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Features
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The Cravens Have a Sequel
A decade after making his debut as a screenwriter on the Wes Craven produced flick The Outpost, son Jonathan has teamed up with dad once again for more hillbilly mutant thunder.
Friday, March 2, 2007 at 10:00 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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John Shearer/WireImage.com
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Wes Craven, with current wife Iya Labunka
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For horror fans, this month in many ways comes down to one simple onscreen credit: Written by Wes Craven and Jonathan Craven. That’s right; father and son, working together as co-writers to follow up dad’s classic 1977 chiller The Hills Have Eyes, a film many genre fans consider pop’s best.
“We worked on the entire story together, soup to nuts,” says Craven during a recent interview with FilmStew. “He asked me if I wanted to do it with him and we immediately started outlining ideas. We just sat down and beat out an outline.”
“Then we locked ourselves in a hotel room for a couple months and wrote a first draft,” he continues. “We worked at separate desks and traded back and forth. If I had been looking over his shoulder, we probably would have killed each other. We are family after all. But it went swimmingly.”
The Hills Have Eyes II, which hits theaters March 23rd, comes on the heels of last year’s Fox remake of the 1977 original, a film Craven Jr. heartily approves of. It’s just the latest way father and son have teamed up over the years.
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Maury Phillips/WireImage.com
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Jonathan Craven and friend
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“I co-wrote a movie called The Outpost, which my father produced in 1993,” Craven explains. “I’ve also worked as a magazine writer. I set out to do my own thing and we’ve crossed paths. Obviously, he’s such an institution in film and he’s always got stuff going on. In this case, it just was really timing. He wanted to write and he wanted to write with me, and it all lined up perfectly.”
Craven was but a kid when dad filmed the scary original in L.A. Rather than dad sending him postcard missives from his east coast summer camp, it was the other way around. One letter in particular sticks in Craven’s memory, in which his father wrote about his own summer camp-like adventures: ‘Today on set the rattlesnake got loose and we all had to scramble to look for it.’
But it wasn’t all fun and games for the young Craven who, after his parents separated, shuttled back and forth between mom’s apartments in New York and dad’s houses in Los Angeles. His sister got Johnny Depp’s leather jacket from A Nightmare on Elm Street and dad of course brought home various mementoes. Craven? He says he got nothing.
Still, when Craven was six, he got to play a small role in The Last House on the Left, dad’s 1972 directorial debut. For those non-horror trivia geeks out there, he was Boy with Balloon.
“For all I knew they were making a love story,” Craven admits with a laugh. “[Co-star] David Hess was very nice to me. I was told to hold the balloon, and when David walks by, to hold up this [middle] finger.”
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Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage.com
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Hills II co-star Daniella Alonso
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“I blew it several times,” he recalls. “I remember spending a lot of time in the editing room. I have no recollection of watching images as much as playing with bits of film and film cores.”
As far as The Hills Have Eyes II is concerned, it may well be this year’s quietest allegory for the Iraq war. Picking up on the military base narrative of the original, this time around it is the National Guard who battle the mutant hillbillies.
“We didn’t set out to be political, but there is no avoiding the political implications,” Craven suggests. “Once we started writing it, we realized how political the idea of this mutant insurgency with soldiers was.”
“I don’t mean to be ironic or cute, but you write these things and then you realize how many parallels there are,” he adds. “In the news, we see young kids going out and having horrible things happening to them from these people who are willing to do anything. That all had parallels and influences beyond what we ever thought.”
Over the years, Craven has heard all the jokes about what it must have been like to grow up with a horror film pioneer for a dad. So much so that he doesn’t even blink when launching into his deadpan reply to our question along those lines.
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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Co-star Jacob Vargas
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“I grew up in a perfectly normal dungeon,” he insists. “And whenever I was allowed out from underneath the stairs, I went to see horror movies. It was the sole form of entertainment I was allowed.”
Then, breaking back to reality, Craven agrees that it always amazes people when he tells them his dad is not some kind of bloodthirsty maniac. “Please don’t tell anyone; he’s obviously a civilized guy,” Craven quips. “He’s strange and funny in more normal ways, but he focuses his demons on his work.”
When filmmaker Alexandre Aja remade The Hills Have Eyes last year for Fox, he told FilmStew that he thought the original today felt more iconic than scary. Although Craven certainly agrees with that assessment given the blood and gore threshold of today’s Saw’s and Hostel’s, he reminds everyone that 1977 movie audiences were positively freaking out when they saw the film.
Which brings Craven back to dad and the age-old challenge of a famous filmmaker or actor offspring growing up in the shadow of a family legend. “You’re looking at a guy who’s knocked out three one hundred million dollar plus movies,” Craven muses. “It’s like, why compare yourself? He’s a phenomenon of horror and I’m totally comfortable with that."
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