John and Emma Collingwood are on vacation at their lakeshore house when, by a bizarre twist of fate, they give shelter to the sociopaths who have just assaulted and nearly killed their daughter. Upon discovering the truth, they exact a chilling revenge on her attackers...

Bloody-Disgusting's BC: The idea of doing a Last House remake, was it a case of someone approaching you, or was it your idea to sort of modernize your own film? How did it all come about?

Wes Craven: We had basically realized that we had ownership of the property again; after 30 years the rights came back to us: Sean Cunningham and myself. So we just kind of explored who would be interested, if anyone, and there WAS immediate interest, so we set off to make it. It took a couple years to get the legalities right... back in those days we didn’t keep very good records. Once we got all that straightened out we were free to make it.

BD: And how did Dennis get involved?

Wes: Cody Zweig He just looks at all of the films of the world, looking for the next director we might be able to work with. And he saw Hardcore and loved it, and said this is the guy, he’d do a fantastic job. Hardcore is a combination of very dark material, very frank, raw material, but at the same time has great performances by those girls and a real sense of humanity. And you need both to do a good horror film. You need to be able to go into the dark, WAY into the dark, and you also need a real love and understanding of human beings. Including the fact that bad guys have good parts to them and good guys have bad parts to them, it’s not just “good” and “bad”.

BD: So when you are producing a remake of a film that you originally wrote and directed - what area of production do you tend to get the most involved in? And on that note, at what point do you step furthest away from it?

Wes: I’m very much there with pre-production, actually not even. Development, would be more accurate. That process took a while, to find the right writers; we had scripts by people that simply weren’t very good. So once we had the writers we could go out and find the director, and then get studio approval. And we had a very good relationship with Andrew Rona at Rogue. He was one of the two guys that worked under Bob Weinstein and THE guy who worked with us on the Scream series. We had a long relationship; we knew each other and trusted each other. And once we were ready to go he took it very quickly. It was wild, he bought that and he bought 25/8 in the same month.

BD: They literally wrote a book on the MPAA problems with the first movie, did they sharpen their claws when they saw you coming back, or were they more forgiving toward you this time around?

Wes: The MPAA is very very strange. It’s different I think since Jack Valenti has died. But it’s still very bothersome. You have to take these people into account and you never know what their take is going to be, what they think is bad or what they think is good. We had the unusual response on this one, of them saying ‘We think this is a great film”. Which you almost NEVER hear; I think on Nightmare on Elm St one of them kinda whispered to me “I think this is a very important film.... therefore, you don’t need this scene!”

BD: They butter you up a little.

Wes: (laughs) Yeah. But it’s true, on Nightmare it was only the scene where Tina falls, we had to cut her hitting the bed which splashed blood. Which to this day just hurts to watch. And we had to shorten the blood coming from Johnny Depp’s bed. Those were the only two cuts in the whole film. With this one it was just the rape. They just felt it went on longer than necessary. And for Dennis it was very difficult, because he is not used to having to listen to people such as this. But they were willing to compromise to an extent, and we found an area where we could live with it. Dennis will have his full cut on the DVD, and I think you’ll see honestly it’s not that big of a difference, but it does go on longer. There’s more of seeing a thrust or this or that. And the death of Paige is a bit more extended.

BD: The film (set in the US) was shot in South Africa, were you on set at all?

Wes: No, I was actually in pre-production on 25/8, and then shooting. We’d shot a film there called The Breed, which was done by someone I had known for years. So we had worked there, and Dennis had shot some commercials there. So he was familiar with it, and knew that they had good crews. And the financial situation was good there. So it was a combination of those types of things.

BD: It fooled me!

Wes: Yeah! Well they built the house entirely, and the general store was built, and the town was seen in a distance. Jonathan was saying that it really looks like the United States except when you really look at it, it doesn’t. Every plug is different, every sign is different. So you have to go through and try to weed out everything. But the house was a complete build, it wasn’t like a set they actually built the house.

BD: When someone remakes one of John Carpenter’s movies, he just asks for his money and has nothing to do with it. But with Hills and now Last House, you’ve been pretty involved. Would you be opposed to someone redoing one of your films without your direct involvement?

Wes: Well with Nightmare I guess I don’t have a choice! But no, I feel a sense of obligation or loyalty to my movies that are going to be remade that they be good, maybe even better than the original. That’s what we did with Hills, and certainly what we’re trying with Last House. You get somebody that’s a gifted artist and say go do your version of the story, rather than “go redo my film”. Give that person the freedom to bring the story to life, and kind of protect them from whoever they need protection from, be it the studio or the bean counters or whatever.

BD: So is it safe to say you will keep the same level of involvement with Shocker and People Under the Stairs?

Wes: Sure, yeah. I think Jonathan and Cody will be full producers on those, and those two and me are very close.

BD: Which is more likely to come first?

Wes: People is more likely to be next.

BD: I’m excited for Shocker. The original is my biggest guilty pleasure of all time.

Wes: Is it? Yeah I would love to see that done right. We couldn’t afford the special effects that it really deserved, so if you get in there with a good budget I think it will really be kind of fun.

BD: And keep the theme song too.

Wes: (sings) “Shocker!” (laughs)

BD: (laughs) OK I am posting that audio, hope you don’t mind!

(both laugh)

I know you mentioned Shocker’s effects, but for the most part, Hills and Last House were a little more crude, being your first movies, vs. Shocker and People Under The Stairs. So with those being more technically sound, do you think enough time has passed since they were released to bring something new in terms of social commentary, the way you were able to with Hills?*

Wes: Certainly with People you have the huge disparity of people with wealth and people that are kept from having enough to subside on. And the theme of older people preying on younger people is innate. So I don’t think there will be any problem finding relevance in today’s world. With Shocker, the world has more and more to do with the electromagnetic world, computers and all the other electronic devices. Since then it’s invading our whole sense of reality. A lot of kids have more exposure to reality through those devices than they do with actually talking someone face to face. Everyone is walking around looking down at their devices.

BD: The funny thing about Shocker is people will always describe it as “The one where the guy goes into the TV”, but that’s really only the last 20 minutes of the movie. Do you think the TV thing will be more prominent this time around, or will it focus more on these newer technologies that you mentioned?

Wes: I think it will be more realistic and clever. The original had an element of fun to it; actually it was kind of inspired by Max Headroom. This guy could go into telephone wires and everything else, and I thought “Wow this is terrific.” It’s a little like Freddy, with the dreams. He could come into our world and then go back somewhere where you couldn’t chase him. How would you get that guy?

BD: Before that is 25/8 though. How is that coming? You’re still in post?

Wes: We’re getting ready for our first test screening, so we’re pretty close to the end.

BD: For those who might not know, can you describe it without spoiling much?

Wes: It’s about this kid who is unknowingly the son of a schizophrenic, a man who is under treatment who had 6 personalities, or 5 personalities plus his own. The 6th person was taking him over at night and killing people, and he didn’t realize he was doing that. And one night he goes to call his psychiatrist and the entity inside of him says “if you call I will kill your family”. The man makes the call and ends up dead. And that night, when he dies, 7 children are born in a local hospital, and those are the central characters of the main story. And one of them, I don’t want to say who, is kind of inheriting possibly the bad and the good of the father. So it’s kind of a very fun but complex concept, basically these seven kids who were all in one person. And they’re all joining psychically without realizing it, but they are also very distinct characters with their own lives. But it’s also very scary and kind of a mystery.

BD: Sounds like you get to explore some of the philosophical areas that you were studying before you turned to filmmaking.

Wes: Yeah. It’s not a normal typical horror picture. But in my mind it takes horror in a direction I took it before with Nightmare, where a lot of people read that script... that script was in town for 3 years, and there was only one person who thought there was a good film in there. Pretty remarkable. Sometimes you come up with something that’s so different that a lot of people will be kind of wary about it. It’s certainly not like anything that’s out right now, so it fulfills my requisite which is to make something that people have never seen before but it’s still something that they would LIKE to see (laughs). And it’s been fun to make, and my wife and I worked together producing it, so it was nice to work together.

BD: I just remembered when I was a kid, and my dad didn’t want me watching some horror movie, with the whole “they’re sick and pointless” excuse. So I pointed out that you had a Master’s degree in philosophy. I think it helped, him knowing that the guys who were making the movies were intelligent and that movies like Freddy had intellectual themes behind them.

Wes: The genre has the potential to be as deep as the filmmakers can take it. It’s enormously elastic. You can go into dreams, into wires, into possession, into schizophrenia, so many different places; those dark areas that have not been figured out by us and that we can’t quite control. All those areas that neither science nor civilization really have control of or understand, only that they are very powerful. It’s a big arena. And that’s why I never worried about being “stuck” in the genre, and that I should be lucky to be able to be doing this.

BD: Well you still explore other genres, you recently did a romantic segment in... I can’t pronounce it.

Wes: Paris, je t'aime. It’s the only French I can speak (laughs). And I’ve done Music of the Heart, so there’s at least some record I can do other things.

BD: And you wrote “The Fountain Society”, which wasn’t horror. Have you ever considered doing another novel?

Wes: It really took it out of me, I did that between Scream 2 and Music of the Heart. I was writing while I was directing. So writing a novel, I now understand you have to have a year of nothing else, at least. It’s tough. We tried to develop that into a script; we had two writers and neither one of them cracked it. It’s still owned by Dreamworks, and they have an open invitation to do it if I write the script. But they can’t pay me anything, so I don’t know.

BD: There’s a script floating around called Gemini Man, which is about a guy in his 50s being chased by his 30 year old clone. I was reading an article about it last week and couldn’t help but notice the similarities to “Fountain Society” (which also deals with clones of varying ages).

Wes: I remember that, it was actually being talked about when we were trying to develop “Fountain Society”.

BD: I would assume that the technology now would be better suited than 10 years ago.

Wes: Well Benjamin Button proves that the technology is there. It’s probably very expensive. It was interesting because that novel was about an older man in his 70s and his brain is put into his clone, who is in his 30s. And he leaves his wife and is with this young woman for most of the story, but in the end he goes back to his wife. But in a film, it didn’t feel like an audience would sit still for this guy going back to a 70 year old woman and having that be the climax of the film. So the script had him going back more with the younger woman, but that sort of makes him look like a creep (laughs).

BD: Speaking of script issues, you said that you’d come back to Scream 4 if you liked the script; what would YOU like to see for a fourth film?

Wes: I don’t even know if I’m supposed to talk about it. There was some initial contact, “is Wes interested?” and I basically said “Look it’s all contingent on the script.” It doesn’t make any sense for me to go back and just do a Scream 4 for whatever reason.

BD: So it has to be more than a guy in a ghost mask killing a new group of people.

Wes: Yeah. If it’s something innovative like the first one was, then I’m interested. But I also have a lot of other things I’m interested in, so it just depends.

BD: Would you ever want to write one yourself?

Wes: I’d rather do something that was wholly my own. That’s always going to be Kevin’s baby. It’s better for me, smarter, as an artist to develop my own material. Unless someone brings a script to me that I think is pretty terrific and I can focus on the directing. Like Red Eye was like that, that script was pretty ready to go. The only change was the original ending took place in her father’s new house, and I said “make it the house she was raised in”. It was originally a house that had no resonance with her. But other than that the script was ready to go, we did it in a very quick amount of time.

BD: I remember it coming out much quicker than I expected, like “Wow, it’s done? I thought they just shot it.”

Wes: I think the director’s cut took five days. Patrick Lussier and myself worked together for so long, he was extremely fast and we were on the same page. Plus we didn’t shoot anything more than what was required to get the story told. So we didn’t have many choices.

BD: So there was never a scene where his eyes glowed red...

Wes: (laughs). Oh that was very unfortunate. The marketing team came up with that, “We’re getting a tremendous response to it!” But it’s not the movie! (laughs)

BD: While we are on the subject of trailers, are you happy with the Last House trailer? I thought it was giving a bit too much away.

Wes: We had a meeting with the marketing department, where they went on for ten minutes about how they loved the film and how it caught them off guard because they didn’t rally know that much about it. They hadn’t seen dailies or anything, they just said that they loved the film. LOVED it. And at first, yeah, at first I thought “Well, there’s the whole story.” But their take on it was interesting; it was like “If the audience sees that there is a young girl being raped, and they don’t know that there is some payback, and that she survives, then half the audience won’t see it.” And this is really a film about that fact that she does survive and that her parents are able to protect her, and then do what they do because she’s alive. And you know, most trailers show most of the story anyway, so it’s probably a very smart move. And it’s tracking very highly with older and younger audiences, so it’s kind of a brilliant thing in a way, it’s appealing to more conservative audiences. A lot of times, when people start having kids they stop going to horror films, because they have a whole new take on how precious kids are, and they don’t want to think about someone doing something like this. So by showing that a parent is able to do something about it, save their child, it’s opening it up to them.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT hits theaters March 13th

*BC’s long-winded, more respectable way of asking “why a remake?”