I'm sure most of you reading this were more than a little excited when Masters of Horror was first announced -- the prospect of the best directors in the genre given complete control of a one-hour movie seemed almost too good to be true. When the list of directors for the first season was announced, I got a little less excited.

There are a lot of names that made it onto the list that I wholeheartedly agreed with, directors like John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon have made a number of what I'd consider to be great horror films. I even agreed with comedy director John Landis getting a spot -- on the basis of An American Werewolf in London alone -- and I certainly think that a newbie like Lucky McKee is someone genuinely interested in taking the genre in different directions.

But William Malone? (Okay, I acknowledge Fear Dot Com has its fans, but I'd hardly call it the work of a master.) and ... Mick Garris?

I figured as the producer of the series, of course he'd give himself a shot at one of these, but his work as a director hadn't really grabbed me. I will acknowledge his chops as a historian of the genre, and I must say I did love the opening of "The Stand" miniseries, with its tracking shots that looked down over the first victims of the plague set to the surprisingly effective choice of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't fear the reaper" was some really terrific work -- in those few minutes, I thought Garris had captured that marriage of pop culture and death in a way that matched the flavor of so much of Stephen King's work.

But most of his other stuff hasn't really done much for me. Until, that is, I watched "Chocolate", because it's just really damn good.

Working from an original story by Garris (one of the immediately refreshing things about "Chocolate" is the fact that it's based on his own ideas -- I mean, ninety-percent of the guy's directorial work is adaptations of Stephen King stories), "Chocolate" tells the story of mopey Jamie (Henry "Elllioott" Thomas), a divorcee living in Chicago, who begins having what at first seem like very intense hallucinations -- beginning the moment he wakes up with the taste of Chocolate in his mouth.

The dissolution of his marriage has left Jamie feeling a little empty as he goes about his life as a chemist (there's a very amusing supporting turn by Matt Frewer as one of Jamie's coworkers, a kind of punk rock scientist), and these strange episodes seem to fill the void in his life.

Jamie eventually concludes he has a kind of psychic link with a woman in Canada when he wakes one morning to ... well, I really have to keep the secret of this scene which was made a little extra creepy and fun for me with the meta-knowledge that this is the kid from "E.T.", after all.

They used to advertise "Dracula" with the tagline "the strangest love story ever told", and this line could have been used to sell "Chocolate" as well. Or maybe "wake up with the taste of horror in your mouth!" But this is actually a love story and a horror story tied together and the stuff works. Using Henry Thomas' wounded puppy cutie-boy looks actually helps some of the creepier things his character does go down a little easier (how could the friend of small brown aliens everywhere be a stalker?) and the thing that got me the most about Chocolate is that I found myself hoping at one point that love between its two central weirdos might actually kind of work out.

Like the other discs in the "Masters of Horror" series, "Chocolate" is full of extra features (I am especially fond of the trading cards that are included with each of the dvds). There are a number of interviews, including a lengthy chat with Garris as to how the whole "masters of horror" thing got started, his own early work with the Z Channel in Los Angeles, and his association with Stephen King. There is the obligatory "working with the master" featurette which isn't as good on this disc as it is on, say, the John Carpenter disc. There is also an episode from Garris' Z-Channel program "Fantasy Film Festival" in which Garris interviews Roger Corman (who I wish would have done one of these Masters of Horror episodes), trailers for the other dvds in the series, and pdf's of the short story and the script.