Wes Craven Talks YEAH! and His Untold Stories

I was also thinking, the survivor is often not who you think it would be. The martial artist or the wizard don’t quite have the strength to stand up to Freddy, but it’s usually one of the women who might not come across as the strong one, but ultimately has the inner strength to defeat Freddy.

Yeah, that’s the crux of the matter and there are horror films that don’t do that, that just kill everybody off. I guess I did that sort of with Last House on the Left because you didn’t care that much about the parents. I think the best kind of scary movie, for me at my stage, is to do something where there’s somebody at the center that goes all the way through and survives and it toughened by it but not hardened by it. I think Sidney Prescott is still a warm, giving human being and I think to me that’s interesting. I try to make the central character not some super martial arts kid or super stud or whatever it is. Sidney Prescott is the girl next door but she’s smart and tough and she has to go through a real learning curve. She starts out really naive and she doesn’t know the terrible truth about her mother and she doesn’t know that her boyfriend’s a killer, but she learns and she copes with it and comes out the end tougher but wiser.

 

You mentioned the child psychologist. Every time there’s an incident, people start talking about movies and video games. Are we just going to go in these circles forever and ever?

I think so, yeah. To me the scariest thing is the real world. The same kind of people that cluck their teeth and say, “These are horrible things” are the kind of people that are comfortable with the wars we’ve been fighting for the last 25 years. I don’t know, I subscribe to the New York Times and every day the front page is usually some horrific thing of some refugee camp being devastated by people riding in and killing everybody, or some bomb in a marketplace that kills 75 people, or some revelation about the CIA torturing. Whatever it is, those are real events and real people. Those are the people that are supposedly in charge and the good guys, but to me those are the scariest things and that’s real. Nobody ever talks about that causing kids to go out and kill people.

The fact is that the country has been arming itself with AR-15s which are not from movies initially, but from the wars we’ve been fighting. I’m not giving an anti-war speech but I think art reflects the culture and reflects the real reality. I’ve never traced back any of the stories about kids doing things dressed like Freddy or anything to a real event. We always found that they would find where it actually happened and conclude it did not happen. It’s just ways of kids dealing with the coming reality that they sense is out there. I think you can make art that is irresponsible but there was a French philosopher who said it’s okay to lie in fiction because that’s what art is, but it’s not okay to lie about the essence of things. That’s what I use as my moral compass I think. Don’t make it look attractive in a way that says this is just cool and easy. If you’re talking about violence, you show that it’s complex and it’s not just the bad guys that are violent, and that innocence is sometimes hidden within apparent toughness or violence and violence is hidden within innocence. I like thinking of it that way.

 

The amazing thing is it’s not like movies and games are the only new influence we’ve had in the last 30 years, but that’s the only thing they keep bringing up. There’ve been all kinds of cultural shifts that no one’s analyzing or chastising.

I think anything that’s really successful, and anything that gets the kids I think scares adults. Look, I’m a parent and even grandparent so I know that fear you have for things that your kids are really excited about. Usually they’re things that are kind of scary to adults and you’re always worried that somebody’s going to hurt so your whole paradigm shifts when you’re a parent. I can understand it but I think as The Who said, the kids are all right. They’re going to get through it all right.

 

Are there still remakes of The People Under the Stairs and Shocker in development?

No, no, not at the moment. By the time of Hills 2, it really took a lot of my own creative time. It’s not like you’re just finding somebody and they go off and make the movie. Ultimately they go off and make the movie but there’s a lot of time spent on getting the script right and casting and finding the right directors and everything else. Hills 2 especially, it took almost a year of my creative life so it felt like it’s too early in my own career to just do remakes of my own stuff.

 

Not that I necessarily want to see a different version of The People Under the Stairs, but that might be the closest I would get to continuing that series.

I’d like to redo Shocker just to get the special effects right because we had a real special effects disaster on the film. The guy who was doing all the visual effects kind of flamed out, had a nervous breakdown because he was attempting more than he could actually do. When he told us towards the end of the movie that not a single one of the special effects was actually working, he was working on a new technique, my son’s job specifically became just to find all the negative. It was all around town in unmarked boxes and under people’s editing [benches]. It was a nightmare itself. We pulled every favor in town to get all those special effects done very quickly and some of them are pretty sketchy.

 

I never noticed when I was a Shocker fan. Which effects were problematic?

Going in and out of the television, going into the wall.

 

People Under the Stairs is actually my favorite horror movie.

Really? Oh fantastic.

 

Any good stories about that?

The most difficult thing about that picture as I recall was shooting between walls, which we finally solved by just having portable walls but you had to make much wider spaces than normal and it’s very difficult to get camera angles because you’re in such a confined space. And a lot of the picture was written to be in total darkness and lit just by a match or a lighter. For our cinematographer that was a nightmare so that slowed us down somewhat.

 

So that will always exist as a standalone it seems. Not a continuing series or re-imagining.

Yeah, I don’t know how you would continue that. I guess you could go to a different house and different situations. The kids did escape at the end so they could have gone off and built a magical kingdom someplace.

 

If they’d done a remake, it would have presumably been a modern take on what a house like that would be today.

Yeah. The thing with both those pictures, they were the first time I had final cut and they were done with Universal but also a guy named Shep Gordon so there’s three entities that have to be satisfied so it gets very complicated. It just all kind of stopped.

 

Before we wrap, what is your next film?

I’m working right now on a five issue comic book story with a company called Liquid Comics, with Steve Niles who did 30 Days of Night. The fifth issue is hopefully about to arrive from Steve, and there’s a movie deal attached to that. That will be the most likely thing next but I’m also reading other scripts. Who knows, something else might come first. I’ve taken a year off. I had total knee replacement. Just had some physical stuff that had to be attended to so I’m just coming to the end of that. 

 


Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.

TRENDING


X