TALK about traumatic upbringings. Hey, kid, what’s your dad do? Oh, he scares the crap out of people.
Such was life for Jonathan Craven, son of Wes Craven, Hollywood’s Master of Horror. He grew up with a Swamp Thing in the pool, people under the stairs and Freddie Krueger lurking by the boiler in the basement.
“Oh, I grew up in a perfectly normal dungeon,” deadpans Jonathan, now 41 and seemingly unscarred from the experience. “Actually, my dad’s not a bloodthirsty maniac. He’s a civilized guy. He focuses his demons in his work.”
Credited with repeatedly reinventing the horror genre with classics such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the “Scream” series, for his latest project the Master of Horror brought son Jonathan on board to co-write the screenplay. “The Hills Have Eyes 2,” opening Friday, is the first-ever collaboration between father and son.
To crank out the script, they worked 30 days straight at two desks inside a suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A. They’d pound away at their respective keyboards and then read each other’s handiwork.
“Usually, I’d have an idea, send it over to him, and he’d turn it into a masterpiece,” says Jonathan, whose past screenwriting experience consisted of only one low-budget horror flick called “Mind Ripper,” in 1995.
“The Hills Have Eyes 2” is a quasi-remake of a film Wes directed in 1985. In that delightfully campy original, a Winnebago full of soon-to-be-dead racing enthusiasts breaks down on a deserted road while headed to a motocross race. The fun begins when ax-wielding mutants arrive from the hills.
For the effects-heavy sequel, produced by Wes but directed by young fright-maker Martin Weisz, an unsuspecting National Guard unit arriving at a nuclear-research facility is the mutant bait. As always, Craven pere followed his two bedrock criteria for crafting terror.
“One is, have I seen it before?” he says. “And two, would I go across town to see it? It’s not that I ever think of myself as reinventing horror. I just get an idea and think, that’s cool, it hasn’t been done.”
The family secret is that making horror to the Cravens is really just a joke.
Naive dopes getting murdered by mutants while stuck in a Port-o-Potty? That’s comedy to these guys.
Finding a murder victim’s wallet stuck in the ax wound in his head? Ha! Good one.
OK, it’s a darker humor than most.
“When we hear something that’s really horrible, we laugh,” says Jonathan. “Not in the news. I mean in writing. If I came up with a scenario so twisted it would actually make my dad chuckle, I knew I had something really good.”