PopHorror Let's Get Scared
If you’re a horror fan, then you have to know who Zach Galligan is since Gremlins is like, a staple in almost every genre fan’s diet. While 40 years ago Gremlins is what started Zach’s horror journey and set the course for the rest of his career, it’s current movies like Midnight Peepshow that confirm he’s found a home in our beloved genre.
An unnamed madame operates a unique peep show that caters to its customers deepest desires, fears, and sins. Tonight, it welcomes a businessman with a unique connection to an extreme fantasy website. Soon he will become a witness to three stories of victims that found the website.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Zach about recording the voiceover for his segment, Fuck, Marry, Kill, being a horror fan, the continued love for Gremlins, and more!
PopHorror: I really enjoyed Midnight Peepshow. It was a lot of fun and I’m super excited to speak with you.
Zach Galligan: Oh, good!
PopHorror: What was your initial reaction to the script?
Zach Galligan: Well, let me just tell you some of the details about how I got involved with this and that will probably answer the question. So, I had done a film in England in 2017 called Madness in the Method and in it, I had met a number of English people in the film business. One of them was associated with Midnight Peepshow. He was the DP, Director of Photography. He told me he was involved with this project Midnight Peepshow and that they were having, he didn’t really want to say it was a problem, but they had done a voiceover, and they were happy with it, but they were not thrilled with it. They were content, but after a few weeks they started thinking it was missing something. They couldn’t quite put their finger on what it is, but they knew that they wanted another actor to just sort of take another pass at it and see if that actor could add something to it. And they weren’t even 100% sure exactly what that missing ingredient was, but they were hoping that by sending me the script that I would be interested in it and that somehow perhaps I could find out what was missing, and hopefully goes without saying, add it into the mix and improve it. They sent me the script just before I got on a plane to England. I was going there anyway for a convention. I read it on the plane, the material. It was based on, you know on the title, it was pretty much what they’d described and pretty much what I had expected. They also sent me a couple of sound clips of what the previous person had done, and like they said, it wasn’t bad in any way, just… I don’t know. To me, it seemed like it could have used a little bit more humor, maybe it could have used some more urgency, it could have seemed like the Game Master perhaps enjoyed what he was doing a bit more than just simply going through the motions. I kind of identified some of those problems and not to my pleasure but pleasant surprise, the producers were like, “Yes, yes, yes, those all sound like a better direction to go into.” So, I said, “How about this? Make me an offer and I only have limited time in London. Bring your audio equipment, if you can, to my hotel suite and we’ll take a pass at it. We’ll take a crack at it, and we’ll see if it’s any better. And if it isn’t any better, you can go back to your first version because it’s perfectly fine, and if it is better, then you can use that.” And so that’s what we did, and as you can see, they preferred it, and it’s in the flick, and I have not seen the complete finished product yet, but apparently it works just fine. I’m all about keeping the customer satisfied. If the producers are happy with it, then I’m happy with it. My job is to get hired and to do pretty much what’s asked of me, especially when I’m not even going to be on camera. Maybe if I was going to be on camera and had a much more central role to it, perhaps I would have – if I felt strongly enough – perhaps argued more for whatever I wanted. But basically my job was to go in there and kind of fix the problem. And so apparently I did, and they were happy with it. I was happy with it, and to be perfectly honest, we’re talking summer of 2021, so this is two and half years later. I’d pretty much forgotten about Midnight Peepshow a month after I did it so when I got the call from them literally maybe two or three weeks ago saying, “Would you like to do publicity for it?” I was like, “Sure.” Then they sent me the poster art, which I think is quite good actually. I’ve seen a lot of posters, this is one of the better ones, if you’ve seen the same thing that I have. Also it was kind of fun because the film is coming out in America on Valentine’s Day this year, which happens to be my 60th birthday, so that was kind of a fun little Easter egg, an unintentional Easter egg associated with the film, too.
PopHorror: Happy early birthday!
Zach Galligan: Thank you!
PopHorror: It’s funny how two different people can do the same thing, like you and their original actor, and have completely different results.
Zach Galligan: Also, one of the benefits of having done this for a very long time – it’s shocking for me to say this sentence – this March will be my 43rd year being a professional actor. I’ve been doing this for a long time and eventually you start to realize that a lot of actors approach the material kind of the same way. What you ideally want to do, and this is much easier said than done, but when I used to teach acting class at NYU, I used to say that auditioning was like a conveyor belt in which you saw an endless series of silver cans go by you. The whole point of auditioning and what you really want to be as an actor is, you want to be the Day-Glo multicolored can. The one that goes on the conveyor belt when someone suddenly goes, “Woah, woah, woah! Stop the conveyor belt. What is that?” And most of our great screen actors are the ones where the person comes on screen and you, for whatever reason, can’t take your eyes off of them. Whether it was Brando with his animal magnetism that he had, or Christopher Walken has that very strange, undefinable speech pattern that comedians make so much fun of by imitating him. If you know anything about Christopher Walken, it comes from his eliminating punctuation in sentences.
PopHorror: Oh, wow!
Zach Galligan: That’s where it comes from. He goes through scripts, and he eliminates punctuation. He finds his own way for the ideas to slide into each other so sentence one kind of slides into sentence two and maybe sentence three has nothing to do with sentence four. Four, five, and six are all clumped together. That’s why nobody ever sounds or speaks like Christopher Walken because he’s eliminating the traditional barriers of speech.
PopHorror: That’s interesting. I did not know that.
Zach Galligan: So you can either do it a certain way or you can look at it, at a part or a role, or something, and go, “Everyone’s going to do it. The most obvious way to do it would be Way A. I’m going to try and find something that makes sense and is Way B, and is way less likely to be chosen. I’m going to do that because I want to be able to separate myself from the pack.” The difference is – the mistake some actors make – some make a choice that is so out there, it sometimes doesn’t even make sense within the logic of the piece that you’re doing. It’s not really a crazy choice, it’s just dumb because it just doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit in with the logic. It doesn’t make sense within the story. So, as I’ve gotten older and more experienced, I’ve always tried to look at the, “What is a really interesting way to do this part that would still make sense but wouldn’t be the obvious choice that nine out of ten actors are going to choose?” And like I said, it’s a lot easier said than done. When you do stumble on that and it works, it works beautifully. I can think of so many examples of it. Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects where every time his character opens his mouth, you barely even can understand what he’s saying. He opens his mouth and you go, “What? What’s his guy saying?” And it forces you in a weird way to pay attention to him because if you’re not squinting and listening every time he opens his mouth, you’re not going to get it. That’s another brilliant choice. You can think of all sorts of brilliant choices but it’s almost always the way less expected is much better than the expected way.
PopHorror: Absolutely. You said that you’re entering your 43rd year of acting professionally. You start out doing horror pretty early on in your career with both Gremlins and both Waxworks. What keeps you coming back to the genre?
Zach Galligan: I’m not sure that I keep coming back to as much as the genre keeps coming back to me. That’s kind of like the old wet streets make rain thing where it’s like no, it’s the rain that makes the wet streets. It’s the horror genre that considers me fondly and doesn’t want to let go and that’s fine with me. I’ve always loved horror since I was a kid. When I was young, it was my favorite genre. I was drawn to it from a very early age. I can remember growing up in Manhattan and watching Chiller Theatre in the late 60s, early 70s with the hand that would come out of the marsh and go, “Chillerrrr” and pick up the C-H-I-L-L-E-R thing and then retreat back into the swamp. I would watch The Blob, and Godzilla vs the Sea Monster, Attack of the Mushroom People, and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Anything that was attacking I enjoyed – Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs the Flying Saucers. All the best 50s and 60… You’ve got to remember, if I’m five, six years old, all the movies are 50s, 60s movies. There are no 70s moves, this is 1970. Steve McQueen in The Blob was a very big one for me. Very formative one. You’ve got to remember, 1970 is like three years before The Exorcist. And I’m a kid and I’m watching all of those 60s movies, Godzilla movies, all of that stuff that was on late night, which for me, at six years old, late night is like nine o’clock. “Hey Mom, can I stay up till 10?” when you’re six years old. So I was always drawn to it. In a way I think it was one of the reasons why I landed Gremlins was because when those types of horror movies… The Spielberg creature feature movies would come up, and don’t forget this was right after Poltergeist, which I absolutely loved when I saw that. I was 18, which was the perfect age for Poltergeist and I think I tried a little harder for some of those auditions than I would for the audition for the family drama where the family gets divorced, and the kid has to be mad at his dad. That was fine, but it wasn’t as cool as like monsters and stuff.
PopHorror: Of course!
Zach Galligan: I mean, I grew up with Starlog, and Famous Monsters and all those 70s creepy magazines – Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, all of those Warren magazines. I loved all of that stuff. I was a comic book kid, a hundred percent a comic book kid. Downstairs in my basement here, outside of Atlanta, I have two, three, about three plastic bins full of all my 1960s-70s comics.
PopHorror: Wow! That’s impressive.
Zach Galligan: I have stuff that I bought at the newsstand with my dad in the summer of 1969. It’s wild. They’re not really valuable because they’re not bagged and boxed and I’m not obsessive like that. A lot of them have yellow pages and stuff like that, but it doesn’t matter. They’re for me. I’m not selling them. I love them.
PopHorror: It’s the nostalgia. You don’t keep it because you think that someday you’re going to sell it. It’s because you can’t part with it and not have it in your life. I have stuff like that too.
Zach Galligan: Correct.
PopHorror: It’s all about how it makes you feel and the memories attached to it.
Zach Galligan: Absolutely.
PopHorror: When you first did Gremlins, did you ever imagine the following it would have today? Like conventions, even the merchandise still today. You can buy brand new Gremlins merchandise in 2024. Did you ever think it would ever be as popular as it is right now?
Zach Galligan: I certainly thought it would be popular at the time. I think it’s much more the longevity that kind of stuns me. This June’s going to be 40 years since it came out. If you had told me 40 years ago that this movie opening in June was going to last four decades… In some respects, it is actually bigger now than it was then, just because there’s so much more media and such a greater ability for media to spread stuff than there was back in 1984. People don’t really remember the media landscape in 1984. I would imagine you don’t. You seem as if you probably weren’t alive in 1984.
PopHorror: I was four. I was born in 80.
Zach Galligan: There you go. Born in 80, okay. But still, four is pretty young to be aware of the media landscape. You had Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, a brand-new magazine called Us, People, TV Guide, and that was pretty much it. It really wasn’t until the 90s that the magazine rack explosion happened and literally 15 years later of course, the internet would come along and slay most of these magazines. Although, there’s a store in the Atlanta area called Books-A-Million, it’s kind of like Barnes and Noble, they have a magazine rack that stretches – I’m not joking – it’s got to be about 50 yards long. It’s like 100 feet to 150 feet long and it has hundreds of magazines. And I still always say to myself, “Who buys these?”
PopHorror: Are they current?
Zach Galligan: They’re current. Who buys magazines anymore? It just feels to me it’s all online. It’s wild.
PopHorror: I’m impressed that there are enough current magazines to fill that size of space. Just one last question for you today. What’s your favorite scary movie?
Zach Galligan: My favorite scary movie… I almost always go back to The Thing, the Carpenter The Thing. I love it so much that when I was in Dallas – well Irving, Texas at least – last May, I was doing a convention there and there was a The Thing reunion with like six cast members – not Kurt Russell, unfortunately, the real catch – and John Carpenter was there. I was like, you know what? I’ve never gotten a poster with people signing it, and I had all six actors sign it, and I got Mr. Carpenter to very quickly sign it too. I haven’t gotten it framed yet but I’m going to hang it here in my office. Yeah, there’s going to be a big ass The Thing poster in here and that’s because it’s number one. The only other one would obviously be The Exorcist and that’s partially because I worked with Ellen Burstyn for six weeks. She played my mom in a TV movie that I did and so I became very friendly with Ellen at the time, and she told me tons of stories about making the movie. I also worked with Barton Heyman, the late Barton Heyman who plays one of the doctors who gets his testicles grabbed and jammed down on the floor. I was also friendly with the woman who plays Ellen Burstyn’s sister, Kitty Winn, and William Friedkin, before he passed away, followed me on Twitter, so I have a very tight connection to a bunch of actual people in The Exorcist, so every time I see it, it means more and more to me.
Thank you so much to Zach for taking the time to speak with us. Midnight Peepshow is now available on digital!
