of The Stand had no trouble weighing in on that eternally raging debate. “I would have to go with Team Freddy,” Garris says. “Michael and Jason are scary because they are silent, hulking figures that don’t have a personality. That gets a little tiresome after a while, and I don’t really need to know the roots of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees.”
Garris adds that in A Nightmare On Elm Street—which, in his view, is “still the best” film in the series—“Freddy’s got a personality, he’s witty. [But] he wasn’t the jokester so much. There’s a lot to him.”
Freddy’s main draw, Garris observes, is his ability to open up creative possibilities for horror filmmakers. “When you’re dealing with dreams, you’re dealing with dreamscapes that are very cinematic and don’t have to be grounded in reality,” he explains. “You can go into the surreal and the hyperreal in those dreams. You can do imaginative things that don’t have to play like real life, and can still be fear-inducing when those dreams cross over into real life. That makes for more of a rich stew of cinematic imagination.”
Maybe Garris’ Freddy favoritism is a hint that he’d like to direct a Nightmare film himself… or maybe it’s just chatter. Whatever the case, Post Mortem producer Joe Russo says that you can’t argue with Mick’s answer.
“Freddy definitely has the most personality and he has the most elaborate kills and the storytelling allows for it. I think that’s a very justified answer,” Russo says during the AMA.
You can listen to the entire “AMA” episode below.
Myers, Krueger, Voorhees—who you got? Who’s the scariest? The most dynamic? The most creatively rewarding? Let us know in the comments below.