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Horror is Their Business, and Business is Good
Actor Robert Englund says it’s “all cleavage, all the time” as Freddy Krueger takes on horror villain Jason Vorhees. He joins co-stars Monica Keena, Kelly Rowland and Jason Ritter in talking about Freddy vs. Jason.
Friday, August 15, 2003
By Larry Carroll
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What makes you scream? When you lie awake in bed, wondering what that noise was you just heard downstairs, how do you envision the specter that might be making his way towards your bedroom? If you were born in the mid-Seventies or later, there's a very good chance that you imagine death not as a cloaked skeleton holding a scythe, but rather a disfigured smartass with a razor-blade glove, or a silent hulking man wearing a hockey mask.
"Freddy Krueger traumatized me as a little kid," remembers Monica Keena, the innocent virgin in the new film Freddy vs. Jason. "In the second grade, I went to a friend's house and we snuck into the original Nightmare on Elm Street. I was absolutely terrified for a month, because I had never been allowed to watch movies like this. My mother had to take me to the pediatrician to figure out why I wasn't sleeping or eating."
All over the world, those who grew up in the final quarter of the twentieth century found spooks with names like Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers and Leatherface taking the place of the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, Wolf Man and Mummy who had inhabited the nightmares of their parents and grandparents. Despite low-budgets, bad acting and lousy reviews, those who loved a good scare couldn't stay away from the theaters, and so we received ten Friday the 13th movies, seven Nightmare on Elm Streets, eight Halloweens, and far too many imitations to count.
Jason Ritter, Keena's love interest in the film, thinks he knows why horror films have been so popular for so long. "People love to put themselves above these dumb characters,” she explains. “You know you would never walk into that room or go up those stairs, and that means you would be a survivor. You think it could never happen to you because you're smarter than all those people."
But what's it like to have to portray one of these lambs being led to the slaughter? In a recent sit-down interview, the two young actors shared their techniques. "You have to play these characters as if they're really suffering and running from things they're terrified of," Keena insists. "If you don't, it would seem ridiculous. You have to be careful not to be too campy, but at the same time keep things light enough that it's bearable to watch, even with all this blood and guts. These movies are popular because they let you walk on the wild side without ever really being in danger."
Pushing back her blond hair and flashing a flawless smile, Keena laughs. "I'd like to do a romantic comedy next," she says, "something where I'm not bloody and dirty and freezing all the time. But Patricia Arquette was in one of these movies, and so was Johnny Depp, Crispin Glover, even Kevin Bacon. Every actor has done movies like this in their past, and it's a good place to start."
The actress almost never had the chance. By the late 90s the genre seemed to be gasping for breath, having been parodied by the Scream series, watered down into the silliness of the Leprechaun and Chucky movies, and reduced to such attention-grabbing gimmickry as bringing back old characters, putting the action in 3-D, or sending the villain to Manhattan.
"I saw Freddy's Dead," Ritter remembers. "It was the first Nightmare I ever saw. I went with my Dad (John Ritter, of Three's Company fame) and we did the whole 3-D thing. It was really creepy at the time, but now the movie looks kind of ridiculous."
When you're talking about an empire built on gratuitous nudity, comical gore and invincible main characters, a certain amount of gimmickry is to be expected. But those are the rituals that we seek when we plop down ten bucks to see one of these movies - Freddy running around his furnace room, Jason watching the unsuspecting campers from behind a tree - and so while the audience might want something fresh, they want it to be familiar at the same time. This is why the concept behind Freddy vs. Jason is a stroke of pure genius.
"I'm pissed," says Robert Englund, the man who has been donning the famous fedora and striped sweater for twenty years. "When they've been promoting this movie, they give the stats of Freddy and Jason, and they list all our kills. I'm protesting the stats. They don't count all my dream kills, they just count reality kills, so of course Jason's going to win." Outside his costume, Englund seems like a laid-back guy, the type of bloke you'd run into while drinking beers at the beach. So it's all the funnier when he starts talking about Freddy's lack of respect. "I mean, come on, kills are kills. I've killed lots of people too."
Now Englund finally has the chance to set the record straight. After chasing down lots of panicky teenagers, the two monsters square off and determine once and for all who's tougher. "Jason's got the reach on me," Englund admits, "but the guy's gotta take a nap sometime, and then I'm in there."
This is the key to Freddy's appeal, says versus director Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky). "Freddy is scarier because he gets into your dreams, and how many people don't dream?"
Englund agrees: "We always knew we were on to something good. I'd like to take credit, most of it obviously rests with Wes (Craven, the creator of the Nightmare series), but the real thing isn't the character, it's the concept. The hook is the dream - the bad dream, the nightmare, the dreamscape. A nightmare that can kill you is such a great idea, and it's also international. Whether you live in Alaska or Zanzibar, you've had nightmares. I think that's the real reason Freddy has lasted so long."
But what about Jason? He's lasted even longer, been in more movies, killed more teenagers, and is so much easier to dress up as come Halloween time. Sean Cunningham, the director of the original Friday the 13th and producer of the last two films in the series, only has one thing to say about the Freddy fans: "They're a bunch of candy-asses."
Cunningham, a free-spirited man in a Hawaiian shirt who looks much younger than his sixty-two years, never met a joke he didn't like. But he knows that the fans of the two killers take their heroes very seriously. "Sure, some will be attracted to one and some will like the other, but they are very different,” he suggests. “When you're dealing with Jason, you're dealing with a fear of untimely and unwanted death - like a shark attack. He is a shark and he's looking around for his next meal. When he sees you, he doesn't care what you did this morning, or who you're sleeping with. He decides he's hungry, and you'd better hope you're not lunch."
| "Freddy is much more personal and verbal,” Cunningham continues. “He gets in your psyche and explores whatever your greatest weaknesses and fears are. Not surprisingly, if you're a Freddy fan you're a fan of those psychological things. These two killers speak to two different parts of our subconscious. And, yeah…Freddy fans are candy-asses as well."
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One Freddy fan that might not appreciate those sentiments is Kelly Rowland, a member of the music group Destiny's Child, who makes her film debut in Freddy vs. Jason. "This movie will reach a lot more people than any single concert," she says, "So this made me nervous." Rowland proudly counts herself among the Krueger devotees. "I'm a Freddy fan, because he's so humorous. Freddy is funny and he plays with your mind, and that's cool. He played with my mind all the time when I was a kid - I thought I'd sink through the stairs or something. So thanks a lot, Freddy, for making my life a living hell."
| All in a day's work, says Englund, who loves the way people react to his character. "When we were shooting the first Nightmare, me and Johnny Depp and a few guys in the crew got bored with the catering. We went across the street to a little Thai restaurant," he laughs. "They had just brought grandpa over on the boat, I guess, and he came out of the kitchen, with the door swinging, to see me in full costume sitting there, munching away and putting the last of the noodles into my Freddy mouth. Well, he just lost it."
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Englund loves to tell stories about dressing up as Freddy and freaking people out, like the time that his agent talked him into scaring his fiancée while she washed her dishes ("she practically severed her arteries dropping all those glasses"), or a lewd tale about the time a hooker mistook him for a customer ("Let me tell ya, I cured her of prostitution. She is no longer in the world's oldest profession."). Englund, like Cunningham, gleefully revels in his sick sense of humor. It's an asset one needs to survive three decades of low-budget horror filmmaking.
| "It's not easy," Englund confesses when asked about what he goes through to become Freddy-fied. "I'm a surfer, so I always do my own water stunts. They triple glued my face onto me, but they didn't get the glue ratio right," he winces. "They were so worried about me leaking that the molds were too heavily applied. For the first two weeks, every time we were done shooting I couldn't get it off. They would scrub and scrub and finally get this glue off. My skin was all raw and they had to put the makeup back the next day."
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It was worse for Jason, Englund says. "Ken (Kirzinger, who plays the man in the hockey mask) had no peripheral vision. He was like a horse with blinders on, plus the mask, plus all the strange padding he had." Even those who weren't doing any killing, England says, had it pretty tough. "It was freezing cold when we filmed in Vancouver," Englund recalls. "Most of it was at night, it was freezing cold, nasty cold. But I had my sweater on, sometimes a wetsuit underneath it. Monica and these other girls had to run around at this freezing lake - all cleavage, all the time."
Ah yes, the cleavage. Without it, no horror movie would be complete. "It's all in the name of horror films," Rowland reasons. "It's been happening for twenty years now, and what could be changed? If an actress wants to do it, then that's her business. That's not me, though."
| Although some actresses do appear topless in Freddy vs. Jason, the two lead actresses managed to avoid it. "I understand that the nudity is part of this whole genre and the history of it," says Keena. "I would have been opposed to it, both personally and because it would have been inappropriate for my character."
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But Rowland understands why it's so necessary to the fans. "My brother was a part of that audience: 'Yo, man, she's about to take her top off!" she laughs. "When he found out I was going to be in this movie, this was the order of the questions: 'What's your character like? Do you get killed? Do you have to take your clothes off? Are there any other naked women in the movie?' I was like, Aren't you getting married?"
Just the thought of taking off their shirts in one of these movies, it would seem, is enough to make these actresses panicky. But what really makes the cast of Freddy vs. Jason scream?
"I'm scared to death of spiders,” says Rowland. "If a spider walked into this room right now, I'd leave. I'd let the spider have the room because I don't want to even share the same space as them."
| Englund has a different answer: "Gary Busey. I still surf, and I keep getting invited to these events. I've missed all these great Big Wednesday (a surfing film he starred in with the deranged star) reunions they've been having. Hopefully I'll make one soon, but I'm a little afraid I'll run into Busey!"
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Hmmm…the star of TV's I'm with Busey strikes fear in Freddy Krueger? Perhaps the winner of the Jason/Freddy grudge match could take him on in a steel cage? Or maybe there are some other contestants out there?
"Chucky," Ronny Yu says, remembering his former leading man. "Wow, that's a good idea. Chucky could fight Jason and Freddy."
"I don't even know if there are plans for the sequel," Jason Ritter insists, "but Michael Myers would be a good one for them to face, whoever the winner is. That could be fun."
"No, not Michael Myers," replies Cunningham. "Xena. Xena and Gabrielle versus Freddy and Jason. Place your bets now."
Ritter likes that movie possibility, but he's got one that could top it. "Freddy versus Shrek," he laughs. "Now there's an idea."
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