Bussey doesn't age a day.
There is some great stuff in the movie, but
there's something else that's missing, too.
They shot stuff on the golden age, the
"before" stuff. They shot stuff of us out in
the water playing checkers. Out on the water
on a slow day, talkin' to your buddy, playin'
checkers on the surf board. They shot stuff
of the guys poppin' seaweed, guys throwin'
wax, skippin' it to the other guy and the guy
catchin' it real cool. I'm not saying I didn't
like it.
976-EVIL
It's a classic American story. A clean, tight,
rhythmic, little horror film with
a great reverse. Sort of like
The Devil and Daniel
Webster, but it
mutates at the
end, almost
into fantasy.
Taking the
metaphor
"when hell
freezes over"
to its logical
extreme.
One of the
bad, white
trash gang
kids is
Actress Sandy Dennis won an Academy
Award for best supporting actress
for her part in the movie "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Here
she fiddles around with some
dummy between takes on
the set of 976-EVIL."
named Rags, and he's played by Jim
Thiebaud. He's like a little skateboard
asshole.
The first day he worked seventeen hours.
I had to beat him up. I had to beat it into him.
I hate to do this to actors, but I was moving
him, posing him. After that, he was warm,
and on his marks and acting. I just kept
saying to him, 'Jim, what's gonna happen is,
this is gonna all be over and you're gonna
wish you didn't rush yourself in front of the
lens. And it was the exact right thing to say.
There's a classic James Dean timeless
cousin, Spike, who's being used by this
family. His parents have died and they got
his property until he's twenty-one. He's a shit
kicker. He flips off old ladies, he kicks
animals. He has his dad's Harley, and his
dad's jacket from the Korean war. Then this
kid, Hoax, who's not a nerd, he's a momma's
boy. Hoax is played by actor Stephen Jeffries,
who starred in Fright Night.
The two kids get this 976 number. There's
976-masturbate,
976-Dodger's
score, 976-SURF
report. Well,
this number
is called
976-EVIL,
and it's an
occult for-
tune. It's
not been doin' too well, so they unplug
it...but someone still answers, and it's the
devil, man. He's recruiting. So it becomes
the Carrie, Rosemary's Baby, little bit of
Outsiders, and a bit of Farewell, My Lovely,
color.
The first time Spike, who's played by Pat
O'Brien, comes into his room, and all he's
got here (pointing to his hand and the base
of thumb and forefinger) is a tattoo of a spike
into a heart, with blood drips coming out, and
he puts down his motorcycle magazine,
throws his six-pack into his refrigerator with
a red light inside, plops down into his chair,
but before he does, he punches either his
jukebox or his radio. Sympathy for the Devil
comes on and he does a little bit of Tom
Cruise's Risky Business, maybe just for thirty
seconds. Just a little bit. Then he just flops
down and scratches his nuts.
In the movie, the bad girl, the girl that was
the gang girl passed around-first white girl
in the history of cinema that's gonna have
a tattooe'd tear-little asymetrical blonde
white girl, but now she's smart. She's a
survivor, she's strong. She's been used, but
now she's seventeen and not goin' to make
the same mistake twice. I sacrifice her
halfway through the movie. She is
portrayed by Leslie Dean.
The thing I'm gonna play with on
her is she wears a crucifix and a
skull in one earring. I'm playing
with a little bit of sacrilege here,
because whenever you do a movie
about evil, you gotta have opposites
in it. It's not tacky. It's like when the
punkers got into swastikas and didn't
know what they meant. So what I'm
sayin' is that it's temptin' fate. It's a fate
tempt.
The devil's gettin' into the old lady, Aunt
Lucy, who's a religious Baptist fanatic,
because the devil gets points for f--with
people who believe in God, or for getting
people's souls who don't believe in him,
and I'm playing with that a little bit here.
Sandy Dennis plays the religious old lady.
She starred in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
and got an Academy Award for it. She's
great. She's wonderful. Wait 'til you see here
go, she'll really go for it. It's unbelievable. It's
real hard not to laugh during the takes with
her. Her line that I gave her the other day,
that she played with was, "Young boy. I have
$80 worth of phone calls to one number,
555-LUST. I dialed that number and a sick-
sick-SICK man came on the phone and said
that he wanted to do obscene things with my
private parts and a Mexican hairless-
CHIHUAHUA!"
One of the last images of the movie is Hoax
turning in a swivel chair toward his high
school principal and going, "Miss Martinez,
I've always wondered if your nipples get erect
when it's cold." Now, you gotta remember
that this is a fourteen-year-old kid talking.
Hoax, the mama's boy who becomes my
Satan, he gets his jaw blown away at the end
of the movie and he's got a permanent
grimace. Anyway, he says that. When he
turns around, he's got the girl's earring in his
ear, his satanically, legend-transforming ear.
He's got the skull and crucifix (it's her
identifiable logo) earring.
The end of the movie, when he gets blown
out of the corner of the building and it's all
over, and it's raining and my heros are on
the ground, the kid picks up the earring of
the little girl and he has to deal with the guilt,
for not taking responsibility for her. I'm gonna
use the best skull earring and the best
antique crucifix I can find.
Here's my shot when I kill my little girl.
Hoax pushes all the furniture to the sides of
the room, gets some salt and does this
pentagram and takes his brown, Recluse
spider out of the terrarium, and puts it in the
middle of the pentagram and kills it. Now the
little girl is arriving at her home, little-cute-
tattoo'd tear-white-poor girl, her mom never
taught her how to wear high heels, so she's
always taking them off-my idea-she pulls
out the fish 'n chips to let 'em defrost before
she pops 'em in the oven, and you see
spiders come out of the tin foil. Four of 'em
run up her arm. She goes for the bug spray
and spiders engulf her. Here's the shot I
wrote, Scorcese, tables overturned. From
above you see her little broken body on the
floor, spiders all over her, we come down, we
come down, and we start to pivot and then
cut to Hoax's bathroom looking into the toilet
bowl, and we're pivoting as he drops the
dead, sacrificial brown Recluse spider into
the swirling Psycho Hitchcock water, and I
match cut from her death to that. That's my
money shot. That's my first death in the
movie. The movie is produced by Lisa
Hansen, the photo director is Bill Elliot and
Chris Buchinsky is special visual consultant.
MORE FREDDY?
Yes, there's definitely a Nightmare Four.
Newline has given me permission to tell all
THRASHER readers, that yes, probably
shooting in early '88. I've read one potential
script which is red-hot. For all of you who saw
Nightmare One, remember the little
throwaway line about the car Freddy had?
The van that he used to take away the
children? What did he do in there? Did he
sniff their little dresses? Yes. This will be the
main element of Nightmare Four. The car, the
van, Freddy's gate to hell.
FAVORITE NIGHTMARE MOVIE, AND ARE
YOU SATISFIED?
I'm real proud of Nightmare Three. I
worked my ass to the bone. Chuck Russel,
the director, worked my butt off. We all
missed Christmas, we all missed New Year's.
We put all the money on the screen, we didn't
put it in our pockets. But now that it's made
money, we're gonna get some money next
year. How about that Patricia Arquette? How
about my hypo needles? How about those
guys, weren't they rare?
I liked Nightmare One. I think it's the
scariest. Nightmare Two is the creepiest.
Check it out again if you hated it. Look for
the nasty bi-sexual weirdness. And
Nightmare Three is the E-ticket.
Robert Englund, wild conversationalist and
helluva guy, gestures with his hands to make a
point during his elaborate interview.
A CHILD KILLER?
Well, originally Freddy was a child
molester. He'd sniff their little panties. But,
because of the McMartin case in the South
Bay, Wes Craven changed it. He didn't want
to look like he was exploiting child.
molestation. Which, in fact, he wasn't. The
Nightmare One script had been around for
ages.
Child killer? What are children? Children
are the future. Freddy's killing the future.
Freddy hates beauty. He hates youth. He
hates the future. He was never allowed to be
part of it. It's kinda political, y'know? Freddy
hates the future. He's killing the future.
Parents are weary. They don't want to defend
the future anymore. The kids see it, and
Freddy's killing the kids.
DIFFERENT DIRECTORS FOR I, II and III?
In Part II, we didn't have Wes Craven's
advice. Wes Craven conceived, wrote and
directed it. It's all his idea. Wes was not
around for Part II. Many people were
disappointed in Part II. Wes was back on Part
Ill as a writer. I've enjoyed working with every
single director. They're all different. It's
like comparing apples and oranges.
I've never worked harder in my life
than I did for Chuck
Russell, who directed
Part III.
Jack Sholder, I
consider a friend
and I count him as
a friend. He's got
a new movie out
that THRASHER
readers should
definitely check out
soon, called The
Hidden by New Line
Cinema, starring
Kyle MacLachlan
from Blue Velvet.
Wes Craven
just did a
movie in Haiti,
a voodoo-
weirdo
movie,
so it should be pretty cherry, too.
ELM STREET THE BOOK?
There's always been screenplays first, the
book comes second. This is that
phenomenon in American culture It's
always been conceived as a movie. The book
different, it's because they hire a writer to
has always followed. And if the book is
kind of adapt and flesh out what you see on
the screen and make it two or three hundred
pages, however long a book has to be. I ran
into the same experience with V. A lot▸
135
KNOWS
MOFO'S LIFT SUDBOY