DS: Your manner of dress is strikingly creepy and yet dashing with the coat, hat combo attire, and the expressionless black facial mask, how did you come up with your look?
MG: When I first began to develop my host persona, I was talking with the person I consider my mentor Penny Dreadful. She advised me to stay away from masks and such because it is very hard to articulate and be understood sometimes without being muffled and suggested makeup instead. Well, I know nothing about doing makeup and I went back to my childhood watching one of my favorite horror hosts, The Shroud on Nightmare Theater. He was covered head to toe with just his eyes showing, dressed like an old-time executioner. And the mystery he created about himself was a big part of the show. I liked that angle and my wife suggested the morph suit I wear. I found that worked out just perfectly, except for some minor eyesight problems lol.
DS: Please tell my readers about The Haunted Hotel, how did you come up with the show's concept, and what you did to distinguish your show from another horror-hosted programming?
MG: After talking with Penny Dreadful, I knew I had to have a reason for what I was doing. Not just stand there with a monster mask and say here's Frankenstein. My host persona needed to be able to present his deadtime stories to people interested in them. So I gave him a place where the living and the dead could come and spend the night and be told scary stories. It took me about two weeks of brainstorming, might have been less if I had a brain. I was looking at being a caretaker of an old run-down forgotten graveyard but I wanted something different. I was watching a ghost hunters program and they were at a run-down hotel saying it was haunted. I thought The Haunted Hotel. And it clicked and I built the show around that name.
DS: What is your process for what movie you plan on showing for any going episode?
MG: I find a film that we are able to show, watch it and then use both my library and the internet to find out trivia to use in our middle segments. I am a huge trivia buff and I love to share that knowledge with others. Once I find a show, I will start to put it together, finding facts about it, behind the scenes, the actors in it, and how the film was made and put it all together into one program. We film six episodes at a time and then edit each one into a complete show. Some are harder than others because of a limited amount of information or some have too much and I have to decide how much I can use, so it’s a balancing act at times. And I want the people to focus more on the movie than me. I hope that in some small way, I am doing my part to inspire the next wave of monster kids.
