Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 28, 2007 and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“I wasn’t around for the filming of The Hills Have Eyes,” says Jonathan Craven of the 1977 cult classic written and directed by his father Wes. “But I did get great letters from the set, saying things like, ‘Today we shot in the desert all day and lost a rattlesnake, and it took us two hours trying to find it, and we were all panicked that we were going to get bitten.’ ”
Three decades later, Craven jokes that “whenever I was let out of the basement, it was a very normal childhood” as he promotes the release of The Hills Have Eyes 2, Fox Atomic’s sequel to the 2006 Hills remake. While Wes, who co-produced both 21st-century adventures, left writing chores on the previous movie to its director Alexandre Aja and the latter’s creative partner Grégory Levasseur, he opted to script Hills 2 (helmed by German filmmaker Martin Weisz) himself with Jonathan. One might expect a father-and-son writing collaboration to have its rough patches, but the younger Craven says, “It was so civilized, you wouldn’t believe it. We were so focused on trying to get it done in the period of time we had. We were respectful of each other, and the way we did it was crucial: We worked at separate desks, and one of us would rough something out and pass it back to the other. It was the setup that brought about the least amount of conflicts. It never got ugly—and I wouldn’t lie about that, because it would make a funny story if it did!”
Craven has worked alongside his dad on several of the latter’s features; he had brief onscreen roles in Last House on the Left and Shocker, and worked in assorted behind-the-scenes capacities on the latter film, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Music of the Heart and the TV series Nightmare Café. In addition, Jonathan co-wrote and produced and Wes executive-produced 1995’s Mind Ripper, a chiller that began life as a second sequel to the 1977 Hills. In the end, though, “The desert location from The Hills Have Eyes was the one thing that carried over.” As for the reasons behind the project’s transition to an unrelated feature, “That’s a good question, and probably a very, very long story,” Craven says. “I think we just found we didn’t want to connect it to Hills, because we felt the final story didn’t have anything to do with it. The people who put up the money just wanted to do a stand-alone movie, and we all decided that it wasn’t really a Hills film.”
The new Hills Have Eyes 2 takes no cues from Wes’ own 1985 follow-up to his original film; instead of dirt bikers and a dog who has flashbacks, the protagonists are a group of freshly minted National Guardsman and -women who come under attack by the desert-dwelling mutants. Given this sequel’s military theme, it’s natural to expect that the political subtexts present in its predecessor would carry over. “We didn’t set out to do that,” Craven notes, “but Wes is a politically minded person, though as a filmmaker he strictly sets out to make entertainment. I don’t believe we set out to be political with Hills 2, but when you have American soldiers being killed by people who are popping out of holes and surprising them, it becomes insurgent-like, and we knew that at the time. We didn’t shy away from it; we were just telling a story and working to make something entertaining, and if it happened to make itself political, we are not unhappy with that.”
Nor were they any less explicit with the gore than the graphically visceral 2006 Hills. While sequels to extreme horror films have been particular targets for the MPAA—not willing to let the same degree of grue slip through the second time around—Craven promises that Hills 2 is “heavy—there are a lot of big, crazy kills, a lot of gore.” A birth scene previewed for the press at the recent New York Comic Con pushes the R to its absolute limits, though the writer declined to comment on the process that got the sequel to that rating.
An upcoming film that would seem a natural to court trouble with the ratings board is the Last House on the Left remake that Wes, his Midnight Pictures partner Marianne Maddalena and original Last House producer Sean S. Cunningham are developing for Rogue Pictures release. Neither a director nor a writer have been confirmed for this project, but Craven says, “Movies are being watched, scripts are being read, meetings are taking place. I don’t think anybody wants to rush that film, but it’s going to happen.”
As for whether a new incarnation of Last House, in which two teenage girls are raped and murdered by a gang of thugs who in turn suffer the vengeance of one of the victims’ parents, could carry the same intensity as its inspiration, Craven offers, “There are concerns along those lines, but while I can’t speak for Wes and Marianne and the other people who are involved, I believe they want to find a filmmaker who can write and direct, or a writer and a director to work in tandem, who can bring their own personality and take on the whole thing. So maybe it won’t be about one-upping the original in terms of the brutality; there might be a different approach instead. I think they want to decide on the filmmaker first, and let that person bring their notion of how it’s going to work.”
In the meantime, Craven, who acknowledges that “the things Wes and I come together on are the ones that tend to get a lot of press,” has a couple of his own irons in the fire. “I’m working on a screenplay idea right now that is horror, and I have a non-genre script that is out there bouncing around. But with my own genre thing, obviously, if [Wes and co.] want to produce it, I’m not going to say no, but it’s not intended to be a Midnight Pictures project.” And he says that he hasn’t felt any pressure in his own writing career of living up to his dad’s reputation. “You know, at a certain point, you look at a guy who has done Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, and created Freddy Krueger and knocked out three $100-million-plus-grossing Scream movies, and you’re like, why even compare yourself? He’s sort of a phenomenon of horror, and I’m totally comfortable with that; you don’t compare yourself to somebody like that. He’s had an incredible career, and I’m happy to do my own thing. I know I’ll always be compared with him and in the context of his work, and that’s OK.”
