Taken from HERO 12: Darkness Falls, out now. 

FK: So by that time you were happy being labelled a horror director?
WC: Well by then it was less of a stigma in my own mind. I had a lot of very positive feedback from fans in the beginning and then, as the years went by, from young studio executives who were fans. When I first started there was nobody like that in the studios, they were all kind of horrified by it all. But then the new generation started to get jobs in the studios, I think Mike [producer Michael De Luca] for instance came into New Line Cinema about the time I did Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and he quickly rose through the ranks – there was him and many others who were suddenly in positions of power to green-light a film, and they were very positive about doing horror, so I didn’t feel quite so much like a monster living under the stairs.

FK: Did you get any strong reactions from people who you’ve met about the films you made?
WC: Oh, so many people [laughs]. Many friends too. When I first moved to New York, my marriage had dissolved and I was living in the Lower East Side in an apartment shared by a lot of people. I didn’t have two cents to rub together and the people in my apartment were a wild collection of dope dealers and struggling actors and academics. When Last House came out and they went to see it, there was noticeable difference in the way they looked at me… I remember people saying that they thought the film was disgusting, people didn’t leave their kids in the same room as me. But looking back on it now, the hardcore fans still say Last House was my best film. Even if they’ve seen Scream or Nightmare on Elm Street I think Last House was about the highest level of terror and disquiet they could endure. People found my earlier films quite disturbing. They still do.

FK: A lot of those early movies were quite low budget.
WC: Oh yeah, they were very low budget.

FK: Is it still hard to let go of different scenes?
WC: Well the most painful were the ones that had to be either eliminated or mitigated by decree of the censor or the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America]. That was very painful because the changes they would ask for were really in the very essence of what I was all about. They would quite frequently say, “This sequence is just too intense” and that just stunned me. I thought, “I’m trying to make a very intense film!” [laughs]. They would always use this straw man argument that some child was going to walk into the theatre and be traumatised by it, so they couldn’t risk it.

FK: Are there any specific scenes that had to be deleted that you remember?
WC: Well beginning with Phyllis, the girl that was stabbed to death against a tree in in Last House on the Left, that was severely cut. By the time we were invited to restore it 20 years later, we just didn’t have the footage. One of the most painful cuts is in Nightmare on Elm Street was when Tina is dragged up across the ceiling of her bedroom and then falls onto the bed and you know, we had the bed three inches deep in blood, and when the stunt woman hit it there was this startling and really shocking spray of blood all over everything. It was probably twelve frames, something like that, but those twelve frames had to go or we they would have axed the movie. Every time I see that film, I see that abrupt cut there.

FK: Still missing.
WC: Yeah still missing, half the frames have gone, practically every film I’ve made there are cuts like that. You know, if you’re a novelist they don’t come up to you and say, “Take out this paragraph,” but for film, because the commercial side is so strong, they are worried that if they offend these very right-wing people who are tightly bound up in their own subconscious, they might bring law suits. The studios and theatres don’t want that, so they very quickly concede power to the critics or the censors. That part of it is very difficult to deal with.

FK: Do the characters in your movies have any significance in your own life?
WC: Well I think they all do. Almost all my films have something to do with family – usually three generations or at the least two. With Nightmare on Elm street for instance, the whole premise is based on what the parents did before the movie started. They killed Freddy who was let off on a charge of child murder in the past, so he is specifically taking revenge on the children of those people. That’s just one of my early perceptions about the way families work – that there are dark things in the past, that in many cases occurred before you were even born, but that you will pay a heavy price for. I think that’s true generally in the world, we all pay for the sins of our fathers and mothers in a way, even at a national level. God knows what’s going on now in the Middle East and many other places, it’s just karma coming home to roost on the heads of the people weren’t even born when the grudges were started. So I think all of my films have something to do with the keeping of secrets. My mother was extremely secretive, and the frightening father figure, whether it’s Papa Jup [The Hills Have Eyes], or Krug [The Last House on the Left] or Freddy Kruger… and my father was very scary to me and my siblings. He died quite early in my life, but we were all afraid of him and that just stays with you, you know? And religion, the sort of religiosity of the couple in The People Under the Stairs who are always screaming at their opponents to “burn in hell” [laughs] – it was like that where I was raised, so I think they’re all quite personal films in a way.

FK: Why do you think it is religious groups specifically have such a problem with your movies? Is it because you reference sin?
WC: Yeah I think that’s it. I think it gets them at a subconscious level. They think the language will influence the kids to do terrible things, for a good decade there was a very strong movement among critics to try to prove, for instance, that Freddy Kruger caused kids to go out and kill their baby sisters. I mean, there were a couple of cases cited, so we very arduously researched, but couldn’t actually find them.

FK: How does that affect you when these things come up and you get blamed?
WC: Well at first you’re sort of horrified, and say “Oh my God, I convinced myself this would never happen.” But in fact it never did happen. When you find out it’s just fabrication, you really feel like these people are liars who will do anything to try to silence you, and then it becomes just a battle with this mindset. I see it all the time, I did a pitch last week at a studio and we were talking about a possible remake of one of my early films and when we laid out the plot, one of them said, “I just don’t know what goes on inside your mind. I can’t take these films.” It’s really that mindset of, “You have something in your mind that I don’t have in mine so you’re scaring me.” It’s so hard for people to see the truth that we all have the potential for violence and sadism, but the thing is that most of the horror film directors I’ve met are funny and intelligent – not violent people at all.

FK: Do you think that as time goes by the threshold for viewers watching explicit images is lowering? With the kinds of images in the news and the different approach to censorship now do you see a change in opinion?
WC: I think so. I think the internet has a lot to do with it. Isis right now is a prime example of people who are just horrendously frightening, with mass executions, can imagine going directly onto the internet, in fact part of their propaganda is, “See how terrible we are?” I remember my son, when he was a teenager, saying, “Yeah I was looking at a man being beheaded in the internet the other night,” and I was just like, “Oh my God.” I’ve always felt that horror films, in a way, are boot camps for the psyche. They’re not, by and large, entertainment for people who are sadistic and obsessed with being violent, but people who are sensitive to the level of violence that’s in the world. I mean, I’ve had so many people thank me for scaring the shit out of them [laughs], you know? They’d say, “When I was six years old my older brother made me watch A Nightmare on Elm Street and I couldn’t sleep for three weeks, thank you, thank you for terrifying me!” I’ve come up with a theory actually that people go into a theatre not to be frightened but to have their fears dealt with. That’s the only way I’ve been able to explain why so many people thank me for what I do. Not the people that don’t go to see my films and just fabricate what they are in their own minds, but the people who do go and see my them, by and large, are grateful for the experience.

It’s really fascinated me my entire career that there is that phenomenon of little boys dressing like Freddy, there is a need to get control of the terrifying and in a sense embrace it in entertainment so it doesn’t devastate you psychically.

FK: I guess it’s almost like looking in the mirror and facing your demons.
WC: Yeah I think its a very ancient thing, from the beginning of human society people would put on the skin of the most terrifying animal in the jungle for their most important ceremonies. So there’s something about putting on a mask, or the hide of a jaguar or a lion that makes you feel safe from the terror that is out there.

FK: I want to also ask you about the names of your characters, they’re often quite traditional and the characters are quite normal, approachable. People like Nancy, Sidney, Gail and Bug and those kind of things, is there a reason why you go for these kind of names?
WC: Yeah I just want them to be just ordinary people, I don’t want them to be some sort of glamorous hero or heroine, I don’t want them to be like Hollywood casting-call looking people, I try to cast people that look like they could live on your block or someone you know from school. It’s all about looking at the person on the screen and putting yourself into that skin.

FK: But also Krug and Kruger – are the bad guys different versions of the same person? Do you think of them having a history and you’re just bringing out different personalities of that character in different films?
WC: Yes and no, Freddy Kruger I did steal from Krug’s name which I thought was such a strong word with the K up front. Also when I was very young WWII was going on, Krupp was the big ammunition manufacturer for Hitler. So there’s something about the KRU sound that appealed to me for evil. Fred came from a kid who was a bully who beat me up a lot in junior high school, so sometimes they’re just something that I plucked from my past.

FK: When you’re creating your characters, how deep does your world of them go?
WC: Well as deep as I can, certainly with Freddy I didn’t want him to stay a two dimensional character who looked frightening, I wanted him to think frighteningly, I wanted him to say really scary things, like holding up his claw saying, “This is God.” That’s a pretty profound statement on the part of the villain, it’s basically saying all of your religion, all of those safety nets you think you have, you don’t really have. That’s much more frightening than the guy just brandishing a weapon, so I want them to be very smart, I want them to be articulate. I mean Papa Jup at one point was giving a speech while eating somebody’s arm… if the grammar were cleaned up it would basically be what people in the third world could be saying to us – “You come over here and you eat our food, we’re gonna watch your cars rust out, we’re gong to watch you seeds dry up.” These are very primal, profound statements on the part of the people. I always want a villain who is has some element of truth in what he is saying, as frightening as that truth might be.

FK: Generally youth plays a big part in a lot of your movies, what is it about that age that captures you?
WC: I’ll tell you the basic reason – that that’s where the audience is. I mean, you couldn’t make this kind of picture for older people, they’re too entrenched in their psyche. Life becomes more precious as they realise their own mortality, and that actually happens to you fairly early [laughs]. By the end of your twenties you’re starting to realise you’re not going to live forever and that you can be brought down by rather simple things. When you’re a kid you don’t think of that so much as the transition that you’re going through in your teens from childhood to adulthood. You recognise who your parents really are, that they’re not just a god or goddess. And then there’s the beginning of sexuality and the fears and misapprehensions surrounding that are a scary journey, so that audience is in a much more primal state.

FK: It’s also quite an exciting time in life.
WC: It’s a very exciting time, and the changes are enormous between thirteen and twenty – you end up in a completely different place than when you started. Your brain reaching its final form, you know that doesn’t happen until your mid-twenties. So it’s just the Wild West, it’s the frontier of being a human being. Once you get there, then things become somewhat more sophisticated, more thrillers than terror films.

FK: Also a lot of your movies seem to be based out of small towns, scenic locations rather than the big cities.
WC: Well there’s a couple of reasons, big cities are much more expensive to shoot in! That’s why horror films often take place outdoors in remote areas where you don’t have to pull permits and worry about people asking you to keep the noise down. But also, those areas tend to be simpler, and you’re trying to tell a very simple, boiled down tale – fables in a way. A small neighbourhood compared to a very complex one is a simpler sort of paradigm if you will. Also for me it plays off the American Dream, with what the right-wing politicians in the United States call ‘Main Street America’. That concept of America as a little town with ‘real people’ being the remnants of that real, good America. I like setting things there because those places are haunted as any other place, so the comparison of the perceived reality and the realised reality is stronger.

FK: At the moment there are a lot of young people who don’t think the American Dream will exist for them – they think it belongs to a past generation, but surely there must be a dream still?
WC: I think there is. I’ve travelled around the world and there’s no place I know of like this. America is full of all sorts of grandiosity and exceptionalism and I wince every time some politician gets up and says America is the hope of the world, I mean come on we’re all human here, but it still is a powerful place and people still do dream and come here to realise their dreams. I came from a working class background, my father fell over dead on a loading dock at his factory, and I’ve made it to the point where I have a voice that goes around the world – that’s pretty astonishing and I don’t know whether I could have done that any place else.

FK: Going back into your movies a little bit, who’s been your favourite actor to direct over the years?
WC: Oh gosh! Erm, you know if you mention one the others will be angry! I mean certainly, directing, if one can use the word with her, is Meryl Streep. She’s just a wonderful time, and a great collaborator and very intelligent with a wicked sense of humour. So that was a lot of fun, but I enjoyed working with Neve Campbell. I worked with some very interesting people earlier on in their careers, Bruce Willis the first time he was in Los Angeles, Morgan Freeman, Emmet Walsh, a lot of great actors when I was doing Twilight Zone episodes in the mid 80s. I have worked with some wonderful actors just one after another… Drew Barrymore for example – great actors, great to work with, very open to learning and who also brought a lot to the table.

FK: What about characters in the movies, which is the favourite you created?
WC: Well I like Papa Jup. It’s funny I mention a villain right up front, I love Nancy and I think Neve Campbell’s character Sidney Prescott is really fascinating, Randy was a wonderful character but I didn’t write those, Kevin Williamson gave me a fantastic script to work with [for Scream].

FK: Do you remember what the first day on set of Scream was like?
WC: Yeah, I remember the night before with Drew Barrymore – at the time she wasn’t sober – we sat in my trailer and drank a bottle of wine and just talked about life and her dogs. She said, “’I’m about to give you something to help you when I have to be screaming and crying and coming unhinged.” This was the first week of shooting with five straight days of playing a character who was being stalked and terrified and about to die. She told me this story she had read in the news of a kid who had set a little dog on fire, soaked it in gasoline and set it on fire and her eyes teared up. She said, “Just say something very short about that and I’ll be there.” She just poured her heart into it and we felt very close during that week, it just was wonderful – she just gave it everything she had.

FK: That’s one of my all time favourite moments in film really, those ten minutes at the beginning of Scream.
WC: Yeah, it was remarkable because at the beginning of the second week of shooting I had a call from the studio saying those days were mediocre at best and that I didn’t know what I was doing [laughs]. They said I should go see the footage of some young director they were working with, and I was on the verge of being fired. I said, “Well just give me a chance to cut it together.” So while I was shooting my second week my editor was quickly working on it, and we sent it off to the studio and they called back and said, “What do we know about looking at dailies? This is brilliant! We’re going to take it to Cannes!”

FK: At the time you were one of the first directors to take a famous actress and kill them off in the first ten minutes.
WC: That was the script, that was Kevin’s idea. During that time in my career I had gone back and forth between thinking I should quit horror because it’s a terrible thing to be doing to the world and then thinking the opposite. I read the first fifteen pages of the script, that sequence, and I called Bob Weinstein and said, “I can’t do this! [laughs] It’s just too intense.” And he said, “Well I’m not going to give it to anyone else for a while, just think about it for a week.” So while I was thinking about it I went to a comic book convention and a little kid came up to me and said, “I think Last House on the Left is your best film and you haven’t been kicking ass enough in your films lately” [laughs]. He turned around and walked away, that night I called Bob and said, “OK Bob, I’ll do it.”

FK: In A Nightmare on Elm Street, how did you come up with that nursery rhyme? I remember watching it with a friend from school when our parents were out, that rhyme stayed in my head for a long time!
WC: I just made it up in about ten minutes. I needed a little jump rope song and, “One, two Freddy’s coming for you…” popped into my mind immediately and then I just kept riffing on that. And, obviously, when I wrote it I didn’t have any tune. So when the composer played it for me the first time I was just like, “Woah, that’s really chilling.”

FK: I have to ask about Johnny Depp as well because that was his first movie, how was it working with him at the time?
WC: Well it was great, he was clearly a guy who had no experience, he was in Los Angeles with his band and a friend of his had gotten the role of the coroner in A Nightmare on Elm Street which was very brief scene. He said, “I have a friend, Johnny, who wants to try to get into movies and I wonder if you would read him just as a favour to me.” He came in and he was sweating, he was very pale, his fingers were stained with nicotine and I looked at him and thought that he was so different from what I was imagined for Nancy’s boyfriend, but so interesting. I went home with his picture and the pictures of two other actors I was considering and my daughter, who was fourteen at the time, looked at the pictures and just pointed at Johnny and said. “That one” [laughs]. And I said, “Why?” and she said “Because he’s beautiful Dad.” I was smart enough to listen to my daughter.

FK: Was there a specific scene in the movie you remember thinking, “Wow, he nailed that one?”
WC: Well you know, the scene when they’re hanging around and he’s playing a trick on his mother saying he’s out by the airport and playing sound effects [on a cassette player down the phone] – he just made it real. It was interesting how he underplayed things and made it work you know, he never looked like he was acting even though before he did a scene he was always sweating and his friend was always mopping off his brow and running the lines one last time. But when he did his thing he just had a very natural understanding that you didn’t have to act you just had to be. He mentioned that he was a big fan of Charlie Chaplin and a couple of other of the silent film stars, Buster Keaton, long before I decided that those actors were superlatively talented because they didn’t have words to rely on. Such an important part of acting is how you move and Johnny just had that down.

FK: I’ve read that you mentioned Scream 4 is ostensibly part of a new trilogy, is that something you’d be interested in doing?
WC: Yes I would. But I think right now Bob Weinstein, who is kind of the guy controls the franchise, is working on an MTV television series called Scream. Even though I have well over 200,000 Twitter followers, and the most common thing they write to me is “Where’s Scream 5?”