ADDED: 9-09-05

Somewhere in the hills that lie beyond civilization, there are eyes of primal, feral terror watching us. But should we stay away, thinking we are safe in our very own neighborhoods, there is that last house on the left, a few blocks away from Elm Street, where even greater horror lies. The evils of our own mind, our own nightmares, new and old, that make us scream and scream again. It is both a curse and a deadly blessing, the people under the stairs, the thing in the swamp, the unknown that is both a shocker and delight.

More than most, Wes Craven knows what scares us. For it scares him too. And it’s not just the things that go bump on the movie screen, it’s the very real evils and fears in our day to day world that lead us to find escape in those darkened multiplexes. It’s a paradox, a paradox Craven deeply comprehends and has made a career exploring. Now in his fourth decade of that exploration, Craven gives us RED EYE, a thriller grappling with what scares us in a post 9/11 world. Is there anywhere we can truly be safe? Ironically, the only safety we may ever find may be in the parables we tell to make sense of our real life horrors.

Back in 1998, in the midst of production on SCREAM 2, I spoke with Wes Craven about these very issues for go figure! magazine. As always, Craven’s views were thoughtful and scholarly, and as a look back at that conversation below reveals, incredibly timeless and prescient.

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As the father of Freddy, what would you say was your original intention when you created your child?

Well, there certainly was no intention of a franchise. I had never experienced that before with any of my pictures. I wasn’t really in tune to sequels or the merchandising of the villain. I was much more just into writing a really good ghost yarn, you know, an idea that had come to me and demanded to be written.

How do you feel about the transformation of Freddy from villain to hero?

It’s a natural progress. I think the reason that what we call evil, violence against others and cruelty and all of those things, the reason they survive so much is that they are surrounded by denial and people who tend to project them on to others. When I was a kid, it was the “Evil Germans” and then the “Evil Terrorists” and the “Evil Drug Dealers”. So to do a picture wherein you’re really talking about the evil that sprung from your own neighborhood. The fact that I named it Elm Street, I wanted to look for a paradigm that would stand for the evil that came out of our own community. But it’s very difficult to get people to participate in that depiction unless there is a specific villain. And even with villains, most actors will overplay or make it goofy. Whereas to make it intelligent, where it has no compunctions about being what it is and it really takes delight in figuring out ways to be insidious or a step ahead of people who are innocent or trusting… That’s very threatening to depict and especially to put out as a product. So very quickly, Bob Shaye over at new Line Cinema said we’ve really got to emphasize Freddy’s jokes more and we’ve got to make something that everybody feels comfortable going to just laughing and having a good time with. And then what happens is sequel after sequel you grow more and more accustomed to it and then you have people memorizing the villain’s lines and buying toys. Maybe that’s just part of the process of trying to come to terms with evil and perhaps learn that you have its number.

Which corresponds to John Saxon’s comment about people wanting to get close to the darkness inside themselves, but not too close. Now the first NIGHTMARE really brought them close and they did get scared, so perhaps in order to deal with their feelings they had to turn Freddy into a plush toy for ages three and up.

Yeah, I think that’s true. And there’s just a host of problems that come with have a villain that truly is dark and dangerous. You have trouble with the ratings board and all sets of parental groups. And then there’s the argument, “Oh, come on, Mom. The kids are just having fun.” After all these years I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong. But you know, it’s like the Devil. I think in the course of two millenniums, we’ve going from being terrified of The Devil to sort of making him into a clown. You know, a Deviled Ham.

With the SCREAM series, straight out of the gate you’re already looking inward as a filmmaker at all of these themes. Is this self-parodying a conscious choice?

I think it started with NEW NIGHTMARE when Bob Shaye came to me and said New Line would like to do another sequel. I asked myself, What could we possibly talk about? And at the same time, I had a million people asking me, “Hey! Aren’t you worried about the effects on all the kids?” And so with NEW NIGHTMARE, I began to explore these themes. What are movies? How do they function in our culture? Why are kids attracted to depictions of evil? And what would happen if you removed it, if “Politically Correct” was successful and they were completely able to excise Horror films from our culture? My feeling was that the culture would be in more danger because there would be no sort of warning signs of the evil that was truly there. And then Kevin Williamson’s SCREAM script came along and just took it to the next step. I was very attracted to it because horror now is so much apart of our culture. One of the themes in SCREAM 2 is the attraction of dark theater, dark tragic Shakespearean theater, and how any given Saturday night at the local movie theater can be like a Saturday night in Athens, Greece all those years ago. Sophocles was making people scream and turn their eyes away long before Freddy!

How do you think that dark side works when it’s translated into toys for children? Are children trying to come to terms with their demons by playing with a Freddy Krueger toy?

I think in general they are. I don’t think that you can legislate evil out of the human heart. I just don’t think it quite works that way. These things are reactions to much more profound and uncontrolled issues. War. Famine. Hate. Those things are real. Take the late Princess Diana and her crusade against land mines. That is exactly the sort of thing that is real. And its taken as a matter of course. The Motion Picture Association doesn’t get up in arms about things like that. They get up in arms about the imaginary things that are reflecting those realities. So I don’t really get worried about kids wearing a Freddy mask or sharp claws because again, it’s ancient. If you go into most native cultures or art or history, you see how we take the things that terrify us the most and wear those masks. Or else we go there temporarily, you know, with the Maypole dance or Bacchanalia or whatever humans need to visit that dark side. That’s the way most cultures handle it. They go there temporarily. In the worst of cultures, however, they try to deny it exists at all and then they go there permanently for long periods of time!

These issues of evil and the depiction of evil in pop culture have been a thread throughout your art. Why have you chosen to explore this particular theme?

More than anything else, it just seemed the thing that preoccupied me the most. I just turned 58, so you can go figure that three months after I was born, Germany invaded Poland. So the first five years of my life were World War 2. I was born into that world-wide ferocious struggle. And I’ve always been aware of that evil. Korea. Vietnam. I went through a lot of it and it’s never seemed be adequately accounted for in our art. The 1950’s tended to glamorize it, and I never thought that anybody in America was ever really getting a handle on what it was like to kill or die. And because, I think, Americans didn’t have an accurate idea of what that was like, a lot of people went off to Vietnam and came back totally shattered because they went off with these ideas that it was going to be like John Wayne going off to Imo Jima. I simply had to come to terms with that in my own psyche. So after awhile, I started to think, well, maybe this is my fate to look at these things. To look at evil. To look at violence and the different ways it has arrived in our culture.

And now with the SCREAM series, you’re looking at the films you’ve made yourself!

Now I’m dealing with the theme of the legitimacy of horror. And its strength. Like the first NIGHTMARE, SCREAM came out of a period where horror films were dead at the box office. SO I think it’s intellectually interesting to take horror in a different direction. A direction dealing with death in our culture, and our fascination with violence. I mean, look at the media coverage of the death of Princess Di. I had it on my television the other day and ended staying up all night. The power of the theater of it all. And dealing with that sort of combination of centuries of tradition and propriety and this violent, violent crash. A young body broken in a Mercedes of all things. It’s that incredible juxtaposition of the structure and the sane and the protocol with the totally un-protocalled and totally uncontrolled violence and insanity of the media. So I just thought its very vital and full of power and very controversial. And these things that are controversial and wired up inside our culture? They’re the very things I want to open.