““Scream 2” follows Sidney (Neve Campbell) to college. It seems a cult movie about her travails in ““Scream,” called ““Stab,” has inspired copycat murders. ““Scream 2” is not as streamlined as the original, and the killer (or killers) seems to have been picked out of a hat. But it’s still a hell of a fun movie–a thrilling marriage of Zeitgeisty satire and timeless scare tactics. Sidney’s movie-buff buddies say sequels suck. Not this one. Craven may be poised to have the biggest hit of a career he never really wanted. Excerpts from an interview:
NEWSWEEK: Your parents were morally opposed to movies.
CRAVEN: They really believed that the bulk of material coming out of Hollywood was too sexual, too violent and too anti-Christian for their children to see. Very, very few people in our church went to the theaters.
Did making movies alienate you from them?
It was all part of a major break I had made. I came to New York and started making [1972’s] ““Last House on the Left” at about the same time I got divorced. And that was a real tragedy to my mother. I had been a college professor with a wife and tw o kids, and suddenly I was divorced and making movies that–with the exception of Roger Ebert’s reviews–were reviled. I mean, just reviled. So there was this shocked distancing that happened. I went through quite a few years where I didn’t talk to my fa mily more than once or twice a year.
Did they see your movies?
My mother’s approaching 90, and I don’t think she’s gone to the movies since she was a girl. She’s never seen anything I’ve done. She started to get kind of proud of me when I started to work on television. But she still said, ““Well, why do you al ways do these horrible subjects?” It’s a valid question, and I don’t have a pat answer for it. But there was stuff I needed to work out. And I don’t know if it was rage from a youth that was so oppressed.
You made ““Last House” during Vietnam.
Yes, we were all living in New York, making cinema for 10 cents, living communally and experimenting with drugs and everything else. ““Last House” was my perception of what violence was really like. When I’d been teaching, there was a lot of footag e from Vietnam that wasn’t being shown on television but was being circulated around. So I had a keen understanding of what that level of violence looked like. On television, they obviously cut away when there’s any sort of killing. But in real life, peo ple get stabbed and they scream and beg you not to stab them again and so forth.
A lot of young stars–particularly males–must want to die campy deaths.
That is always a danger with actors that are not comfortable going to the darker places. Women generally know a lot about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of violence–or they can sense it–and you don’t have to coach them much. And as far as dishing it out, I think women have a lot of rage there that’s not that difficult to tap–rage about being a woman in a culture that quite often exploits women and treats them as second-class citizens.
It seems like you’ve had serious regrets about making only horror movies.
I am profoundly ambivalent. When I think about it in the most positive way, I say, ““For whatever reasons, you have a real gift for this, and you’re exploring a certain dark territory that is as valid as anything else.”
What do you say on your dark days?
On my dark days I say, ““I’ve been too long in the darkness.” I didn’t have the courage –or the art–to make a small film about growing up fundamentalist and to somehow deal with the pain it would cause my mother. But now Miramax is trusting me wi th a totally nongenre film next. It’s not going to have a huge budget, but it will be the little film that I could have–or should have–made 20 years ago. And if I fall on my face, I can still say on my dying day, ““Well, at least I did it.”
