‘Masters of Horror’ looks to rattle nerves

So this serial killer who murders hitchhikers is driving along a deserted highway and he picks up a guy, but what he doesn’t know is that the hitchhiker is a serial killer who murders drivers …

If you’re the kind of person who, seeing that on television one night, would hardly be able to wait for work the next day to tell everybody about it, then you’re the target audience for “Masters of Horror.”

“We’re the kids of ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Thriller’ and those kind of programs, what you would now call ‘water cooler programs,’ ” says Joe Dante, one of 13 horror-genre veterans to direct an episode of the new anthology series, which debuts tonight on Showtime.

“Go to school, and what did everybody talk about on Monday? They talked about what was on ‘The Twilight Zone’ on Friday. On Tuesday they talked about what was on ‘Thriller’ on Monday. There were a couple of other shows: ‘Outer Limits’ … ‘One Step Beyond’ … that were all shows people would talk about.”

That’s the kind of show Dante and the others are going for with “Masters of Horror.”

In an episode directed by John Carpenter (“Halloween”), a film historian searches for an old movie called “Le Fin du Monde” that was screened only once – and drove its audience into a murderous frenzy.

Tobe Hooper (“Texas Chainsaw Massacre”) made one centered on a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors of a nuclear holocaust stage-dances with the corpses of their loved ones.

And Larry Cohen (“It’s Alive”) contributed the tale of the two serial killers unknowingly stalking one another.

Some directors went for gore, some for atmospherics, and others used humor to set up the shocks. There were no rules.

“The only thing we asked for was smart and scary,” says Mick Garris, who made Stephen King’s book “The Stand” into a TV miniseries and is the executive producer of “Masters of Horror.”

Garris is one of the regulars at twice-a-month Hollywood dinners where the horror genre’s most bloodthirsty directors gather to discuss trade secrets such as spectacular ways to puncture eyeballs.

The more they chatted, the more the directors realized that they were nostalgic, not just for the creepy TV shows of their youth, but for a time before their pictures carried the weight of jillion-dollar budgets and the resulting studio expectations and meddling.

Nobody will talk about the budget for an episode of “Masters of Horror,” but given the shooting schedule – each one must be completed in 10 days – it’s safe to say that it wouldn’t cover the cost of the pea soup used in “The Exorcist.” That suits the directors just fine.

“A lot of us started out making very quick movies for not much money, where you have to think on your feet and you really have to improvise if things go wrong,” says Dante (“The Howling”), whose episode of “Masters of Horror” concerns zombie voters who sway a presidential election.

“And believe it or not, it’s actually more exciting than making a big expensive picture with a lot of effects that take forever where you go to work every day and you look down a tunnel and you don’t see the end.”

Shoestring budgets also free the directors to take more risks, says John Landis (“An American Werewolf in London”), who directed an episode that mixes American Indian mythology with a series of bizarre murders and a healthy dollop of sex. When a movie’s marketing budget alone is $45 million, he notes, studios don’t want any surprises from directors, in horror genre or any other genre.

“They try to do what they think is safe,” Landis says. “I would say half the movies I’ve made I could not make now with a major studio. They would not let me. … I watched ‘Chinatown’ the other day. What studio do you think would make that movie now with that plot and that ending?”

Though “Masters of Horror” was inspired by “Twilight Zone” and other 1960s anthology shows, the directors are quick to say it will be vastly different than those series.

It’s not a series at all, Landis says, but “13 one-hour little movies” rather than a unified TV show with the artistic vision of a single executive producer.

“It was Rod Serling’s ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” he says. “No matter that Richard Matheson and other gifted writers worked for it and there were some good directors. It was Rod Serling’s vision.”

Another important difference: Expect to see more blood and gore than you did on “Twilight Zone.” A lot more.

“We’re telling horrific stories,” says Garris, whose “Masters of Horror” episode features a corporate whiz kid whose brain is hijacked into that of a young woman with a fearful secret. “And over the years, there has indeed been a trend toward more sensational, more graphic depictions of horror.

“If you watch ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘One Step Beyond’ today, it will be entertaining, but it will not necessarily scare an audience that has been brought up on things that have been more graphically presented. I don’t think any of us are doing gore for the sake of gore, but we’re also not avoiding it.”