The latest podcast to join the Dread Central Podcast Network is Post Mortem With Mick Garris, which continues to provide a treasure trove of interviews with top horror creators. And the partnership between Dread and Garris has kicked off this week on one hell of a note, with Post Mortem premiering a 70-minute chat between Garris and Clive Barker today.

It’s a must-listen for many reasons, touching upon various topics, but one of the most interesting bits comes when Garris asks Barker to reflect on the reboot of The Mummy they almost made together back in the late 1980s. As you may have heard, Barker and Garris were developing the script together, though the movie of course never ended up coming to life.

Barker’s story, set mostly in the modern day in Beverly Hills, was turned into a screenplay by Garris, and Barker had been hoping to direct the film himself, fresh off Hellraiser.

Barker’s vision for The Mummy was to make it scary, violent and sexually charged. The story revolved around the head of a contemporary art museum who turns out to be a cultist trying to reanimate mummies, but the concept was too much for Universal. As Barker relayed to Fangoria back in 2015, Universal rejected the concept outright, and that was that.

“It had the first gender change.. transsexual… so we were ahead of the curve,” Barker reflects in the new Post Mortem chat with Garris. “So there’s a boy born… a boy-child born at the beginning of the narrative, who is obviously significant in the narrative… but we cut twenty years and there’s no sign of this guy. Apparently. There is a wonderfully strange, mysterious woman who is part of the narrative, a very important part of the narrative – I don’t want to say too much because we’re gonna make this one day… I hope… we should talk to Netflix…”

Barker continues, “The little boy… who is born at the beginning of the narrative… has become this exquisite woman. And a major part of a modern day narrative about The Mummy. But this is our naivete, Mick. How could we ever have thought, in 1989, when we turned this in, that they would say, ‘Ah, great!’ I think I’ve had a slightly naïve attitude [towards] the suits.”

“Maybe our Mummy can be a movie [today],” Barker ponders, noting how far we’ve come since 1989.

Listen to the full Post Mortem chat with Barker below, or wherever you get your podcasts.