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00:00:28There's nothing I like more than going into a movie and seeing somebody get their head ripped off.
00:00:33¶¶
00:00:37That was cool.
00:00:38It's like a really rare map to a very dark forest.
00:00:42¶¶
00:00:45Kill her, mommy.
00:00:47¶¶
00:00:50I'm a 13-year-old transvestite killer.
00:00:53There's something inherently sexual in every slasher movie.
00:00:55¶¶
00:00:57Only good-looking people can get away with murder.
00:00:59¶¶
00:01:03Jesus called me despicable.
00:01:05The worst of this disgusting bunch.
00:01:07¶¶
00:01:11If you don't like the genre, boo-hoo.
00:01:13I go to strange places and I kill people.
00:01:15Now that's what makes horror films.
00:01:17¶¶
00:01:18And it'll always be with us.
00:01:20¶¶
00:01:41Mankind's appetite for violence is as old as mankind itself.
00:01:46The truth of the matter is there's a bloodlust in all of us.
00:01:49The first sign they look for as far as human habitation in the landscape,
00:01:53which are going back, like, 20,000 years,
00:01:55is are there rocks that were made into edged weapons?
00:01:58That's one of the basic solutions to opening kind of the integument,
00:02:02the shell of some other living thing.
00:02:04Earlier forms of art depict that in all of its grotesqueness.
00:02:08We have a reptile brain way down inside,
00:02:11and that brain is cold-blooded, that part of the brain,
00:02:15and it kills, and it doesn't care.
00:02:17Animals kill each other in order to eat,
00:02:19and humans have always killed each other.
00:02:21Horror has been around forever.
00:02:23Certainly, you go back, like, 5,000 years with The Odyssey,
00:02:26and it's full of monsters, as I call them.
00:02:28The ancient Romans, you know,
00:02:29the thrill of watching people torn apart by animals.
00:02:31I mean, they would gather in mass to see something like that.
00:02:35What was that fulfilling? What was that catering to?
00:02:38They're human.
00:02:40There are hunters among us that hunt other humans for their own gratification.
00:02:44The darkness is in the human soul.
00:02:46Yo-yo! Yo-yo!
00:02:50Yo-yo! Yo-yo!
00:02:54Yo-yo! Yo-yo!
00:02:57Kids being eaten and so on.
00:02:59It's been going on for centuries.
00:03:01In the spring of 1897,
00:03:03man's taste for the macabre found a new level of splendor
00:03:07with the Paris opening of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol.
00:03:10And for the next 60 years,
00:03:12the original theatre of horror brought scenes of rape, torture,
00:03:16and grotesque violent stunts to a voyeuristic live audience.
00:03:20Thousands and thousands of plays, you know, were written
00:03:24and were very popular.
00:03:26Just eye-gouging and, you know, faces in fire
00:03:29and burning at the stake and arrows through the...
00:03:32You know, there was something about wanting to see that happen to people.
00:03:36With the increasing numbers of modern cinemas,
00:03:39the Grand Guignol closed its doors forever in 1962
00:03:43after giving birth almost accidentally to a new genre.
00:03:47Perhaps it is no coincidence, and somehow fitting,
00:03:50that just two years earlier,
00:03:52two of Britain's most talented filmmakers
00:03:54had laid the foundations for the contemporary slasher film.
00:04:00Michael Powell's Peeping Tom,
00:04:02a sympathetic portrayal of a voyeuristic murderer,
00:04:05horrified audiences and critics alike
00:04:08who failed to note the film's intelligent treatment of the subject.
00:04:12It would be 20 years before the film was finally hailed
00:04:15a classic example of British cinema,
00:04:18though it came far too late for Powell's career,
00:04:21which effectively came to an end
00:04:23with Peeping Tom's 1960 release.
00:04:27That same year, however,
00:04:29the genius of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
00:04:32whet the appetite of the American audiences.
00:04:35The cause of the American culture had changed.
00:04:40We had Ed Gein, who had murdered a lot of people.
00:04:44I had no idea that Block had written his book about a real person.
00:04:49I read it and I thought,
00:04:52this is a strange thing for Hitchcock to do.
00:04:55He just sat there like this, you know,
00:04:57with his hands on his belly,
00:05:00and never moved, never blinked,
00:05:04never said a word.
00:05:06When I got to the point where she gets killed while she's in the shower,
00:05:10he said,
00:05:13we could get a star.
00:05:23The thing about that movie is,
00:05:25as scary as it is, as scary as it was,
00:05:27the difference between that and what came later, there's no blood.
00:05:30Horror movies changed after Psycho.
00:05:32It was kind of the granddaddy of all these films.
00:05:34Later, you see films that really nail you to the back of the theater.
00:05:53But it wasn't until 1978
00:05:55when the genre crescendoed into that one perfect note.
00:06:03Halloween night.
00:06:06A small American town.
00:06:0915 years ago.
00:06:33Michael.
00:06:38Halloween.
00:06:40One of the things that I noticed that happened earlier
00:06:43was this Jim Jones business.
00:06:46This religious leader, he had all his followers,
00:06:49and they took Kool-Aid and died,
00:06:51and there was this kind of bizarre feeling in the country
00:06:54that things weren't quite right.
00:06:57Carter was our president.
00:06:59He was an unpopular leader.
00:07:01I don't think Halloween came around at the time.
00:07:03People just wanted to have a safe scare.
00:07:0678 was the right time.
00:07:13Oh, my God!
00:07:15Tommy!
00:07:17Tommy, it's me!
00:07:19Halloween.
00:07:20Now, Debra and I worked together for many, many, many years.
00:07:23She worked on screenplays with me and produced for me.
00:07:26Erwin Yablons actually came up with the idea of setting it in Halloween,
00:07:29and we were searching for a story.
00:07:31You know, what could the story be?
00:07:33Because we were very limited.
00:07:35In fact, they wanted babysitters,
00:07:37and I'd been a babysitter, and I had all these great stories.
00:07:40They went out to London to meet with my father,
00:07:43and it was actually a very quick meeting.
00:07:45It was a quick sell.
00:07:47John really impressed him.
00:07:49Told him that he would take no money,
00:07:51that he would do it for very cheap.
00:07:53I think you know it was $300,000 they ended up doing it for.
00:07:56John would direct, produce, write, do the score.
00:07:59I grew up watching horror movies,
00:08:01and when I made Halloween, I just took all the lessons
00:08:04that I learned from what I had seen
00:08:06and what I'd love to see on the screen.
00:08:08We were just trying to make a movie, man.
00:08:11We had very little money.
00:08:13We had Donald Pleasance for 3 days.
00:08:15I spent 8 years trying to reach him,
00:08:18and then another 7 trying to keep him locked up
00:08:21because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes
00:08:24was truly and simply evil.
00:08:26Somebody's escaped from the mental institution,
00:08:29and he's on the loose.
00:08:41I consider the film to be a perfect film.
00:08:43Michael Myers is the hand of God, he's a force of nature.
00:08:46Look back on it, it's still considered
00:08:48one of the scariest films of all time.
00:08:50It is, at the end of the day, very light on gore.
00:08:53There's maybe one scene where a character's
00:08:55pinned against a cabinet in the kitchen,
00:08:58and you see the knife sticking out,
00:09:00and it's all about Michael Myers
00:09:03sort of looking quizzically at this dead body.
00:09:06Scariest moments come with the tilt of a head
00:09:09or come with that great John Carpenter 2-3-5 scope format.
00:09:13We made it with widescreen, Panavision,
00:09:16and tried to make it as elegant as possible.
00:09:19But the crucial central performance
00:09:21is really Curtis' performance.
00:09:23It's brilliant. She looks like a human being.
00:09:26She creates a true character
00:09:28that the audience very strongly identifies with.
00:09:30Deborah thought it would be a great idea to cast her,
00:09:33plus the fact that she was Janet Leigh's daughter,
00:09:35which kind of connected back to Psycho.
00:09:37On Halloween night, it's when people play tricks on each other.
00:09:40It's all make-believe, I think Ritchie was just trying to scare you.
00:09:43Didn't matter if you lived in Poughkeepsie,
00:09:45didn't matter if you lived in Detroit,
00:09:47didn't matter if you lived in Los Angeles,
00:09:49didn't matter if you were babysitters at one point or another,
00:09:52everyone can relate to the terror of being faced
00:09:55with that faceless white mask.
00:09:57You can't kill the boogeyman.
00:09:59Screams
00:10:01The thing I did to try to kick it up in the air
00:10:04was to make the protagonist unkillable.
00:10:06I think people underrate this to this day,
00:10:08how effective the ending of that film was.
00:10:11gunshots
00:10:15gunshot
00:10:19The idea of leaving it open-ended
00:10:21and that Michael Myers was still out there when you left the theater
00:10:25so that even people when they were walking up
00:10:27putting the keys in their house would stop and go...
00:10:33Halloween was released in a regional release.
00:10:35In other words, the distributor wasn't big enough to do it nationwide,
00:10:39so it went from region to region.
00:10:41It was one of those underground films
00:10:43that really was not reviewed very well.
00:10:45All the reviews that we had on Halloween were negative.
00:10:48But the review in Village Voice was all of a sudden a positive review,
00:10:52and it said this movie has something more to it.
00:10:54And it began to pick up because of word of mouth.
00:10:58So it gave me a little credibility.
00:11:00It was just a really scary horror film
00:11:03that is considered a slasher film
00:11:05because it was very real and there was slashing in it.
00:11:08It's always like the thing that exists
00:11:10before the name gets put on it
00:11:12would be Halloween, I guess.
00:11:14The single guy with a knife chasing teenagers.
00:11:16It's a classic which spawned many afterwards,
00:11:19the way Star Wars or American Graffiti or Indiana Jones are.
00:11:23It's a template in the horror genre, so that makes it a classic.
00:11:26Any time a story has truly terrified us historically,
00:11:30it becomes history.
00:11:32Halloween is history.
00:11:34That it made a fortune that turned Hollywood on its butt.
00:11:43HALLOWEEN
00:11:49Now, Friday the 13th is a film that's fully aware
00:11:51it's come after Halloween.
00:11:53You're going to Camp Blood, ain't ya?
00:11:55The difference between that and Friday
00:11:57was the Friday guy said,
00:11:59we're going to let it rip where these other guys didn't.
00:12:01Never come back again?
00:12:03Well, shut up, Ralph.
00:12:05It's got a death curse.
00:12:08We run this ad in Variety.
00:12:10It says, Friday the 13th, the most terrifying film ever made.
00:12:13The point of the ad was to see if anybody was going to sue us
00:12:16and if we could actually use the title, Friday the 13th.
00:12:19But as it turns out, not only did we not get sued,
00:12:22but we got phone calls from distributors saying,
00:12:24we'd love to see this film. What is it? When can we see it?
00:12:27We didn't even have a script.
00:12:29So I have this ad and I have some money lined up
00:12:31and I have these guys in Boston that have decided
00:12:33that they want a bigger piece of the action
00:12:35and they want to put up all the money.
00:12:37I had a history with these guys and I just felt
00:12:39it was too much of an edge.
00:12:41At some point you have to draw the line and say,
00:12:43no, what you're offering is very nice,
00:12:45but I don't want to do the deal.
00:12:47Well, then they said, all right, and they hung up
00:12:49and I said, gee, that's too bad.
00:12:51And I looked around, you know, and I've got 2 kids
00:12:53and I've got a wife and I've got this whole army of people
00:12:56that have been working on this thing for a long time.
00:12:58I had sort of had a sleepless night,
00:13:00and that morning I woke up early around 5 o'clock
00:13:02and I picked up the phone and I called this guy at home
00:13:05and I said, you know, I've thought about it overnight
00:13:08and I'll do the deal.
00:13:10And he said, oh, I'm glad you called
00:13:12because I was just leaving, I was on my way to Weymouth
00:13:15and I was going to take that money and put it in a shopping center.
00:13:18If indeed I had slept late that morning,
00:13:20it's quite likely the movie would never have happened.
00:13:22Hey, wasn't that the road up for Camp Crystal Lake back there?
00:13:25It's really sort of the first one
00:13:28that was excessively gory and gratuitous.
00:13:35I'm close friends with Sean Cunningham
00:13:37and his feeling was, forget all the social comment
00:13:39and everything else, let's just be so outrageous
00:13:42that people won't be able to believe what they're seeing.
00:13:45So he went for that sort of arrow through the eyeball thing
00:13:48which was in its own way strangely subversive.
00:13:51I've got this idea for a movie
00:13:53and it's going to have some special effects in it.
00:13:55We don't quite know how we're going to do it
00:13:57and where we're going to do it, and we need somebody.
00:14:00And I think one of us had seen Dawn of the Dead.
00:14:03Let's find out who did the effects on that.
00:14:05We found somebody and found Tom Savini, this madman,
00:14:09this guy with just explosive energy
00:14:12and laughing eyes and a chinchilla
00:14:14and a car full of stuff arrives in the driveway
00:14:17a day or two later and sort of bounds out
00:14:20and starts talking about how great this could be.
00:14:22It's almost like a Romero film.
00:14:24Romero, before he starts a film, he calls me and he says,
00:14:27start thinking of ways to kill people.
00:14:29And we invited him to work on the picture
00:14:31and he just never went home.
00:14:33We were on this conference table
00:14:35chatting about how to kill these teenagers.
00:14:38The simplest one I can think of, the hatchet gag.
00:14:44I think my favorite gag was probably the Kevin Bacon gag
00:14:47where the arrow comes up out of the neck.
00:14:49When it cuts from the real Kevin Bacon
00:14:52to him lying there with the wife beater
00:14:55and necklace on the dummy, you don't make a separation,
00:14:58you're just following right along,
00:15:00so the arrow coming out was a big surprise.
00:15:02The hand comes first, and then I'm pushing the arrow
00:15:05through the rubber dummy inside of an ice bag
00:15:08that's filled with blood, and the actual pressure
00:15:11of pushing the arrow against the ice bag
00:15:13forced the blood to come out.
00:15:15Plus I got to spin the arrow a bit, twist it.
00:15:18And the audience had never seen anything like that before.
00:15:21Well, I'm Mrs. Voorhees.
00:15:23I've always approached a character
00:15:25with doing an autobiography.
00:15:27I can tell you this story about why Mrs. Voorhees
00:15:30is the way she is.
00:15:32One place in the script, there is a hand
00:15:35that has a high school ring on it,
00:15:38a male's high school ring.
00:15:40And we girls always wore the boys' class ring.
00:15:43You went steady, but you didn't have a sexual relationship
00:15:46with the guy that you were in love with.
00:15:48They did make love, and she became pregnant.
00:15:51She told him, he said,
00:15:53Oh, don't brush it all on me.
00:15:55Well, her father has a fit.
00:15:58You're a tramp, you have no business
00:16:00being a part of this family.
00:16:02Leave, get out, get out, so she leaves.
00:16:04She went to the Salvation Army,
00:16:06and that she had the baby there.
00:16:09And the night I came up, and when Tommy Savini
00:16:12was making the mock-up of my head,
00:16:14he was showing me some Polaroid pictures.
00:16:17And I said, Well, who's this?
00:16:19And he said, Oh, that's your son, Jason.
00:16:22I said, Oh.
00:16:24And I said, Well, why does he look so strange?
00:16:27And he said, Well, he's a mongoloid.
00:16:29I said, He's what?
00:16:31And she takes this job at this camp
00:16:33so he can be with other children,
00:16:35and all the counselors are there, and they're off making love.
00:16:38Somewhere her little boy was swimming with the other campers.
00:16:41The kid drowns.
00:16:43Mrs. Voorhees is the perfect mother.
00:16:46Not only will she kill for her son, she'll die for him.
00:16:50¶¶
00:16:53How could you chop off somebody's head on camera?
00:16:56So having never done it, I couldn't figure out,
00:16:58I wanted it to happen right in front of you.
00:17:00I wanted you to see the machete,
00:17:02and see the head come loose and go.
00:17:04And we actually fastened her rubber head
00:17:06to the rubber body that Tassa wore on his shoulders
00:17:09with toothpicks.
00:17:11That's the only way I can think of
00:17:13that a machete would cut through those toothpicks,
00:17:15and I wanted the head to flip when it got cut too.
00:17:18So I actually swung the machete, hit the right spot,
00:17:21and the toothpicks let go of the head and it flipped in the air.
00:17:25When the head comes off and Betsy Palmer reaches up
00:17:28and grasps with a missing head,
00:17:30that there's hair on the knuckles
00:17:32because it's my friend Tasso Stavrakas, this Greek man,
00:17:35and it's his hands coming up in the frame.
00:17:37I think the secret that has happened
00:17:39with Friday the 13th, number one,
00:17:41is that you don't,
00:17:43you don't really see the killer killing.
00:17:46It's all that wonderful ha-ha-ha, ch-ch-ch.
00:17:50And there was a close-up of Betsy Palmer's mouth,
00:17:53and obviously she was a person who heard voices.
00:17:55She had voices in her head, and she heard Jason saying...
00:17:58Kill her, Mommy. Kill her.
00:18:02And only took the K and put an I there, so it was kuh.
00:18:06And then Mommy, which was ma.
00:18:09And I went to a microphone,
00:18:12had something called an echoplex,
00:18:14it just went kuh, ma, like that.
00:18:17And the echoplex would go ch-ch-ch, ma.
00:18:22There was no ending in the script,
00:18:25so I had just seen Carrie.
00:18:27In Carrie, at the end, you think the movie's over,
00:18:29the music is coming up like the credits are going to roll,
00:18:32and all of a sudden the hand comes out of the grave.
00:18:35Well, that really jolted us.
00:18:37Wouldn't it be cool if we had that kind of a moment
00:18:39at the end of Friday the 13th, but what could it be?
00:18:42I suggested that we bring Jason back.
00:18:44Maybe he jumps out of the lake or something.
00:18:46What? But it'd be cool to have a moment.
00:18:49Harry Manfredini starts playing this beautiful end title music.
00:18:54The object of the ending was to tell the audience,
00:18:59well, this movie is over.
00:19:01And we're seeing the girl on the lake,
00:19:03and you realize, oh, she's going to be okay.
00:19:06screaming
00:19:11When Jason came out of the water, popcorn was flying,
00:19:15people were jumping out of seats
00:19:17and screaming and yelling, and Sean was just like,
00:19:20I got him, I got him, I got him.
00:19:22I think that that moment, that boo moment,
00:19:26is one of the reasons why the film ultimately was so successful
00:19:29because it just said, we're having fun, are you?
00:19:33And everybody said, oh, yeah, man, we're having fun.
00:19:36And they left with that, they left on a high.
00:19:38And suddenly Paramount and Warner Bros.
00:19:40started bidding against each other.
00:19:42We decide that we're going to go with Frank Mancuso,
00:19:45who was head of distribution at Paramount at the time.
00:19:48And what he wanted to do was something completely different.
00:19:51He wanted to open it nationally.
00:19:53You had a major studio behind a low-rent slasher film
00:19:57for the first time.
00:19:59And the picture was an enormous success from day one.
00:20:01Everyone was talking about it in the schoolyard,
00:20:04talking about all the gruesome murders,
00:20:06and that made everyone want to run back the next weekend
00:20:10to see it either again or for the first time
00:20:12to see what everyone was talking about.
00:20:14I am still in awe that it has become what it has become.
00:20:18I never realized at the beginning that I would get enough money
00:20:22to be able to buy a place like this and call it my own.
00:20:25Paramount made $40 million with Friday the 13th.
00:20:36I'm going to the prom!
00:20:39Tell me you really love me
00:20:42Jamie Lee Curtis' manager came to us
00:20:44and really made a plea for his client to have it,
00:20:46and I couldn't get over it the day he called
00:20:48because I'm thinking, it's Jamie Lee Curtis, she was in Halloween.
00:20:51I mean, she's done this, why, why?
00:20:53So when she wanted to do it, I then had to go back to the producer
00:20:56who I'd been building up for this TV movie actress and say,
00:20:59forget her, let's get Jamie.
00:21:01And quite honestly, I've always said since the movie opened
00:21:04that Jamie Lee was 75% of the success of that movie.
00:21:07Not because kids appreciated it and liked it,
00:21:09and as good a suspenser as it was, it was Jamie Lee.
00:21:13Prom Night was conceived as more of a thriller than a horror film,
00:21:16and so it needed twists and turns.
00:21:18In order to achieve that,
00:21:20we took the route of the brother being the killer.
00:21:25Come on, they don't want you in their game.
00:21:30Kim's youngest sister is chased through a building
00:21:33by a group of her fellow kids.
00:21:35He sees them terrorize the sister,
00:21:37but before he can do anything, the young girl falls out a window.
00:21:41He sees her crash to her death.
00:21:43Later, when the police come and everything, he's taken back home,
00:21:46but he's always held it in him.
00:21:48Finally, on the night of the prom,
00:21:50he decides it's time to get revenge and make these kids pay.
00:22:06I think it's a good movie.
00:22:08Well, Paramount did too, as it turned out.
00:22:10They talked to the producers seriously about distributing it.
00:22:13The producer talked to a couple of other studios,
00:22:15one which was Avco Embassy, that really wanted it badly.
00:22:18They made a much better deal with Peter, the producer,
00:22:21than Paramount was willing to do, particularly on the back end.
00:22:24Paramount, seeing, I guess, the potential in this,
00:22:27went looking for a film of their own
00:22:29and came up with Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th.
00:22:33The big difference between the two films
00:22:35was that Paramount could afford to put out 1,200 prints on Friday the 13th,
00:22:39and we did 300 at Avco and bicycled them back and forth,
00:22:42so we didn't do quite as well, but I must say we did great.
00:22:46Hollywood took notice of the financial success of Halloween,
00:22:49Friday the 13th, and prom night,
00:22:52and with audiences eager to spend their money,
00:22:55a slew of slasher films were born.
00:22:58Anybody that gets in at the beginning
00:23:00with a good film of the cycle, be it horror, be it slasher,
00:23:04has a good chance of succeeding.
00:23:08And this inspired guys to think, well, he can make a film,
00:23:11it doesn't have to cost a lot of money,
00:23:13and he can get it before thousands of movie screens
00:23:16and probably make a lot of money.
00:23:18I got a call from the producer, or at least investor,
00:23:21and I went to a penthouse-y kind of apartment,
00:23:24and he was, like, laying on a couch.
00:23:26All he had on was boxer shorts.
00:23:28He had white boxer shorts open in the front, OK?
00:23:31And he was laying on the couch.
00:23:33He was an old guy with long gray hair,
00:23:35looked like Howard Hughes in the last moments.
00:23:37He just thought this would be a really good movie.
00:23:40SCREAMING
00:23:54SCREAMING
00:23:59We came up with this idea, which we pitched to these two producers,
00:24:03Edgar Lansbury and Joe Baruch.
00:24:05I described the fact that the girl gets out of the car
00:24:08and walks around, finds him hanging upside down from a tree
00:24:11with his throat slit and his ring is tapping against the window,
00:24:14and she screams, and the guy with the hook comes out and starts chasing her.
00:24:18And they're still not impressed.
00:24:20So then I said, we pull back, and we're in a theatre,
00:24:24and we're watching this on the screen,
00:24:26and the real killer's in the theatre,
00:24:28and he's going to kill somebody in there.
00:24:30And they went, oh, wow, that's good.
00:24:32When MGM bought the movie,
00:24:34they brought on a publicist named Ira Teller
00:24:37who decided to do a whole campaign,
00:24:39design the campaign for the film.
00:24:41And he called me one day and he says,
00:24:43I came up with a title for your film,
00:24:45and I was excited, I was expecting something really brilliant.
00:24:48And he says, he knows you're alone.
00:24:50And I went, hmm.
00:24:52And I thought, wow, isn't that, like, a tagline?
00:24:56By the end of 1980,
00:24:58the slasher genre was firmly established
00:25:01with a clear blueprint to follow.
00:25:03The formula being teenagers being threatened by a guy in a mask
00:25:08or a killer of some sort, usually with a knife that slashes.
00:25:19The boogeyman is the faceless, unstoppable killer
00:25:24that no matter what you do, you will not escape.
00:25:29All the dark things that you're afraid of,
00:25:31you get behind those masks
00:25:33and behind that darkness that it comes out of.
00:25:35And you know it is stronger than you.
00:25:39We usually see him from a point-of-view shot,
00:25:41POV shot, right from the start.
00:25:50You know from the genre,
00:25:52it's not going to be easy to outsmart the thing.
00:26:06They want to have been in that place.
00:26:08So whether it is a high school in prom night
00:26:11or a suburb in Halloween,
00:26:14they know it.
00:26:16And therefore, the terror, whatever it may be,
00:26:18whether it is from their own family,
00:26:20whether it is an outside terror, whatever,
00:26:22can prey upon them in an environment they know and they feel safe in.
00:26:32The final girl in these little morality tales
00:26:34is the person who has embodied the moral code
00:26:38that society thinks allows you to go forward in life.
00:26:51SCREAMING
00:27:01It's the virtuous, the virginal one,
00:27:03who's the final girl at the end.
00:27:05It's up to her to defeat the evil.
00:27:20SCREAMING
00:27:31Something that triggers a series of killings.
00:27:34Did you know that a young boy drowned
00:27:36the year before those two others were killed?
00:27:39He's got some kind of twisted backstory.
00:27:41Kiss me.
00:27:46Kiss me.
00:27:51SCREAMING
00:28:08Doc, we heard it.
00:28:10What are you talking about?
00:28:12Kenny Hampson. You're stunned with the corpse?
00:28:15Nobody do that for a goddamn prank.
00:28:17It wasn't just a prank.
00:28:19Doc, he was sick.
00:28:25I'm so sorry.
00:28:27You haven't changed.
00:28:33How does he kill? What does he do?
00:28:35Does he strangle people? Does he talk them to death?
00:28:37Does he tell them jokes?
00:28:39And it's never a gun, right?
00:28:41I mean, sure, wouldn't the movie be over after the first frame?
00:28:43Eight kids, bing, bing, bing, eight times, they're gone.
00:28:46It's more fun to terrorize them
00:28:48and, you know, hit them with a spear or a loose or an umbrella
00:28:51or like a screwdriver.
00:28:53That's where the excitement comes from.
00:28:55How is the next one going to get it?
00:28:57And you look forward to that.
00:28:59So that's part of it. It has to have that
00:29:01if we're talking about what a slasher movie is.
00:29:15You have all these elements,
00:29:17that core audience knows
00:29:19when they go to see a slasher film
00:29:21that conventions are going to be there,
00:29:23they're going to feel familiar to them,
00:29:25and they're going to enjoy themselves.
00:29:27In need of new ways to shock their devotees,
00:29:30filmmakers turned to Italian cinema for inspiration.
00:29:47Friday the 13th Part II had taken, you know, some of that,
00:29:52and it's completely, you know, understandable.
00:29:56These are amazing horror movies, and who hasn't stolen?
00:30:04Bava is definitely the godfather of Italian cinema,
00:30:07of horror cinema, absolutely.
00:30:09I mean, you know, it's like,
00:30:11you know, it's like, you know,
00:30:13Bava is definitely the godfather of Italian cinema,
00:30:16of horror cinema, absolutely.
00:30:18I mean, the films are just, you know,
00:30:20they come off the screen at you
00:30:22as though you're on a canvas,
00:30:24you know, the paint being thrown at you.
00:30:36I just absolutely love Dario Argento's visuals,
00:30:40the acting, the look of the characters,
00:30:43and Suspiria is just one of my favourite films.
00:30:47All of those films that basically not only celebrated blood
00:30:51and celebrated gore,
00:30:53made it, in a weird way, part of the artistic palette.
00:31:04It went through this wave of Halloween
00:31:07where we didn't see a lot of graphic blood and gore,
00:31:10through Friday the 13th,
00:31:12and then the beginning of the slasher era.
00:31:18Up in Canada, it was sort of like slasher central
00:31:21because of the tax lords.
00:31:23They were able to do these films cheaper,
00:31:26and they were, like, instantly profitable
00:31:28before the films even came out, it seemed.
00:31:30They probably opened up the calendar
00:31:32and tried to find a holiday or date to exploit.
00:31:36From the heart comes a warning
00:31:39filled with bloody good cheer.
00:31:41Remember what happened
00:31:43as the 14th draws near.
00:31:46Now, we started thinking about which kind of character
00:31:49can be a killer that can be masked.
00:31:52So we started looking at crafts,
00:31:54and we ended up with a miner.
00:31:56A miner has got a helmet on,
00:31:58he's got a breathing apparatus,
00:32:00he's got a pick.
00:32:06My Bloody Valentine is one of the more vicious
00:32:10of the slasher films from this period.
00:32:12It's pretty gory, it's nasty and mean-spirited,
00:32:16and that film took no prisoners.
00:32:19We'd been dealing with Paramount,
00:32:21so they came down and we showed them the film.
00:32:24They went out of the screening room in shock.
00:32:27Frank said, we're not taking this film
00:32:29unless you get an MPAA rating,
00:32:31but it's up to you to decide
00:32:34Jack Valenti hated the idea of major studios
00:32:38being involved in slasher films,
00:32:40and he wanted to punish Paramount,
00:32:42and he also wanted to punish us
00:32:44as Canadian carpetbaggers
00:32:46who were coming down to the U.S.
00:32:48to cash in on this genre.
00:32:50Despite the R rating,
00:32:52Valentine went on to become a slashing success.
00:32:55Again, we looked in the calendar,
00:32:57and we couldn't find anything
00:32:59that would do for a horror film, a slasher.
00:33:02My birthday's Sunday,
00:33:03and I'd like to invite you to dinner.
00:33:05So we said, okay, let's do it on birthday.
00:33:08We needed a girl lead,
00:33:10and we focused in on Melissa Sue Anderson,
00:33:13who was popular with her TV series.
00:33:15She wanted to play against type.
00:33:17She was tired of being Miss Prissy Two-Shoes
00:33:20and wanted something with meat in it.
00:33:22Then we were able to get a cameo out of Glenn Ford.
00:33:25We told Gersh that, well,
00:33:27we're getting ready for Happy Birthday,
00:33:29and he said, you know, he said,
00:33:31why don't you speak to Jay Lee?
00:33:33And I said, how could we ever get Jay Lee?
00:33:35I mean, Guns of Navarone and everything?
00:33:37He says, yeah, but he's done some thrillers.
00:33:39I said, well, okay, well, let him read the script.
00:33:42So he came aboard.
00:33:43We almost fell on the floor,
00:33:45but his problem was,
00:33:47he kept screaming for blood, more blood,
00:33:49and we had to tone him down
00:33:51because he was running around
00:33:53throwing blood all over the place,
00:33:55and it was obscuring the killings and everything else.
00:33:58You cut a guy's head in a motorcycle chain
00:34:01and you throw a gallon of blood in there,
00:34:03it's all over the cameras, all over the crew.
00:34:05Happy Birthday to me is kind of fun.
00:34:07The thing that's unique about it
00:34:09is that the heroine winds up being the killer.
00:34:12At the end, there's this big birthday party
00:34:15with all the corpses are all surrounded.
00:34:17She's having her birthday party.
00:34:19But the thing is, is that she is innocent
00:34:23because it was one of the other girls,
00:34:25and that's where we did that ending
00:34:27that some people liked and some people hated it.
00:34:30One of the girls of the seven was killing,
00:34:33and she had a mask that looked like Melissa Sue.
00:34:38Columbia didn't get behind it
00:34:41as much as Paramount did with Muddy.
00:34:45The reason that they came into this
00:34:48was that the strike was looming Hollywood,
00:34:51and all the studios were getting worried about product
00:34:54if the strike was going to be long-term.
00:34:56We insisted in the deal with Columbia
00:34:59that we get consult on the advertising,
00:35:02and we met the head of advertising.
00:35:04He shows us the skewer in the guy's mouth,
00:35:08and he says, this is our ad campaign.
00:35:10We said, well, did you have 2 or 3 others that we could look at?
00:35:14No, we decided on this.
00:35:16So we said, yeah, but we got consulting.
00:35:18And he said, well, you've been consulted. Goodbye.
00:35:26We went to see Halloween, Friday the 13th,
00:35:30and we just saw how these things were constructed.
00:35:34And if you watch carefully, and you watch it several times,
00:35:38you see that you have to have your build-up to a horror activity
00:35:43to some kind of massacre, and then it continues on.
00:35:47And they all had to fit that particular pattern.
00:35:51We did take a stopwatch,
00:35:53and every, I don't know, I forgot how many minutes there was,
00:35:57you've got to have something to fit that genre.
00:36:14It's a total divide when you're making a horror film
00:36:17as opposed to when you're watching it,
00:36:19and then when you're watching an audience.
00:36:22If you've seen Graduation Day, we have a major decapitation,
00:36:25which is a pretty grotesque thing, but while you're doing it,
00:36:28you're really involved with the mechanics and the technique.
00:36:31And then when you watch an audience, it kind of blows you away,
00:36:35which is one of the reasons, by the way,
00:36:37I must admit that I don't do horror films anymore.
00:36:40It was a little too scary for me to be in the audience
00:36:43of a real horror film like Graduation Day
00:36:46and see some of the reactions.
00:36:48I mean, what it unleashes was truly scary.
00:36:51There's a great expression in Hebrew, which is,
00:36:54it was good, but it's good that it was.
00:36:57I'm going to have to teach you too!
00:37:04Yes, it was an homage to Psycho,
00:37:07keeping Laura's body preserved, using it as a scare tactic.
00:37:11We all went out, we had hundreds of people in caps and gowns,
00:37:15and that was a very effective ploy.
00:37:17It was very easy to get a whole high school out
00:37:20with black caps and gowns and the badge that said,
00:37:23I survived Graduation Day.
00:37:25There's a whole line of these titles,
00:37:27every holiday ever practically got covered.
00:37:36My feeling was that for a while,
00:37:38it was the special effects that were driving those films.
00:37:41Then suddenly people started rooting for the killer.
00:37:44They wanted to see people murdered
00:37:46because they wanted to see what it would look like,
00:37:49how the special effects would be accomplished.
00:37:52And special effects artists like Tom Savini
00:37:55satisfied those cravings.
00:37:59He just knows how to make that stuff work,
00:38:02and particularly when we were willing to be excessive,
00:38:05because we didn't have to censor, you know, like his twisted mind.
00:38:09I used to get so scared when I saw these movies when I was a kid,
00:38:14and it just made me want to scare people.
00:38:17So I shined shoes in my neighborhood
00:38:19just to buy makeup supplies.
00:38:21I was stealing lipsticks on my mother's purse,
00:38:23anything to, like, screw up my face and do makeup.
00:38:26I went to the photo school, and they sent me to Vietnam.
00:38:29So my job was to photograph damage to people and machines.
00:38:32And I saw some hideous stuff.
00:38:36I walked over a severed arm one day,
00:38:38and it was grabbing the ground,
00:38:40the muscles had contracted, it was grabbing the ground.
00:38:43And I studied the viscera on the end of it,
00:38:45thinking I gotta create this someday.
00:38:48To me, they're magic tricks.
00:38:51They're ways for me to fool people.
00:38:53If you're using a rubber weapon, give it some substance first.
00:38:56Smack something, plant it in a door
00:38:58so you see that this metal blade has taken a big chunk out of the door.
00:39:01So when the rubber wind hits the person,
00:39:03you still think it's the...
00:39:05you still get the same feeling of the big metal wind.
00:39:07Ow!
00:39:15Ow!
00:39:21Super effective, disgusting, you know, vile film, yeah.
00:39:25But that's what it's supposed to be, so that's why it's good.
00:39:28I think most of the girls were like porno stars in that film, weren't they?
00:39:33I think they were, weren't they?
00:39:35Even the burning, you know, I remember the effects in those films were great.
00:39:39That whole scene on the boat where the guy, the killer,
00:39:42comes out with the shears and kills everybody.
00:39:45SCREAMING
00:39:50SCREAMING
00:39:56SCREAMING
00:40:01SCREAMING
00:40:07SCREAMING
00:40:13He's nuts. He's absolutely crazy, but he's brilliant.
00:40:20SCREAMING
00:40:30He sees the effect as if he is, in fact, a killer.
00:40:34What is my fascination with thinking of ways to kill people?
00:40:39I do feel like an assassin sometimes.
00:40:42When I go see my movies, I don't watch the movie.
00:40:45I really try to pick somebody out in the audience
00:40:48and I watch the evolution of their heart attack.
00:40:51SCREAMING
00:41:00The Prowler, I felt, came out right at that sort of peak of the splatter genre.
00:41:05That's my best stuff, I think.
00:41:09SCREAMING
00:41:14There's no precedent for a lot of the stuff that we create,
00:41:17especially in these slasher films.
00:41:19The fun is inventing how to do it.
00:41:23There's some pretty juicy stuff,
00:41:25especially the end with blowing Farley Granger's head off.
00:41:29So we cast Farley Granger's head and I built this dummy
00:41:32and we filled it with apple cores and shrimp dip and blood bags
00:41:36and took it off with a real shotgun.
00:41:40There is a lot of darkness to the art.
00:41:56By 1981, the audiences couldn't get enough gore.
00:42:01Every weekend, it seemed like there was a new slasher film coming out.
00:42:05Stuff like Splatter University and Pieces and Don't Go In The Woods.
00:42:10Every independent producer and his brother
00:42:12were making these films on their own,
00:42:14churning them out and flooding the market.
00:42:16The New Lions were getting involved
00:42:18and all these other companies that don't even exist anymore,
00:42:21like World Northel.
00:42:23The budgets got smaller and they weren't as sophisticated.
00:42:28Sleepaway Camp, you talk to kids that watched that original movie
00:42:32and there is one thing and one thing only that they will remember.
00:42:36And I swear to God, I am convinced to this day,
00:42:39Neil Jordan saw that movie as a kid
00:42:41and when he did the crying game stuff,
00:42:43I'm ripping off Sleepaway Camp.
00:42:45It is the idea that that girl has a penis.
00:42:48And my God, one of the single greatest reveals
00:42:51in the history of the genre.
00:42:54And to this day, as bad as the sequels are,
00:42:57that moment is one of the great holy shit moments.
00:43:02Guy was wearing a mold of my face, standing there nude.
00:43:05He had to be 18 to do nudity.
00:43:07He had to be small enough to have the same shape body as me.
00:43:10I was a small 13-year-old, little thin face.
00:43:13They found a guy, he got wasted and did the scene.
00:43:16I had no concept at that age.
00:43:18What? I was playing what?
00:43:20No one really told me. I went and saw it and went,
00:43:22Oh, at the end, like everyone else,
00:43:24I was the chick with the tits.
00:43:27That moment, weirdly enough, affected me more,
00:43:30particularly dating-wise.
00:43:32I didn't trust women for a long time after that,
00:43:34but that's a separate documentary.
00:43:36And the worst of these movies,
00:43:38the movies that have absolutely no redeemable value,
00:43:40are not well-made films.
00:43:42It doesn't matter because there's something there,
00:43:44even in an awkward performance, that makes show of it.
00:43:46He's dead, all right.
00:43:48No kidding.
00:43:51He's so cold.
00:43:53Is the pizza?
00:43:55Oh!
00:43:59Well, life goes on after all.
00:44:02Slumber Party Massacre is at the end of the first cycle.
00:44:05In other words, the classics of Friday the 13th and Halloween
00:44:08and what they spawned was reaching an end.
00:44:11So Slumber Party Massacre does spoof those
00:44:14and is more comedic than they are.
00:44:16Critics attacked the slasher films for being misogynistic.
00:44:23When people criticized me for doing Slumber Party Massacre,
00:44:26I just thought they were full of it, to be perfectly honest.
00:44:29I think that the film is not sexist,
00:44:32is based on an underlying fear that's very interesting
00:44:35and very female, which is about getting laid for the first time.
00:44:39However, despite the filmmakers' intention,
00:44:42the genre became an easy target for critics.
00:44:47Yeah, I think slasher films are, you know,
00:44:50considered one notch above pornography in a lot of people's minds
00:44:54and subversive and dangerous.
00:44:57Run if you must.
00:44:59Hello, operator?
00:45:01Hide if you can.
00:45:03Scream if you are able.
00:45:06But above all, if you are alone...
00:45:09PHONE RINGS
00:45:11..don't answer the phone.
00:45:14TV commercials like that one,
00:45:16exploiting the plight of women in danger,
00:45:18those ads have been saturating television for the past two years.
00:45:21These films are coming out week after week,
00:45:24playing to millions of people,
00:45:26and the dominant image in American films today on women
00:45:29is not fondant and Kleeberg.
00:45:31It's women like that, cowering in the corner,
00:45:33knives being brandished in their faces,
00:45:35being raped, being sliced apart.
00:45:37That's what's going on in American movies.
00:45:39That's why we're doing this show.
00:45:41Horror films way back when, when the women were fainting
00:45:44and not able to cope with anything
00:45:46and they had to be rescued by a man, is a social statement.
00:45:49You're a psycho, you have a victim there.
00:45:51And at the point when those of us that make the films
00:45:54started realising, wait a minute, that's really bullshit,
00:45:57and started making heroines that were strong.
00:46:00The killer in these slasher films is definitely not always the male.
00:46:04Halt!
00:46:09And many more guys die on camera than women.
00:46:12Women do get killed, but very, very few get killed on camera.
00:46:15The really bloody deaths in the film are the guys.
00:46:18These films hate women, and unfortunately,
00:46:20the audiences that go to them
00:46:22don't seem to like women too much either.
00:46:24It's amazing how many pre-teen and teenage girls
00:46:27rent these movies and watch them and love them.
00:46:29And to sit there surrounded by people who are identifying
00:46:32not with the victim, but with the attacker, with the killer,
00:46:35who are cheering these killers on, is a very scary experience.
00:46:39Nobody wants to see her hurt.
00:46:41Because you're playing to fear,
00:46:43that is the emotion of horror movies, is fear.
00:46:45You're trying to evoke that and put the audience through it
00:46:48in a visceral way.
00:46:50That doesn't mean the audience wants to see her get hurt.
00:46:52That's a complete misunderstanding of the genre.
00:46:54They want to see her in jeopardy and triumph and get revenge.
00:46:57Here's one of the ads for the boogeyman.
00:47:00You can't hide from him.
00:47:14I'm convinced it has something to do
00:47:16with the growth of the women's movement in America in the last decade.
00:47:19I think that these films are some sort of primordial response
00:47:23by some very sick people of men saying,
00:47:26get back in your place, women.
00:47:28Help! Help!
00:47:32These women in the films are typically portrayed as independent,
00:47:35as sexual, as enjoying life,
00:47:37and the killer typically, not all the time, but most often,
00:47:40is a man who is sexually frustrated with these new aggressive women.
00:47:44Young girls who wind up being the victims
00:47:46are the ones who've just had sex,
00:47:48and they're being punished in some way.
00:47:52Gosh, if anything, that would turn me against that convention,
00:47:55because I believe just the opposite.
00:47:57I don't think it's demeaning to women.
00:47:59I don't think it's demeaning to any...
00:48:01It's an art form.
00:48:03And so he strikes back at them. He throws knives at them.
00:48:05He can't deal with them. He cuts them up. He kills them.
00:48:08Get back in your place. It's against the women's movement.
00:48:10There's something inherently sexual in every slasher movie.
00:48:13What is wrong with there being something inherently sexual?
00:48:16Ah!
00:48:18Ah!
00:48:20Ah!
00:48:22Ah!
00:48:24Ah!
00:48:26Ah!
00:48:28Ah!
00:48:30Ah!
00:48:32Ah!
00:48:34Ah!
00:48:36Horror movies always have been and will be
00:48:39sort of like the dirty secret that everybody wants to ignore.
00:48:42It doesn't matter how many of them open at number one,
00:48:45how many of them are huge mega-hits, how many of them...
00:48:48It doesn't matter. They always want to sort of treat it that way.
00:48:51They're critics, and they need a line.
00:48:54They need something to take them in and go,
00:48:57what is it that I can criticize?
00:49:00Well, the easiest genre in the world to criticize is the horror genre.
00:49:03And if you want to be even more specific, the slasher genre,
00:49:06because to a critic, what is the value?
00:49:09Well, what's valuable about it
00:49:12is that it allows people to experience their humanity.
00:49:15Critics, for some reason, don't understand that.
00:49:18Maybe most of them have not allowed themselves
00:49:21to really experience their humanity.
00:49:24Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an R rating today,
00:49:27a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity,
00:49:30graphic violence,
00:49:33or an explicit reference to the sex act.
00:49:36Since this film has none of those,
00:49:39and since research has proven that R-rated films
00:49:42are by far the most popular with the movie-going public,
00:49:45the producers of this motion picture
00:49:48have asked me to take this opportunity to say,
00:49:51fuck you.
00:49:54Unfortunately for the genre, critics gained a major ally.
00:49:57Our kids are all learning to trust Santa Claus.
00:50:00They don't have any, oh, fairy tales left.
00:50:03It was the night before Christmas
00:50:06When all through the house
00:50:09Not a creature was staring, not even a mouse
00:50:12The stockings were hung by the chimney with care
00:50:15In hopes that St. Nicholas
00:50:18Soon would be there
00:50:21And they say on the commercial
00:50:24That it only looks like Santa Claus
00:50:27But to a child, there is only one Santa Claus
00:50:30Ah! No!
00:50:33Ah!
00:50:36Ah!
00:50:39Ah!
00:50:42Ah!
00:50:48Ah!
00:50:51Ah!
00:50:54Ah!
00:50:57Ah!
00:51:00You've made it through Halloween
00:51:03Now try and survive Christmas
00:51:06Silent Night
00:51:09Deadly Night
00:51:12Silent Night, Deadly Night became the flashpoint
00:51:15Igniting protests across the nation
00:51:18We always want to put the responsibility on somebody else, don't we?
00:51:21We're ready to say, I didn't do that, it was their kid
00:51:24Or it was that mother
00:51:27Take the responsibility, you're watching television
00:51:30I have a lot to say about people who let their kids watch TV
00:51:33I think what went wrong was the promo
00:51:36If the promo had done no Santa Claus whatsoever
00:51:39But had taken
00:51:42Maybe the child who is terrified
00:51:45Christmas Eve is the scariest
00:51:48Damn night of the year
00:51:51I'd be scared too, I assure you
00:51:54The mother superior who says
00:51:57When he draws a picture for the class
00:52:00Of a Santa Claus killing
00:52:03Very naughty, we are always caught
00:52:06And then we are punished
00:52:09Punishment is absolute
00:52:12Punishment is necessary
00:52:15And when she says naughty, naughty
00:52:18Very, very naughty
00:52:21If they had done something like that
00:52:24And shown how the boy got twisted
00:52:28If the promo had been just that
00:52:31It would have been wonderful
00:52:34Somebody got carried away with an idea
00:52:37Wouldn't it be sensational to have a picture
00:52:40And advertise with Santa Claus
00:52:43Never, ever thinking of the repercussion
00:52:46Putting the Santa Claus in it
00:52:49Gave advantage to the people who saw the promo
00:52:53Sure, the public has a right to have an opinion
00:52:56I don't think you have the right
00:52:59To impose your opinion on somebody else
00:53:02If I was watching television with my daughter
00:53:05And I saw a commercial with a killer Santa Claus
00:53:08Or a killer Easter Bunny
00:53:11I would feel that it was my job as the parent
00:53:14To sit down with my daughter or my son
00:53:17And talk about it
00:53:20How this is fiction
00:53:23And explain what kind of entertainment we're watching
00:53:26When we turn the television on
00:53:29It's responsibility and it starts in the home
00:53:32Rather than call the president of TriStar and complain
00:53:35We're not out to do this to be famous or anything
00:53:38We're out to get the movie taken out of the theater
00:53:41I think that's absolutely ridiculous
00:53:44But TriStar caved in by canceling the ads
00:53:47The people that control making films being corporations
00:53:50That filmmaking is just some tiny little part of what they do
00:53:53But basically what they do is make money
00:53:56And they make product
00:53:59And they make products that they can't get sued for
00:54:02So it puts horror films amongst those of us that really like them
00:54:05In a very dangerous position where you can be legislated against
00:54:08Fearing similar wrath
00:54:11Paramount was in the midst of killing its own beast
00:54:14I was taking meetings about Friday the 13th
00:54:17And it was very strange because I was really excited about doing Final Chapter
00:54:20But I got a sense that people were a little embarrassed by it
00:54:23They said, you know, we don't want to get yelled at
00:54:26By any more shareholders at meetings and stuff
00:54:29Kill the beast
00:54:32And of course we started to think of ways to kill people again
00:54:35And the most important one was Jason's death
00:54:38We'll have Tommy just smack Jason in the side of the head with his machete
00:54:41But let's go further and have him roll down the blade
00:54:44How are we going to do that? Well, I don't know
00:54:47But we'll think of a way and we did it
00:54:50As we were creating it, a guy put his hand in the head and put his finger out there
00:54:53And I said, oh yeah, let's put a tongue in there
00:54:56So the guy wore a tongue on his finger and had his head inside the head
00:54:59Making Jason's tongue go
00:55:02Because we couldn't possibly do that to a real person
00:55:05And boy did they love that in the theater
00:55:09I've heard the idea that Tommy Jarvis is an homage to Tom Savini
00:55:12I was not thinking about Savini in any way
00:55:15Savini had a lot to do with that movie but nothing to do with Tommy Jarvis
00:55:18But you couldn't help thinking
00:55:21Because, you know, the kid was obsessed with things that Savini's obsessed with
00:55:24In fact, all the masks in Tommy's room
00:55:27Are Savini's crap that he has laying around the garages here and there
00:55:30Although Jason's death was not the end of the story
00:55:33It was just the beginning
00:55:37Although Jason made a killing at the box office
00:55:40The genre seemed to have difficulty in luring its victims to theaters
00:55:47Fatigue was starting to set in
00:55:50You'd kind of seen it all before and it just didn't feel fresh
00:55:53We were ready for a more sophisticated slasher film
00:55:56We wanted to see it elevated
00:56:07It's this guy
00:56:10He's after us in our dreams
00:56:13I had saved these clippings of the news story
00:56:16About some young man dying in the middle of severe nightmares
00:56:19His father was a physician and had given him sleeping pills
00:56:22And the kid supposedly was taking them
00:56:25And they had come out of Southeast Asia war camp
00:56:28So the family just assumed that he had been traumatized
00:56:31He said, no, no, it's different
00:56:34There's something stalking me in my dream, I don't want to sleep
00:56:37And he actually kept himself alive, or awake
00:56:40You didn't sleep at all last night, did you?
00:56:43You know, the doctor says you have to sleep
00:56:46Or you'll go even crazier?
00:56:49And finally he fell asleep
00:56:52And the family carried him up to his bed and put him to bed
00:56:55And the accounts afterwards, we were all relieved
00:56:58And felt like finally he can rest and sleep
00:57:01I heard screaming and thrashing, and I ran into his room
00:57:04He was just screaming, kicking on his bed
00:57:07And by the time we got to him, he just fell silent
00:57:10And he was dead
00:57:13Then they found in his closet there was a coffee pot
00:57:16That he had hidden in there with black coffee
00:57:19And they found all the sleeping pills, he hadn't taken any
00:57:22And it was so dramatic, it was like, holy shit
00:57:25This guy knew he was going to die if he slept
00:57:28You don't fall asleep
00:57:31How terrifying is that?
00:57:34This case, this was a story about dreamers who, if they didn't wake up
00:57:37Which was very difficult to do with Freddy
00:57:40They would be killed in their dreams
00:57:43And there was going to be one hero or heroine in this case
00:57:46Whose task was to figure out how to clear Freddy
00:57:49Out of her life and out of the lives of all children
00:57:52Without going to sleep
00:57:55When I was walking around to Hollywood
00:57:58Everybody in Hollywood thought it was either dumb or too scary
00:58:01Or not scary enough
00:58:04I have a whole stack of wonderful letters that I keep
00:58:07Just to remind myself when things go rough
00:58:10I've got to say, to Bob's credit, he's the only person that I ran into
00:58:13That got it, and he got it right away
00:58:16Which I think is a real tribute to the man
00:58:19The difficulty was that since the bank wouldn't loan us money
00:58:22To make this movie, I had to not only undertake
00:58:25To develop the script, which I did
00:58:28But then go out and try to raise the financing
00:58:31You start off with a director and a script
00:58:34But 8 weeks before you begin principal photography
00:58:37All of a sudden there's 50 people working
00:58:40You've got hairdressers and set designers and production coordinators
00:58:43And all kinds of other people, and they all have to be paid
00:58:46We had to pay them out of our own pocket
00:58:49Solely on my belief that we could
00:58:52Somehow pull this financing together
00:58:55It was extremely harrowing and anxiety-provoking, all the bad stuff
00:58:58You want to experience watching a movie but not have in real life
00:59:01Because I couldn't wake up from it, it was just there every morning
00:59:16music plays
00:59:25Wes and I never could settle on an ending
00:59:28Wes sort of thought I wanted Freddy driving the car
00:59:31Because I wanted to have a sequel, but I wasn't even that sophisticated
00:59:35So Wes and I continued to argue about this ending
00:59:38Over and over and over
00:59:41We had like 3 different endings that we shot
00:59:44And we tested one, and then we tested the other, and tested the third
00:59:48None of them really were particularly satisfactory
00:59:51What we finally decided to do, because different audiences
00:59:54Had different points of view, is to end the film with all 3 endings
01:00:05It wasn't satisfactory, but the audience seemed to like it
01:00:08And I recall showing my father the movie
01:00:11And he said, it's a really good movie, really exciting and scary
01:00:14There's kind of a pause in our conversation
01:00:17He said, but you know, I don't like that ending
01:00:20I said, well Dad, we tried everything, we've done every kind of ending
01:00:23He said, I don't care, you're going to screw up this movie, don't end it that way
01:00:27After we finished the film, we showed it to Frank Mancuso
01:00:30And the other people at Paramount
01:00:33They called me up and said, we're sorry, we don't want to take this film
01:00:36Because audiences are not interested in movies about dreams
01:00:40So by default, we had to move ahead and distribute the film on our own
01:00:43I remember driving by a big theater on Broadway
01:00:46In New York on opening night
01:00:49And there was lines around the block, I'd never seen that with any of our films
01:00:52It seemed to have worked
01:00:58What Freddie holds in my heart is Robert Anglin, who's a terrific trooper
01:01:01A very good actor, a gentleman
01:01:04And a certain amount of a scholar
01:01:07And also I feel the same about Wes
01:01:10The whole thing of Nightmare on Elm Street was based on Eastern philosophy
01:01:13That I was studying at that time
01:01:16Most of us are down at the bottom level
01:01:19Where we go about our daily lives and everything else
01:01:22But we don't think about a lot of things
01:01:25And then next up is businessmen, and then there's artists, and then there's mystics
01:01:28And the farther up you go, the more uncomfortable it is
01:01:31Just before the top, you get to a point where you either commit suicide
01:01:34Or you go back down, or you break through into real enlightenment
01:01:37But you have to take at that point
01:01:40Total responsibility for consciousness
01:01:43That was kind of what I built that whole thing around
01:01:46And sleep by that is the paradigm of not being conscious
01:01:49So in order to be conscious, the most primal thing you had to do was stay awake
01:01:52With some slasher films, I think it's just blood and guts and torture
01:01:55And things like that, which are pretty reliably upsetting
01:01:58But I think kind of a cheat, you know
01:02:01To me, it's much more about the social, economic, psychological zeitgeist
01:02:04Of what's going on in the culture at the time that I try to get at
01:02:07The culture of the 80s had left its indelible mark on art and film
01:02:10And in particular, on the landscape of the slasher genre
01:02:13I think it kind of points to generational aspects
01:02:16The best horror is usually related to really turbulent times
01:02:19It's a reflection of society on the whole
01:02:22We were in the Cold War and the atom bomb
01:02:25And everybody was building houses
01:02:28We were in the Cold War and the atom bomb
01:02:31And everybody was building shelters
01:02:34Maybe the people were very uncertain about their future
01:02:37It was escapism
01:02:40I mean, if you're going to die a radioactive death
01:02:43Maybe you might get a kick out of watching somebody
01:02:46Get head cut off in a movie theater, I don't know
01:02:49I mean, how can anyone be serious about anything
01:02:52When some moron can steal a bomb or push a button
01:02:55I became shocked at the change in my country in the 80s
01:02:58When Reaganomics, or Reagan came in
01:03:01Excess, you know, everybody living off credit cards and wanting to see more
01:03:04And now, I mean, there was a time when
01:03:07The old horror films, which to me are still the best
01:03:10Was where you didn't see everything
01:03:13What happened behind closed doors that were suggested
01:03:16And you had, your mind completed it
01:03:19And your mind completes it more horribly than the effects guys can create it
01:03:22We want to see the heads blow off, we want to see the blood
01:03:25In fact, the kids are disappointed, the audience is disappointed
01:03:28If they don't see it
01:03:31The pressures of AIDS coming in
01:03:34There's an unknown enemy who's out to get us
01:03:37And I think, you know, certainly that plays out in the horror slasher genre
01:03:40Because you don't know who the killer is
01:03:43Which I think is very much similar to, you know, the virus
01:03:46I mean, you know, it doesn't have a face
01:03:49And it just, it showed how people can be
01:03:52How frightened people are underneath
01:03:55The idea of these kids having this unprotected sex
01:03:58Setting themselves up for God knows what
01:04:01And the idea of Jason as the fist of God
01:04:04Punishing these kids for their drinking, their drugs, and their sexuality
01:04:07I wonder if that works, do you think kids are out there saying
01:04:10Ooh, I bet I'm gonna smoke this joint or fuck my girlfriend
01:04:13At the same time, the Halloween series
01:04:16Is playing on this kind of, in many ways, the white flight of suburbia
01:04:19And that nothing can touch you in suburbia
01:04:22Once you've left the big city
01:04:25Well, just wait, Michael Myers is coming to town
01:04:28And then when you get to Nightmare on Elm Street
01:04:31Nightmare on Elm Street is all about the internalization of teenage desires in many ways
01:04:34And so those films were really reflecting the culture
01:04:37Your post-Vietnam, the country's moving more conservative
01:04:40Jason and the Friday the 13th films are in many ways
01:04:43In most Reagan-era film series, with the exception probably of Rambo
01:04:46You are paying for the sins of youth
01:04:49A lot of the excesses that you saw in violence
01:04:52Was a response to the body culture
01:04:55Everybody was exercising
01:04:58There was a lot of emphasis on looks
01:05:01And perfection and beauty
01:05:04And the horror filmmakers said, oh yeah, I'll shake you up
01:05:07And they just ripped it apart
01:05:10It struck a chord in humans
01:05:13Horror movies before that, the metaphors had gotten old
01:05:16If you take, for example, the wolfman sort of metaphor
01:05:19That's about fear of one's own bestiality
01:05:22Or the 50s science fiction movies
01:05:25Which were about the fear of science
01:05:28And how that could get out of control
01:05:31I think in the 80s there was a new perception
01:05:34That the enemy was ourselves
01:05:37That we had gone crazy
01:05:40And whose motive was not rational
01:05:43Who could just come out of the blue and kill you
01:05:46But there was generally a new apathy in the public about it
01:05:49And I can't remember her name, it was in New York
01:05:52She was getting murdered and set on fire
01:05:55Outside an apartment building
01:05:58And everybody inside, they didn't come and help her
01:06:01And it was a deadening of the spirit
01:06:04There was a lot of fear publicity
01:06:07And a lot of sense of children being kidnapped
01:06:10The villain was real, the villain was not supernatural
01:06:13The villain was a human being
01:06:16And a human being was as scary as it could get
01:06:19Corporate America capitalized on those fears
01:06:22By unleashing Freddy and his disciples
01:06:25Through sequels and merchandising
01:06:28It opened the floodgates
01:06:32And then somebody said, wait, horror's hot again
01:06:35Who else can we resurrect?
01:06:38What's Leatherface been up to? What's Michael Myers been up to?
01:06:41You'd go one summer and there would be a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie
01:06:44A new Friday the 13th film
01:06:47A new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie
01:06:50By far of the three major franchises, the most controversial of any of them
01:06:53Not smartly thought up
01:06:56Friday the 13th Part V, A New Beginning
01:06:59It would basically take you through an entire film
01:07:02Thinking, I'm getting Jason, I'm getting Jason, I'm getting Jason
01:07:05Oh, it's the guy driving the ambulance
01:07:08Whose fat son got hacked up over a candy bar
01:07:11In the first five minutes of the movie
01:07:14Shockingly, that didn't work
01:07:17In haste to make money, Friday the 13th Part V
01:07:20Was not the only film that fooled the audience
01:07:23It was never intended to be a serious genre piece
01:07:27And they sold it as a genre piece
01:07:30And the genre fans came out to see it the opening weekend
01:07:39Oh, ha, ha
01:07:42Ha, ha, ha, ha!
01:07:45That's really funny, you guys!
01:07:48Really funny
01:07:51When it's revealed at the end that the entire movie never happened
01:07:54It was either a dream or a joke or something like that
01:07:57You always, the audience, myself included, feels robbed
01:08:00They were completely disappointed
01:08:03Because it was not a slasher picture
01:08:06And the film tanked
01:08:09A lot of people that don't like April Fool's Day
01:08:12And they think it's a cheat, okay, I'm sorry
01:08:15I will tell anybody, anybody, and I'm going to get in trouble
01:08:18With the hot tension filmmakers, that's a cheat, okay
01:08:21It's kind of a nice little pull the rug out from under you
01:08:24If this contributed at all
01:08:27To the genre going into decline
01:08:30Okay, I'll take responsibility
01:08:33No, I won't
01:08:36I'm blaming the people at Paramount, those marketing people
01:08:39They're the ones who messed us up
01:08:42That's life, you know, what can you do?
01:08:45While Paramount had fooled its audience
01:08:49TV show, games, T-shirts, masks
01:08:52Yohara icons were being mass-marketed
01:08:55To middle America
01:08:58Which was quite a sight to see
01:09:01The studios are in the business to make money
01:09:04We're not going to have the Michael Myers cartoon
01:09:07Or, you know, it's not a bad idea
01:09:10Before long, audiences started to grow a little weary
01:09:13As Friday the 13th ran on
01:09:17They almost slowly, more slow than usual, I would say
01:09:20Descended again into self-parody
01:09:25Freddie's wisecracks were wearing a little thin
01:09:28Want some fish? No
01:09:31We'll see, bitch
01:09:34Bon appetit, bitch
01:09:37By the end of the decade, the Reagan era of greed had come to an end
01:09:40And in the process, had bled the slasher genre dry
01:09:47As the genre descended into obscurity
01:09:50In its dying wake, it gave life to many careers
01:09:56A lot of people's first movie is a horror movie
01:09:59I think they always make money or they're always, you know
01:10:02That's the choice they make
01:10:05I was casting this film, I see this guy pop his head in the door
01:10:08He says, I'm a little early, should I wait out here?
01:10:11And I said, no, no, come on in, sit down
01:10:14And he started looking down at the sandwiches, do you want a piece?
01:10:17And he says, sure, and he took it and he started eating the sandwich with me
01:10:20He only worked about a week, a week and a half on the film
01:10:23And he calls me and he says, you know, I got to read for this pilot
01:10:26And he got it, it was Prison Buddies
01:10:29The burning will probably be remembered for launching the film
01:10:32Careers of Harvey and Bob Weinstein
01:10:35They come up to visit me on the set of Maniac, but that's the first thing they saw
01:10:38That Harvey and Bob Weinstein saw me create and they were floored by it, wow
01:10:42It was Jason Alexander with hair
01:10:45He was just as funny on that movie as he is today, he's always cracking jokes
01:10:48A very realistic delivery, you know, I kind of like that guy
01:10:51And Holly Hunter, I went to college with Holly Hunter
01:10:54And she went right from that to being, I think, in the background of the burning
01:10:57Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, obviously the original film
01:11:00Is best known for Johnny Depp getting pulled in the bed
01:11:03And a geyser of blood shooting up afterwards
01:11:06Kevin Bacon, everyone obviously knows from the original Friday Night
01:11:09What's the most fun about going back and looking at these movies
01:11:30For almost seven years, the genre lied seemingly dead
01:11:34But by mid-90s, a new generation of audiences
01:11:37Were ready to breathe life into the beast
01:11:46When Silence of the Lambs came out and won Best Picture
01:11:49And nobody ever wanted to refer to Silence of the Lambs as a horror movie
01:11:52Because at that point, horror was kind of taboo
01:11:55They said, oh, it's a psychological thriller
01:11:58You know, wait a minute, you're talking about a guy going around killing women
01:12:02And skinning them to make a suit out of human flesh
01:12:05If that's not a horror movie, I don't know what is
01:12:08And then all of a sudden, the genre is revitalized again with Scream
01:12:18That idea of lifting a movie's plot out of the formulaic
01:12:25And making it about the new reality, in a sense
01:12:28Was that every kid was media savvy and every kid knew all about horror films
01:12:31So if you try to make a horror film where somebody says
01:12:34I don't know what that sound was, but I'll go investigate
01:12:37If somebody in the room doesn't say, well, that's from Halloween or whatever
01:12:40Then it becomes false
01:12:59He took a formula and he added a little twist to it
01:13:02And of course, with the Scream films, the twist was
01:13:05The killer is actually someone who's a fan of those movies
01:13:08And quizzes his victim
01:13:17And if his victims know the horror genre, then they're fine
01:13:20If they don't know the horror genre, they become his next victim
01:13:28Jason, I saw that movie 20 goddamn times!
01:13:31Then you should know Jason's mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was the original killer
01:13:34Jason didn't show up until the sequel
01:13:37I'm afraid that was a wrong answer
01:13:40There's something so horrible about the way she's being played with
01:13:43That it sets up who the killer is for the whole rest of the movie
01:13:46And it gives you a motor that never stops
01:13:58music plays
01:14:10Scream impressed me as being one of the first films
01:14:13That associated slasher with humor
01:14:16Wes is such an intelligent man
01:14:19He's got a really unique sense of humor
01:14:22He really knows how to manipulate the audience
01:14:25And blow them into a false sense of security
01:14:28The key factor for a good slasher movie is that
01:14:31It fulfills the requirements of the genre
01:14:34But surprises you in a way that a previous one has not done
01:14:37Scream is probably a great example of that
01:14:40Because it fulfills every single requirement
01:14:43At the same time making you laugh at every single requirement
01:14:46You laugh at them, but you want to succumb to them, and so you do
01:14:49I think Scream is probably one of the best ever made for that reason
01:14:53Sex equals death, okay?
01:14:56Number two, you can never drink or do drugs
01:14:59No, the sin factor
01:15:02Sin, it's an extension of number one
01:15:05And number three, never, ever, ever
01:15:08Under any circumstances say, I'll be right back
01:15:11Because you won't be back
01:15:14I'm getting another beer, you want one? Yeah, sure
01:15:17I'll be right back!
01:15:20Neve Campbell, he was one of the first instances where
01:15:23A horror film, a slasher film, had recognizable stars
01:15:27Drew Barrymore was a star
01:15:30And Neve Campbell was a huge television star
01:15:33The idea in the 80s of a Courtney Cox
01:15:36Coming off the highest rated show on network television
01:15:39To do a Scream was unheard of
01:15:42Dimension Films, Bob Weinstein was willing to go out and pay somebody
01:15:45Some serious money to be in the film
01:15:48He was willing towards being large successors
01:15:51Those two women alone brought in a huge audience, you know, and a female audience
01:15:54So, how's the book? Well, it'll be out later this year
01:15:57Oh, I'll look for it
01:16:00I'll send you a copy
01:16:03For a whole new audience beyond the usual slasher base of fans
01:16:06It was a new thing
01:16:09It was scary, it was entertaining
01:16:12It set the genre on its head
01:16:15But they weren't your father's horror films
01:16:18This was a whole new breed of slasher film
01:16:21There was definitely a slickness in films like I Know What You Did Last Summer
01:16:24And Urban Legend
01:16:27You wouldn't get in a film like New Year's Evil or Pieces
01:16:30Now, every horror movie you see come out
01:16:33Is gonna have some recognizable television star
01:16:36And those television stars smartly realized
01:16:39I can increase my foreign value from these movies
01:16:42There's a Sarah Michelle Gellar theorem
01:16:45In that Sarah Michelle Gellar benefited more from doing The Grudge
01:16:48Than she did from seven seasons of Buffy
01:16:51I would argue it's the concept and the style of that movie that did it
01:16:54Sarah Michelle Gellar's gonna see more interesting roles
01:16:57And more interesting opportunities as a result of that
01:17:00And you look now as we come upon When a Stranger Calls
01:17:03Or some of these films that are coming out now
01:17:06Every one of these girls goes into these movies hoping
01:17:09And to be honest with you, I look back going to Freddy vs. Jason
01:17:12To go and get someone from Destiny's Child
01:17:15Tell me something
01:17:18What kind of faggot runs around in a Christmas sweater?
01:17:21Time a hugely selling R&B unit
01:17:24Putting them in that movie
01:17:30Freddy vs. Jason was just a permutation on the theme
01:17:33That worked out well
01:17:40The Slasher Era
01:17:51Genre purists' arguments aside
01:17:54The Slasher Era has left an unmistakable imprint on modern horror
01:17:57Visible in the work of notable directors
01:18:00Such as Rob Zombie
01:18:03Eli Roth
01:18:05And James Wan
01:18:09Saw was just different and fresh
01:18:12Because it was a completely different kind of killer
01:18:15I want to play a game
01:18:18The killer was, in essence, the victim
01:18:21It was the people having to kill themselves
01:18:24Of course, masterminded by Jigsaw
01:18:27So he ultimately was still responsible
01:18:30Anyone involved with trying to make and market a horror film these days
01:18:33Really has a much better chance of at least getting some sort of distribution
01:18:36Slasher movies make $120 million
01:18:39There are slasher movies that make a lot of dough
01:18:42That doesn't mean they're great
01:18:45That means a lot of people are going to see them
01:18:48But it's not for us to say whether they're good or not
01:18:51It was great because it made a lot of money? No, that's not a criteria
01:18:57It started at Universal
01:19:00I took the Universal Studios, pitched it to them
01:19:03It was not 100% a Universal film
01:19:06But it came down to that fateful day
01:19:09When we had our first test preview
01:19:12And then when the lights kind of came up
01:19:15And I went out to talk to the Universal execs
01:19:18They all had these horrified looks on their faces
01:19:21Come to my office tomorrow
01:19:24That didn't sound good
01:19:27But what was nice, that during the process
01:19:30I was able to buy it back
01:19:33Because as nobody wants it, it becomes kind of like a piece of garbage that nobody wants
01:19:36So in that case, I could buy it back and retain all the rights
01:19:39And the merchandise and everything for a steal
01:19:51It seems like there's no taboos left in the slasher film
01:19:55It's called The Devil's Rejects
01:19:58So that should already cut out people that maybe don't want to see it
01:20:01Or House of a Thousand Corpses
01:20:04I think the title isn't tricking anybody
01:20:07And suckering people in
01:20:10And when you see a film like Costal
01:20:13With the really gruesome scenes of torture
01:20:25Ah!
01:20:39And same thing with Wolf Creek
01:20:42There used to be a mindset in Hollywood that violent films didn't make money
01:20:45But the fact that Hostel opened up at $20 million
01:20:48This film with nasty material could be so successful
01:20:51I think shows that the audience
01:20:54Is ready for even more extreme terror
01:20:57You know, it's always tough to predict where the slasher genre
01:21:00Or genre in general is going
01:21:03I don't know where it can go in the future
01:21:06But I mean, let's just start killing the audience
01:21:12The genre has an amazing resiliency
01:21:15Just like the characters in those films
01:21:18I would take a licking and keep on ticking
01:21:21I think people like slasher movies or watch horror films
01:21:24Because, you know, they are rollercoasterized
01:21:27It shakes you up and gives you a thrill
01:21:30That you don't get from...
01:21:33Well, maybe you get it from lovemaking every now and then
01:21:36Except I don't know that your hair stands on end
01:21:39Other things do, but I don't know
01:21:42Horror films evoke horror, fear, terror, that's not bad
01:21:45You have to deal with it, art has to deal with it
01:21:48I get the question all the time
01:21:51Where do you get those ideas?
01:21:54Read the front page of the New York Times, pick any day
01:21:57Now we have a war going on
01:22:00Where people grab people and chop their heads off
01:22:03Right in front of a video camera and send it out to the world
01:22:06I actually had an interviewer ask me
01:22:09Do you think Al-Qaeda got the idea of cutting off heads
01:22:12You've got to be kidding
01:22:15People would think if you watch horror movies
01:22:18It's going to make you go out and want to kill people
01:22:21Or want to shoot people and desensitize them to violence
01:22:24We would always say, yeah, but what if you took a movie projector
01:22:27Went to a prison and showed Disney movies 24 hours a day
01:22:30Then shouldn't that in turn have the same effect?
01:22:33I think the audience today is way too sophisticated
01:22:36Even 12-year-olds, they've seen it all
01:22:39The soldiers who come back from the war
01:22:42In pieces, if you've ever seen that
01:22:45That's so terrifying that nothing we can create comes close
01:22:48It's gone from something so sterile
01:22:51Where death was not a horrible thing
01:22:54It wasn't a bloody thing
01:22:57To now death being really quite horrible and quite bloody
01:23:00And quite brutal and quite painful
01:23:03My grandson, for example, seeing not how pleasant
01:23:07It should be a turn-off
01:23:10Would the world be better off without slasher films?
01:23:13I don't think it makes the list of top 10 things
01:23:16The world would be better without
01:23:19I think the world would be better without politicians who lie
01:23:22I think the world would be better without avarice, without greed
01:23:25But I think that it's a good thing that they're maturing
01:23:28They have matured in some way
01:23:31They'll keep changing as the culture changes, as people change
01:23:35New talents will come along, old talents fade away
01:23:38And, you know, horror movies should be terrifying
01:23:41They should be horrible, they should be disgusting
01:23:44They should be everything
01:23:47When you start watering all that down
01:23:50It's like a studio making a porno movie
01:23:53But going like, we've got to cut out all the sex scenes
01:23:56The slasher genre will never go anywhere
01:23:59I get asked that question all the time
01:24:02Will there be teenagers today? Will there be teenagers tomorrow?
01:24:05Will there be teenagers 5 years from now?
01:24:08If the answer is yes, slasher movies aren't going anywhere
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01:25:05This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life
01:25:08For one last scare
01:25:11Slashers
01:25:14Not in my movie
01:25:17Slashers
01:25:20The fans of this genre and the sub-genre take so seriously
01:25:23And it's one of the reasons it continues to survive
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01:27:41I say the men beware find a lot of women love and relate to these characters in horror movies
01:27:47And you couldn't have the Friday the 13th or the Halloween without the women and so if you're doing that for an audience
01:27:54Who needs that they're very loyal, but you can lose them if you make bad stuff