Hora’s résumé also included Liar’s Moon (1981), The Jogger (1988), a segment in Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (1988), Loverboy (1989), Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992) and God Said, ‘Ha!’ (1998). He once noted he turned down an offer to shoot the original Terminator. Fundamentally, on this film, Joe and I just enjoyed ourselves.” Still, my basic nature is to have fun with this sort of approach, and the nature of this story was such that it did not demand a serious approach. “There is a danger when you use bizarre angles and strong colors in a film,” Hora said, “and that is you might come out looking too much like the old Batman television show. Hora then made his feature debut on Maurie (1973), the basketball drama that starred Bernie Casey as Maurice Stokes and Bo Svenson as Jack Twyman.Ī story in the November 1984 edition of AC magazine described the look of Gremlins as ranging “from the realism of the daylit snow-strewn Kingston Falls town square to the comic-book splash-panel type lighting of a boiling YMCA pool at midnight.” His father was an amateur still photographer who attended the Art Center School of Design, and Hora “grew up in a house of cameras, film, darkrooms, tintypes, old glass plates, photography books and magazines, and lots of music, too,” he said in 2007.Īfter graduating from film school at USC, where he roomed with future Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz, Hora worked for the commercial-production company John Urie and Associates on such projects as the martial arts documentary New Gladiators (1973), financed by Elvis Presley. John Charles Hora was born in Pasadena on Feb. “Not only one of the most talented and amusing Directors of Photography I ever worked with, but a truly unique and eccentric character who knew more about lenses than I know about my own life. Hora also appeared in front of the camera for Dante in Innerspace (1987) - as the scientist Ozzie Wexler - and Burying the Ex (2014). “Perhaps it’s because Joe has a sardonic sense of humor and I have what has been described as an over-developed sense of irony.” “ have an interesting, comfortable relationship,” he told American Cinematographer magazine.
Hora then shot for Dante the “It’s a Good Life” segment of the anthology feature Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), followed by Gremlins (1984), Explorers (1985), The ‘Burbs (1989), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) and Matinee (1993) and the pilot episode for the 1991-92 NBC series Eerie, Indiana.
Hora and Dante teamed up for the first time on The Howling (1981), with the cinematographer “relying on a dramatic lighting approach featuring rich hues, deep shadows and dutched angles to help sell both the suspense and horrific effects courtesy of artist Rob Bottin,” as writer David E.