Wes Craven – Justine Goodman

Photo by Carly Feingold / Courtesy of Fox Atomic

Believe it or not, Wes Craven made quite a few movies before Scream (“You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?!” jokes Wes), including the original versions of The Hills Have Eyes and The Hills Have Eyes 2 in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We recently caught up with Wes to discuss his latest film–a remake of The Hills Have Eyes 2–and his approach to scary movies.

JG: What is required to make a good horror film? Do you just need to have a morbid imagination to make a movie like Hills?
WC: I don’t really have to have a morbid imagination these days – I just have to read the newspaper… It’s basically doing something that’s intriguing to you at the moment that you find frightening. Not that there’s Hills Have Eyes people running around in the United States. But if you nudge that just a bit, you can understand what it’s like, say, for an American soldier in Afghanistan, encountering people that will literally skin you alive or cut your head off in the middle of the mountains. The Hills’ underlying concept is, ‘What do Westerners do when they confront people who would like to kill them, and follow none of the rules they were trained to fight by?’ What does that do to your own sense of personal confidence and morality? Continue reading →

Photo by Eric Lee, courtesy of Fox Atomic

From A Nightmare on Elm Street to the Scream trilogy, everyone knows that when Wes Craven makes a picture, it’s going to be scary. This March, the master of all things nightmarish follows up the first installment of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) with this sequel, which he co-produced and co-wrote with his son, Jonathan. In Hills 2, a group of young, inexperienced National Guardsmen travel to a desert research outpost to deliver supplies to some government scientists, only to discover that the facility has been eerily abandoned. What begins as a seemingly routine rescue mission turns into a terrifying game of cat and mouse, as the troops are hunted by the cannibalistic mutants that occupy the hills. The premise may seem less appealing than that of the first film, in which we saw the Carter family picked off, one by one, but if you’re looking to be frightened you won’t be disappointed. The Hills Have Eyes 2 drops on March 23.
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