Interview By: Benjamin Lee
Proudly reigning as the master of horror for over 30 years, 68-year-old Wes Craven is a surprisingly unscary person.
Articulate, softly spoken and piercingly intelligent, he's not the man you would necessarily associate with some of the scariest films you've ever seen. Craven has managed to be at the forefront of the genre for four different decades, scaring your parents, their parents and your kids. He was the pioneer of the brutal, gritty 70s offerings with The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He tapped into another generation's fears with the groundbreaking 80s hit A Nightmare On Elm Street and then restarted the horror genre in the 90s with the postmodern slasher trilogy of Scream.
It's now the 00s and we've already seen Wes Craven taking on the thriller genre with much success in the fast and furious Red Eye but today sees him taking a backseat as he takes on The Hills Have Eyes 2. Last year Craven produced the remake of his 1972 original and saw it become a decent-sized hit and a year later he revisits the film which saw him begin his career. Despite being the director of the original he admits that directing the remake and its sequel would have been a bad choice.
'I felt like that would be a sign that I'd run out of ideas,' he jokes. Directing duties this time go to Martin Weisz while Craven gladly took on the role of co-writer and producer. The film sees a group of National Guard trainees get picked off by ruthless mutants and shares the same rough, bloody tone of its predecessor. Many are already talking about a gratuitous rape scene that exists in the film which far out-grosses a similar attack in the remake. But Craven denies that they deliberately aim to outdo any of the other recent horror movies.
'I don't think any of us think we've got to be more shocking than some film we went out and saw,' Craven believes, 'I think that really is kind of dogs chasing their tails. You try to make something that has impact because of story or character. It has violence and so forth but that's not the pre-eminent thing.' Violence, he claims isn't the most important factor for him, even in a film like The Hills Have Eyes 2. 'To me it's always been more of what is that thing which makes it personal and unexpected,' he says, 'Not oh you know nobody would want to have their foot sawed off or make them do it to themselves.'
It's currently being rumored that the MPAA are considering a shake-up of the ratings system, with a 'hard' R being mooted for the new stream of violent horror movies. It's something that Craven strongly opposes. 'It seems to me that the R rating is sufficient,' he claims, 'It's pretty clear that beyond a certain age it's safe for a person to see a horror film. I always am very suspicious of the argument that we have to protect a random child that walks into the theater. For one thing my suspicion is that probably 60% of the films they're seeing, if not more, are seen in homes.'
Craven also believes that it's the job of parents to keep charge of what their kids are watching, not the filmmakers. 'It's a parental thing,' he states, 'Are you letting your television be a babysitter or are you watching what your kids are watching''
On The Hills Have Eyes 2, he works with his son Jonathan Craven who co-wrote the script with him. But since parental control is paramount in controlling kids and their exposure to horror films, did he let his son watch horror films when he was a child' 'I didn't sit them down and say watch what Daddy did because they were kids,' he tells, 'I kind of let everything, in so far as what they discovered about films and scary films and even what I did, come from their peers. At a certain point they would say someone at school saw one of your films or they'd heard about it. It just sort of gradually dawned on them that I was out there doing that kind of film. I never had them around on set or anything.'
For someone who's been involved with scary movies for 35 years, it must be tough to truly scare Wes Craven. However he claims that all horror comes from somewhere deep inside the person who created it. 'I think anybody that makes a scary movie would think what would I think would be scary'' he states, 'What scares me' You go inside yourself and go oh man that would be scary. That's what any artist does is they look inside and go how do I relate to this'' Craven does joke that his deepest fear lies outside of his own self. 'My pat answer for what scares me is the Bush administration.'
Politics and Wes Craven have never gone hand in hand. He's often been used by the Republican Government as a Marilyn Manson style destroyer of children's innocence. The Scream movies launched a number of copycat attacks and re-ignited the age-old argument of whether films can make people do terrible things.
'There was a very strong argument being made that films were products that caused kids to either harm themselves or harm others' he explains, 'So as products they were suable as they were a faulty product. And the studios would be sued for putting it out so as soon as the corporations who owned the studios heard that the word came down to the studios to not get sued or we'll drop you.' This led to the stream of PG-13 horror movies that have damaged the genre for the past few years. Chopped and sliced to obtain a rating they were never meant to receive, they've been scorned upon by those who love the genre.
'I think that era has passed with the emergence of a href="http://www.thecinemasource.com/v3/movieinfo.php'movieid=1218&wordcount=0">Saw and films of that sort,' he says, 'a href="http://www.thecinemasource.com/v3/movieinfo.php'movieid=1218&wordcount=0">Saw came out of nowhere and came at a time when studios thought it was much safer to do PG-13 films. Actually Cursed fell under that. We turned in the R-rated version that we'd been contracted to make and the studio cut it down to a PG-13.' As the fears grew about the dangers of violence, the neutered horrors were all fans could see. 'Studios became very cautious and started buying every Japanese ghost story that's ever been made and remaking them because these ghost stories don't have blood,' Craven tells, 'They were safe but then at a certain point the audiences got really bored and about the same time the administration got in trouble with the war in Iraq and a lot of the attention swung away from focusing on the media and all these things because there was a much greater violence going on. Suddenly people realized the other thing was ridiculous and the important thing was that we were losing a war.'
A recent attack on the new wave of more violent horror movies was launched by strict conservative TV pundit Bill O'Reilly but it never managed to gain enough steam to really make a difference. Craven is convinced that figures such as O'Reilly are a dying breed. 'I think Bill O'Reilly's on his way out' he believes, 'I think that whole despicable form of journalism is running out of gas. Everything that they have supported and said you know this is the way we should do things is bankrupt and not working. The whole radical right way of screaming at things and saying shut up you're disgusting. It's swung around to the point when people are looking at them and saying you know what, you're disgusting.'
Although Craven does admit there are a select few genre pics that maybe do go just a little bit too far. 'I do get the sense that there is a sort of a fringe,' he says, 'This sort of torture pornography in some films. They're not appealing to the best in people. I have watched audiences cheer when someone's having their head sawed off. It's a tricky area. In a way it's just getting out teenage angst and rage in a harmless way.'
He does think to an extent it can be healthy for a kid to see a horror film. We do, after all, live in a world full of real-life horrors. 'My sense is the vast majority of kids that see this kind of film see it as some kind of exercise of stealing themselves away from the realities of the world,' he believes, 'I mean kids see stuff on the internet now that is real. You go on the internet and see a reporter getting his head sawed off - it's reality. So in a way the art that they watch amps up to deal with this kind of nightmarish reality.'
Craven doesn't let the attacks bother him. He is after all a man with a lot of fans. His Scream trilogy grossed over $500 million worldwide. Rumors have been circulating for a while now that Craven will be resurrecting ghostface for Scream 4. They are rumors that even Craven has heard himself.
'I've heard rumors,' he admits, 'For the first time in the last several months that there might be something in the offing. I think at this point I'm starting to feel like there would be the notion within the studio to do another but I haven't heard anything specific or haven't had a call from Bob Weinstein.' If it did happen Craven confesses that he would love to see Sidney back for a final showdown. 'I think it's fascinating to have the same person in all four movies' he reveals, 'It would be interesting to at least begin it with Neve Campbell. I haven't thought of it because Bob Weinstein had always said it's gotta be three and out and we won't do a fourth. But that was years ago and I've heard from many many fans that they'd love to see another one.'
It's talking about his fans that matters most to Wes Craven. For those who claim horror films can have a detrimental effect on kids today need only to head to a multiplex on a Saturday night and witness the reactions. 'I see so many of my audiences come out of a theater, when I sit at the back of a screening, and they're not looking like kids with rigid faces, who are gonna go and kill Granny, they're kids that are laughing and their cheeks are red and if they see me they say thanks that was great, you scared the shit out of me!' he laughs.
