

Sometimes, getting to write this column fulfills dreams I never thought I’d be able to do; case in point, the below interview with Wes Craven. If you were to tell me at ten years old that I’d be talking with the guy who just scared my pants full with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, I’d have laughed in your face. But sit down and chat with Mr. Craven, I did. Here’s what transpired when I talked with him about the phenomenon he created with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and the new BluRay release of NEVER SLEEP AGAIN: THE ELM STREET LEGACY.
Here’s what Mr. Craven had to say…
AMBUSH BUG (BUG): It’s an honor to speak with you today, Mr. Craven. Have you had a chance to see NEVER SLEEP AGAIN?
WES CRAVEN (WC): Yes, I watched it when they first completed it.
BUG: OK, having watched them and seeing not only the one’s you contributed to but also seeing the other films in the A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, did you learn something new from watching it?

BUG: Have you kept up with the NIGHTMARE series even though you’re not really a part of the series any more or is that something you’re not interested in anymore?
WC: I think I’ve put it away. The remake was basically done by other people. It was made without Bob Shaye and even Robert, but they own the rights and they can do whatever they want to with the movie, you know?
BUG: Looking back on the phenomenon that was Freddy Krueger, what’s it like that something you created became such a household name; where all you have to do is say Freddy and people know exactly who you’re talking about?

And just the other night, I was watching NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and they were talking about the African Lion as the perfect killing machine and they showed the lion’s claws and they said, “These claws would even intimidate Freddy Krueger.” (laughs)
Freddy Krueger and the title A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET has just become part of the culture.
BUG: What do you think of the way Freddy was marketed? I mean, there were lunch boxes and children’s costumes and such.
WC: There’s something about Freddy that for some reason it seems kids are always attracted to and the nearest I can come to it is that there are specific tribes in Africa that wear costumes of the most feared animal in the jungle. So it is a form of naming and controlling of the monster. They identify it so that they can control it. It makes the horror safe to handle.

WC: It was definitely the interview. When he walked in the room, I had already been casting for Freddy for a long time, and I was really looking for someone who could have the acting chops and the physicality for the role. And a lot of people, you could see when they did the readings were playing it kind of…camp. It wasn’t coming out of them, it was what an actor doing what they thought should come out of a horror film, coming from a place where in their opinion seemed to be a lower opinion of these types of films. You have to realize that if you are to go into the head of Freddy, to go into those darker places in one’s imagination, it’s not easy and most people find it distressing. Nobody really wants to feel like, “Yeah, that darkness is in me.” And that’s what the actor playing Freddy was supposed to do, find that place inside themselves that is dark and able to do these horrible things.

BUG: To be completely honest, I wasn’t very fond of WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE when it first came out. But not long ago, I revisited it and found it to be really sophisticated and scary, though it was a departure from the other films. It seems like a film that was ahead of its time. It started going meta with the material, a trend you further developed in the SCREAM series. If you were ever to return to the NIGHTMARE series, would you continue to go meta with it?

BUG: You had a pretty big part in NEW NIGHTMARE. And you did a pretty good job with that role playing yourself. Have you ever thought of doing more acting?
WC: (laughs) Well, no one’s been beating down my door asking me to act after those performances.
(Both laugh)

BUG: I have to ask, what would it take for you to do another ELM STREET movie?
WC: It’s funny. I fantasize about doing that. First of all it would take Warner Brothers to approach me, which they haven’t. I would only do it if the script they had or that I could come up with would be perfect. It would have to make artistic sense to me. I wouldn’t want to go out and do a remake or anything like that. I would use Robert Englund though.
BUG: Of course. Do you still teach at all?

BUG: I was wondering what were you like as a teacher and what’s a class with Mr. Craven like to be in?
WC: I was kind of goofy. I was teaching History of Western Civilization and Freshman English and things like that. And so, we all had fun. I get a lot of letters from ex-students. I didn’t really have any intention of going the scholarly route and getting a PhD. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life researching the metrics of Keates early odes or something like that.
BUG: Well, I think we have time for one last question. What are you working on at the moment?

BUG: Oh wow!
WC: Yeah, they came to me and gave me my choice and I took “Thou shall not kill.” And I wrote a treatment that they loved, so that’ll be sometime later this year.
BUG: Man, I can’t wait for that. That would be great! Well, that’s all the time we have, so thank you so much for talking with me today. I can’t wait to see all of your upcoming projects.
WC: Thank so much, Mark. Thanks a lot! Bye!
BUG: Below are some of the works of Wes Craven from previous AICN HORROR columns.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)
Directed and written by Wes CravenStarring Russ Grieve, Virginia Vincent, Susan Lanier, Dee Wallace, Janus Blythe, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, James Whitworth, Michael Berryman
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
What more can be said about the original THE HILLS HAVE EYES? It is simply a classic tale of terror about a battle for survival as two families (one your typical mid-western unit, the other a clan of savage feral people) smack into one another with the body count heavy on both sides. Much has been written about how both families functioned on screen; how each had complex relationships and histories, and how each react in times of stress and turmoil. In essence, like most classics, THE HILLS HAVE EYES is much more than the horror film is claimed to be.




DEADLY BLESSING (1981)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Glenn M. Benest, Matthew Barr, Wes Craven
Starring Maren Jensen, Sharon Stone, Susan Buckner, Jeff East, Colleen Riley, Douglas Barr, Lisa Hartman, Lois Nettleton, Ernest Borgnine, Michael Berryman, Jonathon Gulla
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
I tell you, those creepy Amish with their butter and their straw hats and their moustache-less beards. Well, technically, the religious folk in this film are called Hittites, but they are a radically more religious sect of the Amish and on top of that, damn, fucking scary. DEADLY BLESSING is an early work from Wes Craven. After the HILLS HAVE EYES and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, but before he burst onto the scene with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Keeping the chronology in mind, it does turn out to be quite an interesting, yet flawed little thriller.


The scene where Martha is slipped a snake in the bathtub shows up in the famous Freddy glove between Heather Langenkamp’s legs from NIGHTMARE. Here the terror is very real, but just as terrifying. There are numerous expertly edited sequences (dream and real) as Craven takes full advantage of the farm environment with stark open fields and imposing creaky barns. Surprisingly, some of the most effective scares come in the Sharon Stone scenes who may have missed her calling as a scream queen as she takes part in a truly terrifying chase scene in a barn involving a lot of hay, a stalker, and a spider then has a great dream sequence which is mimicked on the poster (though the image looks nothing like her) as a pair of hands force Stone’s mouth open wide as a spider drops from above.

The main theme here which is reiterated numerous times in the nice little extras focusing on the lead actress, the writers behind the film as they collaborated the film, and the FX folks behind the final sequence which I will get to in a bit is that anything that is oppressed is bound to come back with deadlier, triple fold power. Centering on the highly religious culture of the Hittites with rigid rules and mores, the film proves for a fantastic backdrop for discussion about how strict religion can cause more problems than good. While many films covered here on AICN HORROR are somewhat disposable fluff with cheap scares and thrills, DEADLY BLESSING is definitely fodder for a meatier discussion afterwards.

Final seconds aside, DEADLY BLESSING is a hell of a great time. Filled with quite a few fun extras from Michael Berryman, the FX crew, writers, and actresses, this new BluRay is definitely worth checking out.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Wes Craven
Starring Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, Ronee Blakley, Charles Fleischer, Lin Shaye
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
It’s always difficult to review the classics. It’s not that there’s nothing to say about them, it’s just that there’s been so much said about them that I feel I’m not saying anything new about it. I guess what I can do is talk about the first time I saw A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and see where that trip back down memory lane takes me.

Immediately, we were bombarded with the opening sequence which told us all we needed to know as a grumbling and heavy breathing man in the shadows constructs a heinous clawed glove in a filthy workshop near a furnace. While there was no dialog, this montage of construction and moans set the tone that this was the beginning of something special.

Though a lot of the acting in this film is pretty awful (even the then-unknown Johnny Depp comes off as pretty cardboard), the performances were pretty memorable. But we look past that because Robert Englund’s nightmare boogey man is so damn good here and the dream sequences are the stuff of the darkest recesses of our imaginations. While later outings got bigger and more effects driven, Craven relied on (most likely due to budget) subtle horrors such as a bloody body bag with a moaning person in it, stretched out arms that extend past that of a normal human’s should, sliced off fingers, and a phone with a tongue that immediately became iconic.

I don’t plan on explaining the first time I saw every movie in this newly released BluRay collection as I focus on one installment of the series after another over the next few weeks, but maybe this trip to yesteryear will prompt others to share the first time they saw A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. It was definitely a memorable experience for me and my brother on our feet cheering Nancy on as she battled Freddy in the closing moments.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1985)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Wes Craven
Starring Tamara Stafford, Kevin Spirtas, John Bloom, Michael Berryman, Janus Blythe, Robert Houston
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
In the intro of Wes Craven’s follow up to his highly successful and critically acclaimed THE HILLS HAVE EYES, they mentioned that “The hills still had eyes!” which I think would have been a much cooler title. Not sure why I started out this review with that, but for some reason that’s the first thing that entered my head as I sat down to write. I guess that’s better than leading off with the acknowledgement that THE HILLS HAVE THIGHS is a pretty hilarious name for a porno that I didn’t not not not see on Skinemax a while back.

Gone is Craven’s multi-textural dissection of the modern nuclear family that was so prevalent in the first film. In part two, it’s a group of motorbike riders who get stranded in the middle of the desert after taking a shortcut through a dangerous nuclear test site. Anyone who saw the first film knows that this is a no-no as two of the surviving killers from the first film, Michael Berryman’s gaunt skinhead Pluto and John Bloom’s Neanderthal-like Reaper, stalk and kill the bikers in a fashion that was tried and true even at the time of this film’s release. This film seemed much more like a cash grab (something I’d be more willing to accept from Craven now, than back then when he actually had some horrific themes he wanted to explore and the gumption to do it effectively and riskily). Though THE HILLS HAVE EYES wasn’t getting any acting awards, years later, Craven didn’t get is cast to try so hard here either. The menace of the original family is kind of reduced to Pluto calling Beast (another returning character from part one, this one, a dog) a snot-licker before being knocked off a cliff to his death and the Reaper just growling and body slamming folks to death.

In many ways, this feels like a Wes Craven directed FRIDAY THE 13TH film as he goes through the motions that were well mapped out in those films by the time this one came out. It doesn’t help that Henry Manfredini’s score is almost identical to his fantastic FRIDAY THE 13TH scores minus the “Kill-kill-kill-ma-ma-ma!” echoes. The star, Kevin Spirtas even shows up in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 7 A NEW BLOOD a few years later.

If anything, this is a nice snippet of what horror was like in 1985. Everyone was trying to invest their own slasher franchise and with Craven branching out from NIGHTMARE, it seems he was placing his chips in an older property. Lacking in the deft themes and a lot of the grittiness of the original, THE HILLS HAVED EYES PART 2 remains entertaining as an oft times laughably bad horror schlocker.
Maybe if only they called it THE HILLS STILL HAVE EYES, it might have been better…


THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Wes Craven
Starring Brandon Quintin Adams, Everett McGill, Wendy Robie, A.J. Langer, Ving Rhames, Sean Whalen, Bill Cobbs, Kelly Jo Minter, Jeremy Roberts, Conni Marie Brazelton
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
While Wes Craven is responsible for some of the most influential horrors in modern cinema, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS is not one of those films.

Fool (Brandon Quintin Adams) is a street savvy kid who, like most people in his neighborhood, has fallen upon hard times. With his mother’s health deteriorating from the cancers, he teams up with Leroy (Ving Rhames) to break into the spookiest house in the neighborhood, owned by two whiteys who happen to be the landlords of the entire neighborhood. But after breaking into the house, Fool finds out that the unnamed Man (Everett McGill) and Woman (Wendy Robie) reside in a house of horrors with endless corridors, booby traps, and a basement full of freak children who haven’t seen the light of day in years. Trapped in the house, Fool befriends Alice (A.J. Langer) the abused perfect daughter of the Man and Woman who helps him elude their wrath in the walls of the house.

So basically, we have kids acting tough when they should be piddling in their pants. We have weird fetish wear and equipment inserted for no reason other than to be weird and make the monsters more outlandish and unrelatable. And logic is tossed right outside of the window. For example, the Man fires his shotgun repeatedly throughout the house, but firing the shotgun outside is a no-no. The mutant kids in the basement haven’t seen the light of day in years and have turned into zombie-like monstrosities, but when the film ends, they scatter into the night. How in the hell are these albino metal head looking freaks going to survive now that they are out of the basement and wandering the streets? Craven cares not about the answers to these questions. All intellect, psychological heft, tactile terror, and thematic depth put into A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is nowhere to be seen in one second of this film.

Everything from the horrifically bad and repetitive soundtrack to the flat lighting to the shoddy effects makes me want to toss this movie across the room. While I always hope for good things from classic directors, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS was the indicator that Craven had gone Hollywood and left the smartly scary stuff behind him for safe, remedial, and most disappointingly un-scary horror.
For those of you who like this film, I don’t hate you. I get there’s a quirky charm to this film. It’s just that the metaphor was so hamfisted that I always felt Craven was better than this. This BluRay is filled with all sorts of bells and whistles in the special features from interviews to behind the scenes footage. So if you’re a Craven completist, a fan of the film, or just a glutton for punishment, there’s a lot that goes along with this disk to enjoy.

WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Wes Craven
Starring Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Wes Craven, Miko Hughes, Matt Winston, Rob LaBelle, David Newsom, Marianne Maddalena, Robert Shaye, John Saxon, Lin Shaye
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug

Without getting too heady, NEW NIGHTMARE follows the original NIGHTMARE star Heather Langenkamp who plays herself as she begins to have increasingly horrific nightmares. Soon she finds that her son, Miko Hughes, is suffering from these nightmares as well, stating that “the bad old man” in his dreams is telling him to do things. As the antagonist from the NIGHTMARE films begins to seep more and more into Heather’s life, she uncovers that Wes (paying himself) is writing a new NIGHTMARE film which is taking a life of its own in the real world. Scenes play out of Wes’ story just as he is writing them, and given that Wes excels most in horror, this is nothing but trouble for Heather and her son.

But that’s not the story Wes wanted to tell here. Instead, themes from THE DREAM CHILD are revisited as Freddy tries to possess little Dylan (Miko Hughes, who also played the psycho kid Gage from PET SEMETARY). Shades of THE EXORCIST and PET SEMETARY occur as Heather is distraught seeing her son being taken over by some kind of dream manifestation. For the most part, this drama pays off well. There’s a specific scene that takes place in a hospital later in the film which is one of the film’s best as an isolated Dylan attacks his mother and, in a scene that is repeated from the first NIGHTMARE film’s beginning, his nanny is shredded right in front of Dylan and the nursing staff, dragged across the wall and ceiling, and killed.

Still, if you’re looking for a good A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET film, WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE is much better than most of the sequels. I have to give them props for trying new things and listening to fans who complained about the bad stand-up comedian Freddy had become in the sequels. This Freddy is menacing and much more deadly; it’s the one fans of the original had been screaming for. Too bad the climax goes the easy route rather than the cerebral one Wes treats us to throughout most of the film.
SCREAM 4 (SCRE4M, 2011)
Directed by Wes CravenWritten by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Rory Culkin, Anthony Anderson, Adam Brody, Anna Paquin, Kirsten Bell
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
SCREAM 4 (do I have to call it SCRE4M?) wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of the horror genre as if it was better than all of that, yet it still wants to function as a horror film itself. But in order to do this successfully, both the meta-criticism and the horror have to be top notch. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson pretty much achieved this in the very first SCREAM, but since then the SCREAM films became the horror clichés they tried oh so hard to comment on. As the movies went on, the plots got more predictable and scares got lamer. I was hoping that a decade off from the franchise would somehow give the folks behind the film enough time to harness what made the first one work. Sadly, that’s just not the case with SCREAM 4.
The film starts out promising and cleverly incorporates horror and comedy (the two elements that made the first one work so well) in a series of false starts that were genuinely fun. This opening sequence, by far, is the most enjoyable part of the film. It’s a clever and fun way of starting out this SCREAM like the other SCREAM’s while making it wholly original. I wish the fun would have continued at this level for the rest of the film.
Another problem is that the new generation of cast members aren’t nearly as likable as the original crew (or even that of the sequels prior). Sure there’s the chick from HEROES and there’s a Culkin, but none of them match the caliber of the original cast. The reason why the first worked was because the cast was filled with talented young actors (and Matthew Lillard…JOKE!). With SCREAM 4, it feels like casting just plucked whoever was at the food court on the WB lot at random and gave them a role. When you don’t care whether or not the cast lives or dies, you don’t give a shit when they are being chased by a killer.
At its best, SCREAM 4 is a remake of SCREAM. Though SCREAM made the slasher movie cool again with decent acting, funny quips (I still say “Liver alone!” on occasion), and somewhat astute observations on the genre, SCREAM 4 plays like the endless remakes that have overcome the industry these days with little else to add to the conversation. Though it started out strong, much like the bulk of the remakes out there these days, I could have done without SCREAM 4.