by Marc Savlov
There are not a lot of directors who have skewed the popular mindset as well as Wes Craven has. It’s rare enough to find genre
directors who can churn out even one or two good works before settling into the
rut that so often catches up with them. Craven is the exception that proves the
rule, however.
Starting with his 1972 directorial debut, Last House on the Left (featuring a very young Jodie Foster and a very creepy Martin Sheen), Craven
was — and remains — instantly recognizable as one of that rarest of breeds,
the horror auteur. His second film, the
much-discussed The Hills
Have Eyes took the myth of the nuclear family to new extremes, giving it a
hideous, startling twist and effectively breaking its neck.
It was 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street that cemented his reputation.
The disquieting tale of Freddy Krueger, a disembodied child-killer who returned
from the grave via dreams to wreak vengeance on the children of those who had
killed him years before. It was the old “sins of the fathers” funneled through
Freud in a severely tilting haunted house. Nightmare spawned six
sequels, although none that could live up to Craven’s original premise. The
most recent installment (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) was the only sequel
to be directed by Craven.
Despite the rapid decline of the franchise through the late Eighties, the
character of Krueger, he of the razored gauntlets, filthy green-and-red
sweater, battered fedora, and horribly scarred visage, has become a pop-culture
icon, easily as identifiable as Frankenstein’s monster or (ugh!) Barney. At one
point, you could even walk into the Toys R Us chain and pick up a talking
Freddy doll, until someone finally figured out the toy was modeled on the
character of a murdered child molester with fourth-degree burns.
Craven’s films unite the best of the old guard, things that go bump in the
night and so on, with a distinctively psychological and philosophical take on
traditional horror shows. Seeing as how the director majored in both those
subjects while attending Johns Hopkins years ago, perhaps that’s not so
surprising.
What is surprising, though, is just how easily Craven makes it all look.
1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (based on the book by Wade Davis)
remains one of the truly great films to deal with Haitian ritual magic in a
semi-sensible light, while 1991’s The People Under the Stairs was a
fluid, streamlined look into suburbia gone haywire, and also an updating of the
cannibal family unit from The Hills Have Eyes.
Craven, while in town for the third annual Austin Heart of Film Festival and
Screenwriters Conference last week, consented to speak with me on everything
from the story behind Nightmare and his upcoming big-budget film
Scream. Soft-spoken and extremely laid back, this is what he had to
say.
Austin Chronicle: When you began making A Nightmare on Elm Street way
back in 1984, did you have any idea how big it would become?
Wes Craven: No. I didn’t, you know? I knew the story was compelling because I
had sort of massaged it enough to be able to tell it in a minute or two. It
just “told” as a very good story.
AC: Do you remember your original pitch for it?
WC: The pitch per se? Not exactly. It was something that I had as an idea based
on some newspaper articles. There was this series of deaths that have
subsequently been studied — they’re called something like sudden death
syndrome. It was apparently a big problem in Southeast Asia, especially in
Cambodia and places like that. Young males would have severe nightmares and die
in their sleep. There was a whole elaborate system of trying to deal with it,
and apparently it was a very big problem. Just the way that they happened was
very dramatic.
The last one was similar to the others, but it had a little more dramatic
finesse to it. The kid had tried to stay awake and told his parents that he had
had a really awful nightmare and was afraid to sleep. He had extended the
period of staying awake to the point that it scared the parents, and they had
called a doctor who prescribed sleeping pills. Well, the kid just hid them
under his bed, right? Anyway, the kid stayed up a really long time, like two,
three days, and then finally fell asleep. The parents took him up to bed and
tucked him in, then went to bed themselves thinking everyone was finally going
to get a good night’s sleep. They eventually heard screaming and ran into the
kid’s room, tried to wake him up, but he just died. Right there in front of
them.
It just seemed so dramatic that I started to toy with the idea of a story
about somebody that comes to people in dreams, to the point that their dream
life and their waking life become commingled, where they can’t quite discern
what is real and what isn’t anymore.
So I kind of combined those two notions with the idea of somebody who is tied
to a series of events in the past that were impinging on the kids, a sort of
“sins of the parents/children’s children” kind of thing. And basically that’s
how I concocted the story of Freddy.
AC: How did it morph in the finished film? Was there a quick turnaround
on that?
WC: That general notion I think I mentioned to Bob Shaye, who is the head of
New Line Cinema, when we met in New York once. He asked me if I had anything,
and I said, “Well, I’ve got this idea about this guy that can kill you in your
dreams.”
Bob was always interested in that, but I went on to do two other films,
Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing, before anything happened. I did
those two films back to back and I thought I kind of deserved a break, so I
decided to write my first script around this story.
So I wrote the script and sent it to Bob Shaye. He liked it a lot and had
notes and all that, but he wanted to do it for a very low budget, so I spent
about two years trying to get it mounted on my own. I had it set at $2.5
million, and I definitely didn’t want to do it for less than a million, but Bob
wanted to do it for $350,000. There was a long period where I basically went
broke, until Shaye relented a bit, and it was finally done for about $1.8
million, I think.
During that time when I had the script, I would always tell the story to
friends who would just listen raptly and then say how much they loved it. It
seemed like a really good story.
Shaye right away sensed the sequels. I didn’t. He’s always had a much stronger
sense of what could be popularized and how to change something, so in the
subsequent sequels, he made Freddy a lot less threatening and much more jokey,
which caught on. So to his credit — or whatever — he’s the guy that sort of
developed that facet of it.
AC: Did that ever bother you, the fact that the character devolved into
this sort of wisecracking goofball?
WC: Yeah.
AC: But there wasn’t really anything you could do about it?
WC: Not if they buy you out, which in those days was part of the standard
script purchase. It was before any really big sequels had begun. I think maybe
Friday the 13th had had one or two at that point, possibly.
The whole idea of Nightmare was very much of a complete thought. I
mean, it had a resolution at the end, how to deal with violence by turning away
from it and taking the energy out of it. A lot of it came from oneself, and you
had to just deal with those elements of it yourself, in your own way. By the
end of the movie, that was sort of a completed thought.
That sort of “Oh, the mummies back again” type of cockamamie story didn’t
really appeal to me that much. In fact, I passed on doing the second one,
because I thought the whole concept was silly.
AC: The second one was really just terrible.
WC: Yeah, it was. I think after that they realized they had to put some thought into it. They actually came back to me for Nightmare 3, and I
conceived that one and co-wrote it with Bruce Wagner, who has since become
quite an accomplished novelist. That then was rewritten by Chuck Russell and,
if I’m not mistaken, Frank Darabont [The Shawshank Redemption].
AC: What is it, in your opinion, that caused such a major reaction to the
Freddy character? I mean, the guy was a child-killer, which is not your typical
fodder for American icons.
WC: There’s something about Freddy that’s very conversant. I think that he’s
specifically a killer of children made the kids respond, and the fact that he
was somehow amusing made him a bit less of a threat, and made it something that
they could handle. And I think that that’s very important to kids, or to anyone
who’s frightened of anything, really. I know from reading Joseph Campbell early
on — long before I got into the film business — the idea that cultures tend
to take things that they’re most frightened of and make them into icons or
something that they can control via a story. You wear the skin of the leopard,
or you wear these horrible voodoo masks, or whatever it is. It’s ironic, in a
way, like the Mexican Day of the Dead, with people running out and buying
skulls and crossbones when we all know we’re all just terrified of the fact
that, one day, we are going to be those skulls and those crossbones.
If you can somehow lessen it a bit, and make it into something that becomes
more abstract, then you can get a handle on it, and diminish it.
AC: How did you come up with the idea for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare?
That was such a radical departure from the norm, breaking the so-called forth
wall between film, audience, and filmmaker? Was that a conscious effort to
wield some sort of control over the franchise and maybe put an end to it?
WC: In a way, yeah. Again, it was based on an offer from Bob Shaye, who
called up and said “Look, I hear there’s some ill will and you may not be
satisfied with the way things turned out [with the Nightmare series],”
and so we ironed out differences as part of the dealmaking. He said that
killing off Freddy in the last film may have been a mistake, but they weren’t
sure how to bring him back. I said I’d think about it, and so I went back and
looked at the whole series. I didn’t think there was any consistency to the
story line, no real philosophy as it were. It was really kind of a mess. I
thought, how do we jump the paradigm? How do we get up to the next level?
Well, the only way I could think to do that was to say: What if Freddy were to
somehow pass outside the boundaries of film and become “real”? I was also
thinking about how I’m always asked, “Don’t you think your films can harm
people, or cause people to do bad things?”
Although I had never felt that was true, I had also never really thought
through the mechanism of what scary stories do for kids or cultures. Which is
what I did then. I thought, “What if scary stories like these were somehow
banned from our culture?” My feeling was that there’s something about the
function of a scary story that, rather than causing more violence, defuses it
in a way. It gets rid of some of that energy, it lets you look at it. It also
helps you deal with violence. It begs the question: How would I deal
with this situation?
AC: And from this introspection came the premise of the film?
WC: Right. Say Freddy’s been killed, right? Well, what if that caused this sort
of negative energy to be let loose in a way that nobody even thought about. And
then the story per se just progressed from there. I went back to Bob and said
I’d like the film to be about the making of the movies, the making of the whole
series, and it would star all of us. He liked that idea a lot, and
that’s when it got interesting to me.
AC: How was popular reaction to the film?
WC: It did respectably. It did around $20 million, I think. Which was as much
as the Eddie Murphy picture I made [Vampire in Brooklyn]. It was more of
an intellectual thing, frankly, than a totally visceral scary thing. I tried to
approach the audience that had been around as teenagers for the first movie 10
years previous, and that’s a tricky audience to get. But overall, it was very
well reviewed and received well by the thinking audience, that one that likes
to have fun with horror.
AC: There seems to have been a major drop-off in both the quality and
amount of genre films in the last few years. Why do you think that is?
Political climate, maybe?
WC: Oh yeah. The political climate has a lot to do with it. I can tell you I’m
in the middle of — hopefully more toward the end of — fighting the MPAA on my
new film, Scream, for Miramax. It’s very disheartening, basically,
because they’re very powerful and they’re very conservative, and so they have
the power to prevent your film from being released in any meaningful way, by
simply saying it’s an “NC-17.” That means you can’t advertise in 80 percent of
the markets, newspapers, networks, and so on, and it basically relegates your
film to some obscure, tiny area.
They tell you that you’ve got to have an “R” rating, and so you have to keep
going back saying “Okay, I’ve made these cuts. Please give it an `R.’ It’s
making a statement. This is art for me.”
Basically, they don’t want to hear that, and they’ll say, take this out, take
that out, and so on.
But the insidious thing they’re doing now — and have been doing for the last
10 years — is saying it’s the whole tone of the film that they don’t like.
And this is a big film, too. It’s got Courtney Cox, Drew Barrymore, Neve
Campbell. It’s a really complicated, very fascinating story, sort of a murder
mystery for kids who love horror films. But the last act of it is quite bloody;
it’s sort of the falling-apart of the world of this killer who had been, up to
that point, emulating what he sees in horror films, but when he actually has a
wound inflicted on himself, he realizes how much it hurts and he starts to die.
It was sort of this character’s plan to wound himself and pass himself off as a
survivor, but that doesn’t go according to plan, and so the whole third act is
this guy bleeding to death. And it’s got some very dark humor in it.
And they hate it. They cannot stand this kind of humorous treatment of
this sort of stuff. They want fantasy violence — they’ll accept that. My point
is that violence is far more interesting when it’s treated as what it really
is, and the ramifications that it really has. In which case, you look at people
really suffering, you know, people that get stabbed but don’t die right away.
They begin the process of dying, but it’s not instantaneous, it’s not cut and
dried.
It’s almost like that kind of honesty is forbidden. It’s creepy, and to that
extent, it’s very hard to make a film about some of these things. I’ve had them
tell me, “this whole section of the film is just too intense, cut back on the
intensity.”
AC: I remember John McNaughton’s debut, Henry: Portrait of a Serial
Killer went through the exact same thing.
WC: Right. I mean, you know as a filmmaker what you can do to make
something less intense, but the whole point is that you’ve struggled to get it
to that level of intensity already. That’s where you want it, and that’s where
you think it should be. And they make you feel as if you’re eviscerating your
own film. People you never even get to meet.
If I can get this out to an audience, I think it would be very, very powerful
and some of the best work I’ve ever done, but I’m at this block where it’s very
difficult to get out.
AC: How does this kind of runaround from the MPAA effect you personally, as
a director?
WC: I can tell you the effect it has on me overall is: Why struggle to make
this kind of film anymore? You can’t make it in this climate where this
faceless body of people has control over your final product. What’s the point
of struggling and working for a year and a half and freezing your ass off doing
night shoots and fighting producers and everybody else to get it just right,
when at the end you get the shit cut out of it by a bunch of anonymous
overlords?
AC: Maybe it’s time for you to take a stab at the next, oh, Home
Alone sequel. I’d like to see that, actually: Wes Craven’s Home
Alone!
WC: [laughing] Maybe so. Maybe so. It is in many ways more attractive to get
out of the genre and do other things, because, at this moment, there’s less of
a chance of them being cut to ribbons. The way it is now, all the horror is in
the six o’clock news, and we’re not allowed to reflect that at all. n
This article appears in October 25 • 1996 and October 25 • 1996 (Cover).