Wes Craven has been recognized as a leading horror director since the triumph of The Last House on the Left in 1972. He’s responsible for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, launching two of the most lucrative franchises in the history of the genre. In 2006, Alexandre Aja vividly remade The Hills Have Eyes, Craven’s classic tale of monstrous savages attacking a Californian family. The movie’s warm reception among horror fans stirred Craven to revisit the story he invented 20 years ago, so he cowrote The Hills Have Eyes 2 with his son Jonathan.
NYP: Horror is regarded within the industry as immensely profitable, which sometimes obscures the fact that making these movies is an artistic process. How do you go about presenting the creative elements of the horror genre?
Wes Craven: It doesn’t usually enter my thoughts. Once you start worrying about convincing people that what you’re doing is legitimate, you’re stultifying it. I think there’s been a gradual change where a lot of fans who fell in love with horror around the time of Nightmare on Elm Street are now either critics or studio guys. So, from around Red Eye—or maybe Scream—you talk to studio executives who are fans and have been all their lives. Before that, studio heads wouldn’t even be associated with it. They knew it made a lot of money, but you felt like once you left, they thought, “That guy must be really fucked up.”
Lionsgate has done quite well cranking out low-budget horror movies and making a quick profit. Of course, you were making small-scale horror movies years ago.
I heard an interview with a music critic who was talking about jazz. He said that during the time of Coltrane and Miles, these guys were coming up with stuff that wasn’t technically perfect, but it was right out of their imaginations. Then, at a certain point, people were incredibly good players, but they were recirculating the same stuff. That can happen with anything—certainly with making genre films. How we were making them, they were just raw ideas that just came out of nowhere. I wanted to do something whole and original, and that’s how Nightmare on Elm Street was. I always tell students at film schools to do the film they’ve never seen before, because I’ve had so many pitches made to me by young writers: “It’s like Hostel meets …”
The victims in The Hills Have Eyes 2 are National Guard trainees. Is this your response to Iraq?
I didn’t say, “Let’s do something contemporary,” but my mind is completely preoccupied with what’s going on [in Iraq]—the fight against terrorism, or whatever you want to call it—because it’s such a god-awful situation. Whether or not you believe they should’ve gone there in the first place, they’re there now getting the shit kicked out of them, and they’re fighting with an enemy that’s almost impossible to understand or predict. It’s an incredible conundrum to be wrestling with. [In the movie], you see that they’re fighting what everyone thinks are mutants, but they’re actually human beings. If you think you’re fighting mutants, it’s the first step toward disaster. I just followed that guideline, but it’s not like I was going to do an Abu Ghraib thing. It’s not like we’re making a political statement.
So you won’t be sending Freddy Krueger to Iraq?
Uh, no. But now that you mention it, can you sign this release?
