When I became a journalist, it was a dream to be able to meet the filmmakers who inspired me as a movie-loving kid. After 12 years in the industry, it's even more fulfilling to follow these filmmakers as they continue to influence our lives with the stories they tell in different eras.
Wes Craven is on his third or fourth cycle. For me, A Nightmare on Elm Street of course opened the world of dreams and overcoming your fears through Freddy Krueger for me. Also The People Under the Stairs unleashed all the creativity that could exist buried in dangerous suburban house.
The generation before me got to know Craven from his brutal thrillers Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, for both of which Craven produced remakes in the last decade. The Scream series was already impacting horror fans younger than me, but I certainly enjoyed the way its characters knew the rules of the horror movies in which they were stuck, and it didn't help them much.
Scre4m is already addressing a further generation by incorporating cell phones and internet technology, and discussing the rules of horror movie remakes. For the latest film, I once again got a chance to commiserate with my creative guru. By phone, Craven's soft spoken voice rose slightly above the landline static, with a sure footed answer for any analytical inquiry.
SuicideGirls: Having gotten to talk to you over the years, you used to say you were sure there'd be a Scream 4 without you one day. How surprised were you to be back and with all your original cast?
Wes Craven: I was pretty surprised. Life is kind of funny because you never know when you're going to be kind of out of it and get too old to do things and it turns out I'm still perfectly capable of doing things. So here I am back doing this even after 10 years of being away from it. It was very important to have Courtney [Cox], David [Arquette] and Neve [Campbell] a part of it and it very quickly became a matter of getting the gang back together again: Marco Beltrami doing the score again and Peter Deming shooting it and doing it in anamorphic. All those things were things that I very much wanted to achieve and Bob Weinstein was able to basically arrange for me and pay the price for hiring those kind of people. Based on the script that Kevin [Williamson] sketched out for me over dinner and then started presenting as he worked up the pages, I knew it was going to be an intriguing story and we had a great cast. Bob always gives us the funds to get really interesting young actors whose careers have already started in a way so it's not like you're just getting unknowns that nobody in the audience knows. You're getting actors that have already established themselves and have an audience that they'll bring in too.
SG: The phone calls have always been such an important part of Scream. Did you ever imagine we'd all have our own individual personal cell phones?
WC: It's certainly a big part of Scre4m. At one point with texting I had a qualm that oh my God, everybody's going to start texting and not talking on phones, so Ghostface won't have a venue. I think the voice of Roger Jackson is extraordinary. It was one of those lucky finds way back when and has stayed with the picture, another element that has remained from the very beginning. It just has this incredible quality of sophistication and malevolence and intelligence that makes it scary. It's a very interesting villain in a way because it's two very separate things. It's not like Freddy Krueger that talks and you're looking at his face and he's talking to you. It's Ghostface who is absolutely mute and then it's the voice on the telephone. The two rarely are very close to each other.
SG: Even beyond caller ID, the idea that everyone's phone is personally tied to them, is that something scary to explore for this generation?
WC: Absolutely. I think we did that. I think the fact that sometimes you can see who's calling, sometimes you can't, the fact that there's GPSes in your phone. I was just reading an article about a German writer who demanded from a phone company records and he discovered that they were keeping basically where he was every 15 minutes. They had this enormous file on him that tracked every move he had made for the last six months that he was able to get through some sort of Freedom of Information Act in Germany. So the potential for these devices for good and evil is immense. I think more and more they will find their way into genre films because the chances of evil using it in a clever and insidious way are very great.
SG: This idea of the rules for remakes, do you find that all the remakes we've seen in the last 5-10 years are following a set of rules?
WC: Well, the rules are stated in the film I think basically. We look for trends and then we immediately violate the trends. We call them rules but really they're kind of emerging clichs. In the film for instance, we say if you're gay you can't die. Then of course the character that's gay is killed. It doesn't help him whatsoever. A lot of what is part of just the ironic part of the Scream series is to find the clichs, to find the things that have repeated themselves until they're beginning to lose their strength and meaning. Then just make the audience think that's where you're going and then going the totally opposite direction.
SG: Did those rules apply to the remakes you produced of The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left?
WC: I don't think so. I think both those films are quite unique in their situations. They're not quite teenagers in their houses. Frankly, we found really good directors and then let them do what they wanted to do and they were both European so I think in that way, those films were much more European films than they were standard American horror films.
SG: Do you think the remake wave will run its course too?
WC: Well, it almost has to. There are only so many films out there that are worth remaking at all. I think once a film like Scream starts making fun of it, the audience will be aware that enough is enough. I've heard that from reporters and everybody else, enough with the remakes, enough with the sequels, enough with the torture porn. All that stuff is just repeating endlessly. People still want fresh material. They want something that's germane to their own moment in time and they want to feel like the people whose films they pay money to see are really devoting themselves to doing something fresh and new and something that's their own, and not just warmed over somebody else.
SG: Was that your opinion of the Saw franchise in the line about torture porn?
WC: Yeah, a bit. As I've said publicly, I'm aware that people have made those films. I have nothing personally against them. I don't mean to criticize them. It's just my personal taste does not include a pleasure in watching people tortured. I've had torture in some of my films, if you look at Last House, but it's just something that I had no desire for instance to go back and see a sequel, so I've only seen Saw 1, I've only seen Hostel 1. To me, that sort of protracted torturing of an individual isn't entertaining or illuminating in any particular way. But at the same time, I will say that those films I found engaged me very much. They were not what I thought they were going to be. They were not just endless torture. I don't know whether it went that direction eventually but both films were kind of interesting, just kind of a subject matter that I don't care to go back and see more of.
SG: I can tell you Jigsaw always had a message, and even the Hostel movies had a subtext. Do you think Jigsaw's tape recorded messages are an evolution of the phone calls from Scream?
WC: They're certainly a nod in our direction. There's only so many ways a killer can communicate I suppose. Certainly it's similar let's say. I can't say for sure.
SG: Would a Scream movie ever one day make Sidney or Gale the killer?
WC: You know, that's funny. The idea flitted through conversations. When you start to say, What can make this different? We thought of killing everybody, either individually or all in one fell swoop. There's all sorts of ideas that go through during the early stages of the writing process but I don't think so. I think Sidney remains the rock that the audience rests on. You kind of want to see her keep her spirit and keep her sanity and everything else, but you never know.
SG: The first Scream trilogy made nods to the public debate that movies were to blame for influencing kids. Now it seems video games are the scapegoat for that. Don't people ever learn that it's not these things that make people unstable?
WC: No, they don't but what these things are, they're things that make some people very uncomfortable. I think it's highly repressed people, this is my particular theory. They want to stamp out the mirror that's being held up to their particular corner of the society. I just think there's never been any proof of all the claims. All of the fans that I've met have been really wonderful, warm and sweet people. But no, they never tire of that.
SG: Michael Moore even made the movie pointing out you could just as easily blame bowling.
WC: Yeah, knocking over all those pins is so violent. Look how violent football is for God's sake. That's part of the drama of life is violence and dealing with violence and being able to navigate the battlefield.
SG: What do you think of this minimalist found footage movement of horror?
WC: Well, every once in a while, The Blair Witch Project, every once in a while someone does one that's fresh because it hasn't been done in a while. I thought Paranormal Activity was a fun picture. It made me jump in one particular moment. I know Bob Weinstein is doing one, Apollo 18. I think it'll be a subgenre of the genre that from time to time will pop up and be fun.
SG: What was the moment that got you in Paranormal Activity?
WC: When the woman's pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and dragged down to the hallway. That to me was very scary.
Scre4m is out on DVD and Blur-ay now!
Wes Craven is on his third or fourth cycle. For me, A Nightmare on Elm Street of course opened the world of dreams and overcoming your fears through Freddy Krueger for me. Also The People Under the Stairs unleashed all the creativity that could exist buried in dangerous suburban house.
The generation before me got to know Craven from his brutal thrillers Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, for both of which Craven produced remakes in the last decade. The Scream series was already impacting horror fans younger than me, but I certainly enjoyed the way its characters knew the rules of the horror movies in which they were stuck, and it didn't help them much.
Scre4m is already addressing a further generation by incorporating cell phones and internet technology, and discussing the rules of horror movie remakes. For the latest film, I once again got a chance to commiserate with my creative guru. By phone, Craven's soft spoken voice rose slightly above the landline static, with a sure footed answer for any analytical inquiry.
SuicideGirls: Having gotten to talk to you over the years, you used to say you were sure there'd be a Scream 4 without you one day. How surprised were you to be back and with all your original cast?
Wes Craven: I was pretty surprised. Life is kind of funny because you never know when you're going to be kind of out of it and get too old to do things and it turns out I'm still perfectly capable of doing things. So here I am back doing this even after 10 years of being away from it. It was very important to have Courtney [Cox], David [Arquette] and Neve [Campbell] a part of it and it very quickly became a matter of getting the gang back together again: Marco Beltrami doing the score again and Peter Deming shooting it and doing it in anamorphic. All those things were things that I very much wanted to achieve and Bob Weinstein was able to basically arrange for me and pay the price for hiring those kind of people. Based on the script that Kevin [Williamson] sketched out for me over dinner and then started presenting as he worked up the pages, I knew it was going to be an intriguing story and we had a great cast. Bob always gives us the funds to get really interesting young actors whose careers have already started in a way so it's not like you're just getting unknowns that nobody in the audience knows. You're getting actors that have already established themselves and have an audience that they'll bring in too.
SG: The phone calls have always been such an important part of Scream. Did you ever imagine we'd all have our own individual personal cell phones?
WC: It's certainly a big part of Scre4m. At one point with texting I had a qualm that oh my God, everybody's going to start texting and not talking on phones, so Ghostface won't have a venue. I think the voice of Roger Jackson is extraordinary. It was one of those lucky finds way back when and has stayed with the picture, another element that has remained from the very beginning. It just has this incredible quality of sophistication and malevolence and intelligence that makes it scary. It's a very interesting villain in a way because it's two very separate things. It's not like Freddy Krueger that talks and you're looking at his face and he's talking to you. It's Ghostface who is absolutely mute and then it's the voice on the telephone. The two rarely are very close to each other.
SG: Even beyond caller ID, the idea that everyone's phone is personally tied to them, is that something scary to explore for this generation?
WC: Absolutely. I think we did that. I think the fact that sometimes you can see who's calling, sometimes you can't, the fact that there's GPSes in your phone. I was just reading an article about a German writer who demanded from a phone company records and he discovered that they were keeping basically where he was every 15 minutes. They had this enormous file on him that tracked every move he had made for the last six months that he was able to get through some sort of Freedom of Information Act in Germany. So the potential for these devices for good and evil is immense. I think more and more they will find their way into genre films because the chances of evil using it in a clever and insidious way are very great.
SG: This idea of the rules for remakes, do you find that all the remakes we've seen in the last 5-10 years are following a set of rules?
WC: Well, the rules are stated in the film I think basically. We look for trends and then we immediately violate the trends. We call them rules but really they're kind of emerging clichs. In the film for instance, we say if you're gay you can't die. Then of course the character that's gay is killed. It doesn't help him whatsoever. A lot of what is part of just the ironic part of the Scream series is to find the clichs, to find the things that have repeated themselves until they're beginning to lose their strength and meaning. Then just make the audience think that's where you're going and then going the totally opposite direction.
SG: Did those rules apply to the remakes you produced of The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left?
WC: I don't think so. I think both those films are quite unique in their situations. They're not quite teenagers in their houses. Frankly, we found really good directors and then let them do what they wanted to do and they were both European so I think in that way, those films were much more European films than they were standard American horror films.
SG: Do you think the remake wave will run its course too?
WC: Well, it almost has to. There are only so many films out there that are worth remaking at all. I think once a film like Scream starts making fun of it, the audience will be aware that enough is enough. I've heard that from reporters and everybody else, enough with the remakes, enough with the sequels, enough with the torture porn. All that stuff is just repeating endlessly. People still want fresh material. They want something that's germane to their own moment in time and they want to feel like the people whose films they pay money to see are really devoting themselves to doing something fresh and new and something that's their own, and not just warmed over somebody else.
SG: Was that your opinion of the Saw franchise in the line about torture porn?
WC: Yeah, a bit. As I've said publicly, I'm aware that people have made those films. I have nothing personally against them. I don't mean to criticize them. It's just my personal taste does not include a pleasure in watching people tortured. I've had torture in some of my films, if you look at Last House, but it's just something that I had no desire for instance to go back and see a sequel, so I've only seen Saw 1, I've only seen Hostel 1. To me, that sort of protracted torturing of an individual isn't entertaining or illuminating in any particular way. But at the same time, I will say that those films I found engaged me very much. They were not what I thought they were going to be. They were not just endless torture. I don't know whether it went that direction eventually but both films were kind of interesting, just kind of a subject matter that I don't care to go back and see more of.
SG: I can tell you Jigsaw always had a message, and even the Hostel movies had a subtext. Do you think Jigsaw's tape recorded messages are an evolution of the phone calls from Scream?
WC: They're certainly a nod in our direction. There's only so many ways a killer can communicate I suppose. Certainly it's similar let's say. I can't say for sure.
SG: Would a Scream movie ever one day make Sidney or Gale the killer?
WC: You know, that's funny. The idea flitted through conversations. When you start to say, What can make this different? We thought of killing everybody, either individually or all in one fell swoop. There's all sorts of ideas that go through during the early stages of the writing process but I don't think so. I think Sidney remains the rock that the audience rests on. You kind of want to see her keep her spirit and keep her sanity and everything else, but you never know.
SG: The first Scream trilogy made nods to the public debate that movies were to blame for influencing kids. Now it seems video games are the scapegoat for that. Don't people ever learn that it's not these things that make people unstable?
WC: No, they don't but what these things are, they're things that make some people very uncomfortable. I think it's highly repressed people, this is my particular theory. They want to stamp out the mirror that's being held up to their particular corner of the society. I just think there's never been any proof of all the claims. All of the fans that I've met have been really wonderful, warm and sweet people. But no, they never tire of that.
SG: Michael Moore even made the movie pointing out you could just as easily blame bowling.
WC: Yeah, knocking over all those pins is so violent. Look how violent football is for God's sake. That's part of the drama of life is violence and dealing with violence and being able to navigate the battlefield.
SG: What do you think of this minimalist found footage movement of horror?
WC: Well, every once in a while, The Blair Witch Project, every once in a while someone does one that's fresh because it hasn't been done in a while. I thought Paranormal Activity was a fun picture. It made me jump in one particular moment. I know Bob Weinstein is doing one, Apollo 18. I think it'll be a subgenre of the genre that from time to time will pop up and be fun.
SG: What was the moment that got you in Paranormal Activity?
WC: When the woman's pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and dragged down to the hallway. That to me was very scary.
Scre4m is out on DVD and Blur-ay now!