MIKE BARONAS

Mike Baronas has had a hankering for horror since his impressionable, pre-teen years of the 1970’s. Growing up in front of the television, Saturday afternoons found him enveloped in WLVI Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature, the Massachusetts staple for Hammer and giant monster (Gamera vs. Guiron being his favorite) classics.

The move to more graphic styles of filmmaking came about almost by accident when Baronas, an avid fisherman by the age of 12, was intrigued by a movie about his favorite bait called Squirm. To this day, his father’s voice still resonates, “Uh, Michael, you’re looking a little green,” after the film’s poor redneck slob gets a little too frisky while out in his boat and is pushed face-first into a gaggle of electrified nightcrawlers that proceed to burrow under his skin and up into his head. This shock left an indelible impact…and a curiosity that needed to be satiated.

In 1985 the home movie boom was in full swing and Baronas received his first VCR that year. His initial four rentals (primarily due to the cool cover imagery) included Sleepaway Camp, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Bay of Blood and a video that’s warning, “This film contains scenes which may be considered shocking. No one under 17 should be present,” certainly made it a must see – The Gates of Hell. This is the film that changed his life. The offsetting atmosphere and uncompromising violence that Italian director Lucio Fulci captured in this 1980 bloodbath was unlike anything Baronas had ever seen in a Hollywood offering.

Paura nella città dei morti viventi, or City of the Living Dead as it was later released as on DVD, has always been the film to top in Baronas’ eyes. He continued the tradition of Saturday afternoon horror marathons, with his father escorting him to the video store, renting three new movies (pending his dad’s approval) each and every week for years. From the amazingly realistic gore FX of Tom Savini to the claustrophobic and documentary aura of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nothing held a candle to his beloved Gates!

Baronas began to wonder what bizarre mind brought this tale of a suicidal priest whose actions release a legion of the undead upon the world to fruition? It’s this question that haunts him to this day as he continues to research and interview those who worked with Fulci throughout his entire film career for his ongoing book project PAURA: Lucio Fulci Remembered.

Baronas lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two beautiful children.

An interview with Baronas about his DVD excursions, etc. can be found here.

KIT GAVIN

Born in the early seventies, Kit Gavin’s birthday falls the week between Jean Christophe Bretigniere’s and Catriona MacColl’s. He was brought up in Cyprus, Upper Volta, Mexico, the Philippines, and the UK. He considers himself a European as much as a citizen of the world.

Gavin’s interest in European cinema stems from a bizarre mixture of influences in his misspent teenage years watching Hitchcock films, European arthouse movies and the horror films dubbed by the UK press as “video nasties” (he paid a small fortune – even now – for an old copy of Cannibal Ferox).

In the mid-nineties when these movies began to regain popularity, he wrote and contributed to magazines such as European Trash Cinema (much missed), Delirium and Flesh and Blood.

Gavin currently resides in London. Conversant in English, French and Italian to varying degrees, he plans to put those languages to full use when moving to Paris later in 2008.

An interview with Gavin about the DVD release of A Lizard in A Woman’s Skin can be found here.