A quick look around Wes Craven’s hilltop home reveals no apparent signs of depravity. A high-tech telescope, some nice wicker chairs, framed photographs of woods at dusk, two very friendly cats . . .
“There’s a crocodile skull over by the fireplace,” the soft-spoken, trim-bearded director helpfully points out. “But that was a gift from one of the `Scream’ actors.”
It’s really not surprising. Though Craven has gone from strength to strength in the horror film genre — from the bloody shockers “Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes” to inventing the indelible Freddy Krueger to the post-modern cutups of last year’s “Scream,” the first $100 million-grossing slasher film in history — his academic background and serious filmmaking aspirations are well-known.
After all, this was the guy with the graduate philosophy degree whose first feature, “Last House,” was a splatterpunk rehash of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring.”
Now, with “Scream 2” thrilling a new generation of Craven fans, the 48-year-old fright master finally finds himself in a position to do what he’s always wanted to do: make a movie without mass killing.
Not that Craven’s had it with horror. Not at this point, anyway.
“After having had a quarter-century to think about it, I’ve gone through every feeling about the horror genre as you could imagine,” Craven says. “The first picture was like, `That was kind of fun but nobody’ll see it, so now I’ve got to go about my business and make a real film.’ That changed to, `Oh my God, what have I done? I’ve stained my career forever!’
“But that gave way to the realization that this genre is really interesting for a number of reasons. Since it’s off the rationalistic grid of civilized storytelling, it is released from the more standard narrative strictures. You can do anything you please to get across a thought or a feeling or a situation. And as long as you can take the social opprobrium that goes with it, the material is really rich; that is, violence and treachery and nightmares, the night side of human experience.
“And I have a voice for it,” Craven acknowledges. “After you stop moaning about being stereotyped as a horror guy, you can say, `I’m employed doing interesting movies that can be called, in some sense, auteur work. Nobody’s telling me what to do, I have final cut and there’s virtually no limitation except my imagination, and I have to stay within a certain subject matter. But you can put as much comedy as you want in the movie, as much romance or philosophy; anything, as long as you scare the bejesus out of people six or 10 times.”
Engineering those elements and more for “Scream 2” was a daunting assignment. The sequel was rushed into development last spring when Bob Weinstein, who oversees Miramax Films’ genre division Dimension, determined that the company needed a sequel to its phenomenal success for the year-end holiday season.
Trouble was, “Scream’s” saving grace was its wised-up, self-satirizing commentary on slasher film cliches. Rushing out an equally clever sendup of sequels was hard enough; the fact that “Scream” scripter Kevin Williamson was spread thin between “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and his upcoming TV series “Dawson’s Creek” didn’t help matters any.
Craven is cagey about where Williamson’s ideas end and his begin in “Scream 2.” The details were considered so precious, however, that cast members saw only parts of the script, and those pages were printed on dark paper that made them impossible to copy or fax.
Making fun of sequels should be a breeze. Sequels, after all, are usually so cheesy they become unintentional self-parodies of the movies that spawned them.
But the stakes were naturally higher with “Scream 2,” making the balancing of humor and horror a delicate operation.
“We were more self-conscious about this picture,” Craven admits. “First of all, we didn’t quite know what we had done right in the first one. And to an extent you shouldn’t know; you don’t want to reduce it to formula.
“Another thing we wanted to be acutely aware of was that there never be a moment that says to the audience, `Aren’t we so clever? Here we are, making our sequel.’ Which was really tough because here you were, making jokes about sequels. But I was always looking for that point where there’d be one joke too much. There was a lot of attempted exercise in restraint.”
The gory stuff was more a matter of effectively applying scare tactics Craven has honed through two “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, “The People Under the Stairs,” “Shocker,” “Swamp Thing” and many other theatrical and television thrillers.
“Wes was just amaaazing to work with,” gushes “Last Summer” star and TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays a stalked sorority sister in “Scream 2.” “Talk about someone who really created the genre; he just knows every nuance of how to walk and how to turn your head and how to hear a noise off screen. He makes the smallest things into these wonderful moments.
“Unlike many people that stay with one genre but don’t progress, he’s progressed,” Gellar adds. “He’s taken what used to be this worthless slasher cycle to this new level. It’s incredible to work with a master like that.”
But now it’s time for Craven to move on to the next level. His Miramax deal permits him to make one non-genre film in exchange for the “Scream” sequel and a second horror entry. He’s chosen a dramatization of “Fiddlefest,” the documentary about a Harlem music teacher.
“I think it connects to the academic in me,” says the Cleveland native, who holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. “I’ve taught at both the college level and a year of high school. I also love classical music and lived in New York, so it’s got a lot of elements that appeal to me.”
