10 Promising & Big-Name Directors Who Turned To The Small Screen

It's important, in this era in which we are inundated with watchable Stephen King adaptations that are still relatively faithful to the source material, to recognize the work of Mick Garris. Without filmmakers and uberfans like Garris, King's work wouldn't have the cinematic impact it does. Not that his novels weren't bound for the screen at some point, but Garris was the first to recognize the author's work as scripture, often with mixed results onscreen.

Garris debuted with the more-fun-than-it-has-a-right-to-be Critters 2: The Main Course and worked in some capacity behind the scenes of some memorable 80s films such as *batteries not included and The Fly II, all the while hosting forums interviewing other filmmaking legends about their work. Love or hate Garris' work, he's very much the fanboy that someone gave a camera.

He must have been thrilled, then, to helm an original screenplay by King: the confounding 1992 film Sleepwalkers, about the last of a vampiric tribe whose weakness is cats. The film didn't fare well, but it led to Garris' working relationship with King. He would go on to adapt Riding The Bullet, The Stand, The Shining and Desperation, all working closely with the author.

But his greatest contribution to the genre came in 2005 when he launched Masters of Horror, an anthology series with each hour long feature directed by a major horror director. It only lasted two seasons before morphing into the much tamer NBC show Fear Itself, but in its time it managed to honour the likes of Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John Landis and even managed to pull John Carpenter out of retirement.

He was just recently the consulting producer on Eli Roth's History of Horror for AMC. Here's hoping whatever incarnation of Masters of Horror comes next catches on.