"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH
ROBERT ENGLUND
by Peter Sobczynski
June 13, 2003
FLASHBACK WEEKEND: Robert Englund, best known for his character Freddy Krueger in "Nightmare on Elm Street," will be appearing at the "Flashback Weekend Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention" in Rosemont, Illinois - June 13, 14 and 15. Englund will soon appear in the new movie "Freddy vs. Jason." Film critic Peter Sobczynski will host screenings and Q & A sessions.
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By 1984, the horror movie boom that had begun six years earlier with the critically acclaimed hit "Halloween" was all but dead thanks to a glut of rip-offs, knock-offs and repetitive sequels. With the genre at an all-time low, no one really took much notice at first when a struggling studio named New Line released a low-budget shocker called "Nightmare on Elm Street". After all, the cast consisted of a few B-level stars (such as John Saxon and Ronee Blakely) and utter unknowns (including a kid making his acting debut named Johnny Depp) and the director, Wes Craven, had impressed people with his early shockers "The Last House on the Left" and "The Hills Have Eyes" but who had recently been doing TV movies and a cheesy film version of "Swamp Thing." Besides, who wanted to see a film in which the villain was a snarky, fire-scarred child-killer who has returned from beyond the grave to kill teens in their dreams anyway?
Well, "millions and millions of people" would be the answer to that question, the film became a sleeper hit and Robert Englund, the actor playing Krueger (then best known for supporting roles in films like "Stay Hungry" and the then-popular TV series "V") became a star. Over the next decade, both he and the character remained hugely popular with fans through six sequels-"Freddy’s Revenge" (1985), "The Dream Warriors" (1987), "The Dream Master"(1988), "The Dream Child" (1990), "Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare" (1991) and "Wes Craven’s New Nightmare" (1994)-a television series ("Freddy’s Nightmares"), toys, books, costumes, games and even a rap song.
Having gone on hiatus after "New Nightmare" (a brilliant, underrated meta-horror film that anticipated the self-reflexive attitude that Craven would further milk two years later in "Scream"), Englund will be haunting movie screens later this summer in the eagerly awaited "Freddy vs. Jason", in which Krueger and Jason Vorhees, the antihero of "Friday the 13th", finally go mano a mano. To promote the film to fans, Englund will be appearing at the Flashback Weekend Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention, running from June 13-15 at the Radisson O’Hare hotel in Rosemont, IL. Englund will be appearing on the 14th to do a Q&A with fans and introduce a screening of "Wes Craven’s New Nightmare". (Other guests scheduled to attend include Kevin McCarthy for a screening of the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", P.J. Soles for a 25th anniversary showing of "Halloween" and Brad Dourif hosting a screening of "The Two Towers". The author of this article will also be appearing to host screenings and Q&A’s)
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It has been nearly twenty years since the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" came out. Are you surprised to find yourself still playing the character of Freddy Krueger and talking about him after all this time?
I was surprised that we got to do a second film. At the time, I had my first success on television back then and I was preoccupied with doing this TV series called "V", which was sort of a phenomenon at the time (at least the miniseries was) and then "Nightmare on Elm Street" took off with its own life. I knew that we were going to do a "Freddy vs. Jason" movie back in 1999 because I made my deal for it back then and I thought it was going to be a millenium film. There was a big power shift at New Line and whenever that happens, the people who take over the projects want to put their own imprints on them. The script changed and we went through a few directors during those years-Rob Bottin, the great effects wizard who did John Carpenter’s "The Thing" was involved until he left because of a scheduling conflict. Then Guillermo del Toro was involved and then we finally got Ronny Yu.
The irony is that I was on a film festival jury in France with John Landis and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and we were watching all of these movies. One morning, we were there at 8 AM with our croissants and bad French coffee watching the latest Japanese cyberpunk film and then "Bride of Chucky" came on. It was a hoot and we wanted to give it an award but we were afraid that the French wouldn’t get it. They also embraced the film and we did give him an award. Now it is 2003 and Ronny is chasing me around Camp Crystal Lake. It is a small world and things do work out for a reason.
Considering that the character of Freddy Krueger was loathsome even by horror movie standards-being a child molester/killer who returns from the dead-did you ever wonder why he became such a folk hero with people, especially with kids who were, in theory, too young to be seeing the films in the first place?
People forget that when the first two films were made, New Line was a small company and there was no hype machine behind it at all. They were completely organic, grassroots word-of-mouth hits. They were discovered by heavy-metal fans and the punk rock fans first and then their brothers and sisters caught up with them. They were among the last films that were discovered and embraced by a generation instead of being force-fed to them by the media.
Wes Craven always had this inherent sense of humor in Freddy and I think that fans responded to that. Sam Raimi was doing it with "The Evil Dead" but Wes was the first to really popularize the hybrid of horror, humor and irony. They were also very politically incorrect and served the punk sensibility and was embraced for that reason and by that time, it was "cool" to like him.
What I contributed was a physical posture and a carriage and I think fans liked that. People liked the look of Freddy and that just survived over the years. Even when people see the newer films, they remember that the films stand for that kind of irreverence. I can remember that it took 30 years to hear a Rolling Stones song selling a product on television and now the most radical groups sell their soul to Cadillac six weeks after they have a hit song. It took Pink five minutes to use her songs to sell French fries. It took us a little longer to become whores.
When you were growing up, were you much of a horror fan yourself?
When I was a kid, yeh. I’m an old fart and I can remember standing around every morning and analyzing "Twilight Zone" episodes and sleeping over at someone’s house and watching the uncensored "Frankenstein" on the Million Dollar Movie while his parents slept. There were a couple of hardcore horror films that I snuck off to that we weren’t supposed to see. One of them was "Horrors of the Black Museum" with the nails coming out of the binoculars. But I became a bit of a snob-I saw "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary’s Baby" but I didn’t really get back into them until I saw this film called "Asylum" with Patrick MacGee. I got back into them then and then after Freddy, I forced myself to watch them. I felt I owed it to my fans to see the stuff that was going on.
Before doing "Nightmare on Elm Street", you had done a couple of low-budget horror items like Tobe Hooper’s "Eaten Alive" and "Galaxy of Terror"...
I had worked with Bob Rafelson and Daniel Petrie and Robert Aldrich and Robert Mulligan and I was like an up-and-coming character actor in Hollywood. When I did "Eaten Alive", I did that one because it was an all-star cast of actors from the 1950’s-Stuart Whitman and Carolyn Jones and Audrey Hepburn’s husband and Neville Brand. I walked on the set of that and I thought it was going to be the greatest movie ever. It was like being on a back road in Texas with old beat-up Cadillacs and giant iguanas and monkey carcasses and Neville Brand fully in character and I thought it was going to be great! What happened then was that they fired Tobe Hooper 2/3rd’s of the way through because they didn’t think he was going to make it sexy or violent enough. It should have been a great film.
The big change in my life was doing "V". At that time, there was no sci-fi on television and "Star Trek" wasn’t on every hour. Science-fiction fans were starved and I got this big sci-fi fan base. Then I did Freddy during a hiatus from "V" and that became an East Coast cult phenomenon. It was a one-two punch of sci-fi and horror and that was the big shift for me. "Eaten Alive" was an abberation for me and not a design on my part.
For you, was there a single crystallizing moment when you realized that "Nightmare on Elm Street" had gone from being merely a successful horror film to a genuine phenomenon?
When we were making it, we knew that we were on to something because we had wonderful people, great special effects and Wes Craven, but we didn’t think it would be this phenomenon. I was doing TV at the time and that was taking up most of my time. They flew me back to New York to sign autographs with William Shatner in a hotel on Madison Avenue and 47th St. It was raining and my line went outside the lobby and into the rain and was longer than Shatner’s line. Halfway through the line, the fans changed from sci-fi fans to heavy-metal girls and punk rock kids who wanted me to sign Freddy. That was when I knew it had a life of its own and that was in early 1985.
After the success of the first film, you did all of the sequels, a television series ("Freddy’s Nightmares") and it seemed as though you were on the cover of "Fangoria" every month. Was there ever a time during that period when you began to grow tired of the character?
It seemed like I was doing it 24-7 but there was usually about a year between the films. I did go from "The Dream Master" right into the television series and I had done another film right around that time. That was about the peak and I was pretty beat up. I wanted the crew to make money so I got a lot of the crew from the movie to do the series and most of them went on to do "Tales From the Crypt" for HBO. I was directing episodes of the show as well as appearing in it and I had just gotten finished being beaten up by Renny Harlin and doing an intense shooting schedule on "Dream Master" and that was a tough time. It wasn’t that I hated Freddy but it was like it was all Freddy all the time and that was a rough stretch.
From then on, they have been spaced pretty nice and there has always been a nice gimmick. With Part 6, there was a lot of stunt casting and we did the William Castle thing with the 3-D. On Part 5, Stephen Hopkins brought a lot of energy to it and we got to play with new technology on that one. By then, I wasn’t doing the series any more and I was able to catch my breath.
At this convention, you are going to be introducing a screening of "Wes Craven’s New Nightmare" (1994), which is by far my favorite of all of them...
I had to fight to get that one because it is my favorite as well. Ever since the whole post-modern irony thing was established with Sam Raimi and the "Scream" films, people are rediscovering "New Nightmare" and realizing that it is a fun and smart movie.
I loved it when it first came out and then when people were talking about how innovative "Scream" was, I kept thinking that Craven had done a equally good job with similar material two years earlier and no one seemed to notice. Considering the fact that it was a horror film about horror films and featured you playing not only Freddy Krueger but yourself as well, were you able to fully grasp what Craven was going for when you first saw the script?
I had been doing a TV series in Canada with Wes and we were hanging out and he kept telling me this idea. I was always on board but I think he had to convince Heather Langenkamp because one of the plot machinations was that she had a stalker and she had one in real life. It was bringing something of her own personal life into it-she had a baby and she had this obsessed fan-and I remember that Wes had to convince her to do it.
Do you do a lot of conventions these days?
I did one in London last year that was a lot of fun. I do a lot of film festivals, especially in Europe, and have served on a lot of juries. That has been fun and I get to see the latest Japanese cyberpunk and the Spanish and Italian films. I haven’t done any signings in a while but I am doing some now because we are on the bandwagon for "Freddy vs. Jason" and I am picking cities I like to go to.
From seeing these films from around the world, what are some of the recent horror movies that have really grabbed you?
One is "The Devil’s Backbone" by Guillermo del Toro and the other is "Dog Soldiers". I think that "Dog Soldiers" not only manages to reinterpret the werewolf movie in the way that "Ginger Snaps" did but also, I loved the idea of going from an action war movie into a werewolf movie and going from the extreme outdoors to extreme claustrophobia with some "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" thrown in for good measure. There is also this Japanese film called "Dark Water" which I really liked-maybe I was just in the mood when I saw it but it really worked on me and it really disturbed me.
-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI
Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
Peter's Film Review Archives
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The Flashback Weekend runs from June 13-15th and will be held at the Radisson O’Hare in Rosemont, Il. Film screenings will be held at the nearby Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge. For information on ticket prices, hotel deals and up-to-the-minute schedule changes, contact Falshback Weekend by calling (847)478-0119 or go to www.flashbackweekend.com.
PETER'S FLASHBACK SCHEDULE:
June 14:
1:45-2:15 Critics Panel
2:30-3:00 Moderating a discussion/reunion of "The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 2" with stars Bill Moseley and Bill Johnson.
June 15:
11:30-12:15 Panel discussion: "Has Hollywood Killed the Horror
Film?" (Fellow panelists include Robert Englund, Michael
Flores and J.R. Bookwalter.
2-2:30: Q&A with Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead)
5:00 :Introduce "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and onstage Q&A with Kevin McCarthy.
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