Fifteen years ago, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson resuscitated the slasher film with SCREAM. It was slick, smarter-than-average trash* in which a stock group of teenagers struggled for their lives against the rigid conventions of a shopworn subgenre. Though the film wasn't as thematically complex as it might've appeared at first blush (Craven had dug much deeper two years earlier with the fascinatingly flawed NEW NIGHTMARE), the Pirandellian conceit gave mainstream critics license to enjoy it as a "guilty pleasure". Powered by surprisingly good reviews and strong word of mouth, SCREAM went on to become the first slasher film to gross $100 million. And a postmodern horror franchise was born!
Though Williamson deserves a tremendous amount of credit for nailing the zeitgeist with his self-reflexive take on the subgenre, it's impossible to imagine SCREAM hitting phenomenon status without Craven at the helm. For a filmmaker who'd been experimenting with horror-comedy hybrids since 1989's SHOCKER, Williamson's screenplay possessed lightning-in-a-bottle potential - which Craven fully exploited in the film's bravura opening sequence. Though he'd pulled off plenty of memorable set pieces in his career, Craven's films had never been this technically polished; shooting widescreen for the first time in his career, Craven seemed reborn as a director. SCREAM was the work of a master performing at the peak of his powers - and while the scripts for the immediate sequels suffered from varying degrees of narrative overexertion, Craven's newfound visual panache at least kept them watchable.
It's been an up-and-down run over the last twelve years for Craven (with both apex and nadir being hit in 2005 with the crackerjack B-movie RED EYE and the appropriately titled CURSED), so perhaps a return to the SCREAM franchise is just the thing to recharge his creative energies. With a decade under the bridge and Kevin Williamson... eighty-five-percent back as screenwriter (Craven attributes the other fifteen percent to Ehren Kruger), SCRE4M could very well do for the fame-obsessed, social-networking generation what the original did for the nascent internet generation.
So how does a once-pioneering franchise reestablish its relevance in a world gone meta? I discussed this and sundry other topics with the ever-eloquent Mr. Craven a couple of weeks ago. For the spoiler-conscious among you, not to worry: I signed a non-disclosure agreement promising not to reveal the big third-act twist, so we talk about the narrative only in the broadest of terms.
Mr. Beaks: When the first SCREAM was released, there had a been a real dearth of slasher films. The genre is thriving now. What prompted you to return to the franchise?
Craven: It's not my perception of the genre. There are a lot, but a lot of them are remakes and a lot have come out and not done that well. So I do feel like the genre could use a little boost. Right after SCREAM 3, we all agreed we shouldn't do any more for a significant period of time. We all - while we were making that trilogy - really felt it was a trilogy, and to do another SCREAM would be kind of saying, "Oh, we were just kidding." But after ten years, we felt we were in a place where the first decade of the twenty-first century had gone by, things had changed a great deal in the youth culture, and there was a really legitimate opportunity here to talk about new things, and to bring the fans up to date with what is going on right now.
Beaks: SCREAM felt so different at the time. It was self-aware and acknowledged the conventions of the genre - and also respected the audience's intelligence by letting them in on the game. Do you think audiences are now too self-aware?
Craven: I don't think so. [SCRE4M] acknowledges that pretty much up front, saying to the audience that we're aware of this, and kids know every detail about it - including everything that's operating on a meta level. That's all part of what we're talking about here. It's not like we have to make things up out of whole cloth; we always talk about the culture as it is and actually exists - and perhaps make it a bit more arch or sardonic. The whole social networking phenomenon is new. It's profoundly affecting the current generation: in the way we deal with people, in the way we relate to people, and in the way we gather news. All of these things are unprecedented and vast in their scope, so I thought, "Wow, here's some really significant stuff we can set our picture amidst, and do something that is germane to today as opposed to ten years ago."
Beaks: How has the nature of your collaboration changed with Kevin Williamson over the years.
Craven: The first film was unique in the series in that it was a completed script that Kevin had written as a virtually unknown independent writer; [the script] suddenly came on the market over a weekend and was acquired after a big bidding war - which was won by the Weinstein brothers and Miramax. It's not like I was giving a lot of input to him: he was a writer who'd written a terrific script and was done. He came to script from time to time, and, as he likes to say, sat at my feet and "watched the master". But he was a very quick study - and destined to be doing his own directing and producing as well. So he was much more a person who was there to learn.
By the second one, he had his own television show and had directed his own things. He was a much more accomplished and knowledgeable man than he'd been on the first. That was the biggest difference to me. And in some cases, his attention was divided at certain points of the making of the film between the film and his television show, so that was sometimes something significant. But that didn't really come into play until the third one, when it made it kind of impossible for him to fully participate.
Beaks: How was it reuniting with him on this film?
Craven: It was great. Kevin's a great guy. He has just a remarkable imagination. He's very smart. He can capture in a sentence, or a short moment in a scene, the essence of the zeitgeist of the moment. It's kind of extraordinary. His dialogue is really original and quite shocking sometimes - in a way that just makes it fresh and something that you don't feel like you've heard a million times in other genre films or on television. I like working with him a lot.
But my entry into [SCRE4M] was after he and Bob had been working together for some time, kicking around ideas. The original idea for this was not anything I participated in. But on the other hand, once Kevin was writing, I participated a lot: as a director, I'd give pages and pages of notes and so forth. In that sense, it was a good collaboration and went on for some time. I would say that 85% of what you see on the screen was there in the script by the time Kevin departed. I think the chief reason for his departure was that he got into the point where his television show was going into production again, and he needed to be there, and was being threatened with a lawsuit by the network. (Laughs) That's when Ehren Kruger came in and polished up the loose ends.
Beaks: We hear a lot about films that go into production without a completed script. Was that really the case on this film, and, if so, how did you deal with that?
Craven: I have to say, just looking at the films I've written myself, the [writing] process goes on all the time. In horror... and comedy, there is a constant creative interplay that's going on in the making of the film. You can go back to CASABLANCA, and read the stories of how they wrote the third act over and over again, and shot it the day after they finally got it down on paper. It's not something new, and it I don't think it necessarily means the picture is in trouble. It's the core group of people trying to make it absolutely as good as they can, and taking every opportunity to do that. The fact that you've started shooting doesn't mean the script needs to be put in a leather binder and not touched; it means you still have time to fiddle with the third act, or whatever scene it is that is still days or weeks ahead from shooting.
Beaks: You've been doing this for so long, and have pulled off so many terrific suspense set pieces. How did you approach this film in terms of doing suspense beats you hadn't done before?
Craven: I think the opening was more a matter of staging. Kevin's brilliance there was very specific with dialogue. We always shoot on practical sets, actual houses - and every house is different. Almost always, what's written on the page doesn't fit the house that you're in. (Laughs) That sort of thing is constantly being massaged and changed, and then I'll add this and that to almost anything I touch. Nobody tells me you can't touch the script - but at the same time I know not to screw it up by fiddling with something that doesn't need to be enhanced or made a little better.
It's a constant process. The opening was a lot of fun to play with. The scene in the parking garage, that was obviously a scene that lent itself to a lot of suspense. After we filmed and cut the original version, we went back because Bob Weinstein and I had some ideas; I wrote some additional moments in that scene. Sometimes, even quite late in the process, you have an idea where you can make it even more suspenseful. And the scene at "STAB-athon". All of the big set pieces are very much a combination of what is written and what is made possible by the location - and me filling in blanks that need to be filled in.
Beaks: Can you think of a particular instance in the past where a sequence was dramatically improved by reworking it on set?
Craven: It's actually hard to think of a time when that didn't happen. Going back to one of my more obscure films, DEADLY BLESSING, there was a scene written by two young writers that was essentially out of PSYCHO. The heroine is taking a shower, and you see past her to a shadow going past the shower curtain, and then a snake appears in the bathtub - something like that. I knew that was too Hitchcock, and it would not be original. Up to the day before we shot it, I literally, before I fell asleep at night, got a concept for a totally new version of that scene. That's what I ended up shooting, and I think it made it really fascinating because it was something you'd never seen before, so the audience didn't know what to expect next.
I think continuously you're watching every scene thinking, "Have I seen this before? Is this a repeat of someone else's look? How can I do it originally? How can I take advantage of this particular house?" In one of the opening scenes, when we did a location scout for the house we discovered this passageway that led from the upstairs hallway into the garage and down a set of very rough stairs into the garage itself. Based on that, I wrote the chase up the stairs and then through the sort of back way down to the garage - based entirely on the location and knowing that, cinematically, it would be very interesting.
Beaks: Over the years, do you feel that the things you find frightening - or what you think audiences find frightening - has changed?
Craven: This film's a good example of some of the vulnerabilities that have been brought about by the internet - and the fact that people can watch you remotely very easily and record you. All of that stuff is pretty new. There are older variations of it, but this film was built on new situations like that that could be frightening; we looked at that while we were revising this film. But on the other hand, I feel like a suspense scene... kind of what's going on on the exterior is almost not as interesting to me as what's going on in the interior of the character, and what changes the character just before they go into a scene where something is going to happen. I think when someone is doing a good suspense scene, it's as much the interior mechanisms that are taking place with the character as it is the exterior stuff of who jumps out of what building.
Beaks: There was talk last year of a DEADLY FRIEND remake at Warner Bros. Do you have any idea where that stands?
Craven: None whatsoever. Honestly, there was a period when we were doing the sequel to the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES when everyone was talking about me doing remakes of all my films - and a lot of people that owned various properties were suggesting it to me. But I reached a point in that whole process - between LAST HOUSE [ON THE LEFT] and the two HILLS pictures - that I was kind of disappearing from the cinematic scene, especially as a director. So I vowed to myself that I'd done enough of that. The situation with LAST HOUSE and HILLS was different in that we discovered - by "we" I mean Peter Locke, who I did HILLS HAVE EYES with, and Sean Cunningham, who I did LAST HOUSE with - that we actually owned those properties after thirty years, because that was built into the contract. So we had the opportunity to remake those films having total control. It wasn't like someone else was remaking my films. On the other hand, my contract with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was that New Line Cinema owned it forever and ever, so that remake I had nothing to do with. It's kind of a case-by-case thing, but I certainly felt at a certain point that if I want to remain an active and growing artist, I shouldn't be remaking my own stuff; I should be making new movies.
Beaks: Well, there's a very good chance SCRE4M will make a good deal of money, which would then necessitate another sequel. But it sounds to me like you'd rather follow this up with something original. What would you like to do next? Would you be open to doing another SCREAM film?
Craven: It might be easy to forget, but my previous film, which we completed literally while we were in preproduction on [SCRE4M], was MY SOUL TO TAKE. I poured two-and-a-half years of my life into that. It's a film that was very, very different, and I think a lot of people just didn't get it. I felt like I'd done something very original, very personal with that. So when SCRE4M came along, I thought it was going to be fun and interesting, and would kind of put me back on the map in case I was in danger of disappearing with [MY SOUL TO TAKE] not doing well - and before that producing remakes as opposed to directing. There were also films in that decade, like CURSED, that took an enormous amount of time to make and almost didn't break the surface at all. I have done something original very recently, and I will, when we're done with this, be taking time off with my wife to rest, and then maybe start writing something new. But we're also reading scripts, and deciding if and when we want to do another film. There's a lot else out there in our lives now, and we're not going to rush into a film unless I'm really intrigued by it.
SCRE4M opens wide this Friday, April 15th.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
*In the complimentary Kael sense.
