As America entered the 1980s and '90s,
popular culture was as inundated with violence and death
as it had ever been.
But now, the advent of 24-hour news on cable TV
delivered an endless cycle of these disturbing stories.
They call it the work of the Green River Killer,
probably one man who has murdered 13 young women
near Seattle, case unsolved.
Coverage of violent crime was sensationalized
and seemed to suggest peril around every corner,
while new terrors emerged
as a mysterious disease was introduced,
adding yet another layer of worry and dread.
Manicured suburbs were filled with anxious teenagers
and their stressed-out parents.
There seemed to be no safe place to hide.
Motive-less, random killings,
sometimes thousands of miles apart.
A Justice Department investigator calls it
"terrifying, an epidemic."
They're known as serial killers,
and according to law enforcement officials,
there are at least 35 of them
roaming the country now, stalking victims.
Teenagers processed the onslaught of news
as kids will do--
feeling vulnerable, alone, and insecure about everything--
from their place in the world
to their awakening sexual feelings.
Audiences were subjected to a seemingly endless cycle
of exploitative news,
presenting threats from every angle,
suggesting a dangerous world for new modern terrors.
The horror genre became dominated by slasher films
where sexualized teenagers were killed
by merciless, inhuman monsters
punishing them for their transgressions
and while neither they, their helpless parents,
nor the police were able to protect them
from these seemingly unstoppable monsters.
I was a teen in a small town.
I had the typical small-town upbringing,
and so the things that scared me were the idea
that someone could break into your house
and get you when you're asleep.
I was scared of the dark. I was scared--
I always thought someone was under the bed.
I thought there was someone in the closet.
And I wasn't necessarily scared of monsters
and ghosts and aliens as a child.
I was more scared of the serial killers.
I grew up in the '80s, when not only
were serial killers in our movies,
like in Halloween and Friday the 13th,
but they were also in our world.
You know, with Bundy and Gacy and Dahmer
and all of those, you know--
serial killers became household names back then.
The assailant entered a house in a quiet,
middle-class neighborhood in the predawn hours on Sunday
through an unlocked window
and attacked the couple while they slept.
It just terrifying to me 'cause I lived in a small town
where we didn't lock our doors.
And that scared me 'cause it was real.
Stand by. Ready? Three, take three. My cue.
Ready, camera three. One center up.
Good evening. I'm David Walker.
And I'm Lois Hart. Now here's the news.
CNN started broadcasting in the 1980s,
and the '80s were packed with sensational stories
about serial killers.
Like the trials of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy,
the Hillside Stranglers,
and the capture of Henry Lee Lucas.
They started getting great ratings
showing all of the murders
that were happening in your neighborhood.
In New London, Connecticut,
police say a man apparently upset over a family problem
went on a shooting spree aboard an Amtrak train
en route from Washington to Boston.
The brand-new network that was suddenly in everyone's homes
telling you what was happening, and what they were showing you
is that the world you live in is unsafe
because killers are out there.
They're in your neighborhood.
The serial killer next door
had become all too real.
In one gruesome case alone, 26 victims' bodies
were carried out of John Wayne Gacy's home in 1978.
In all, Gacy had sexually assaulted
and murdered 33 young men and boys
over a six-year period.
And as always, the horror genre reflected real-life fears
as filmmakers incorporated this national obsession
with psychotic killers
by perfecting the modern slasher movie--
90 minutes of teenagers being chased by a relentless,
enraged, usually masked killer.
The stalker classic Halloween
and films like Friday The 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street
sent teens flocking to the movies
and launched horror franchises
that dominated the multiplexes throughout the '80s.
And that's kind of what '80s horror movies were all about.
They personified evil with this omniscient force
that could not be fucking stopped.
You can throw bullets at these fuckers, man,
throw them off roofs and shit.
Like, they can't be stopped.
Like death, they're relentless.
So, you know, it was a wonderful metaphor
for a young Catholic kid
who was already fucking obsessed with death
that like, you know, even-- I didn't need CliffsNotes
to understand, like, oh, we all die eventually.
With the advent of cable television
and the emergence of video stores,
viewers could channel surf
between real monsters and imaginary killers.
The first horror movie I ever saw
was Friday the 13th.
And for whatever reason, I was left alone
in front of the television when I was too young.
I was eight or nine years old.
And it was definitely one of the worst,
scariest nights of my life, and I didn't see a horror movie
for about two or three years after that.
But it had a great effect on me
and clearly informed me in later years.
I had been working on a couple children's shows,
and they got put on hold.
I came up with the title Friday the 13th,
and I took out a big ad in Variety saying,
"The most terrifying film ever made.
Friday the 13th, coming soon."
And I didn't have anything.
I got a bunch of distributors and countries
where they wanted a piece of something
called Friday the 13th.
When we first came up with this notion
of Friday the 13th,
it was like all these strange little deaths.
Who was gonna go next, and who's gonna survive?
So when we were trying to figure out an ending,
and there were-- [chuckles]-- this took some doing.
I decided that the killer was gonna be Jason's mother.
Betsy Palmer has a public image
of being the nicest person in the world.
So I thought that we could get
at least a few moments of people relaxing.
"Oh, Betsy Palmer's here. We know she's nice."
Did you know that a young boy drowned
the year before those two others were killed?
The counselors weren't paying any attention.
They were making love while that young boy drowned.
His name was Jason.
You wouldn't question that a mother would,
you know, seek revenge for the death of her kid.
So the first movie is definitely horrific,
but, like, it also had this fucking great twist
where it's like, oh, this lady is the killer?
That's kind of crazy.
And then the very next movie, suddenly a star is born.
But they found a way to make Friday the 13th continue
by being like, "Oh, never mind the killer mom.
The boy-- he lived.
He's the fucking bad guy from now on.
And we're gonna put a fucking bag on his head!"
Not real great marketing.
But then they got to the third movie,
put a fucking hockey mask on him,
and that changed everything.
Aaah!
Oh!
You see that on a little icon, you're like, "That's a horror."
My first horror movie, like, besides Gremlins,
was Friday the 13th Part III in 3D.
And it was coming out in the movie theaters,
and I wanted to see it more than anything.
Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D.
- Aah! - A new dimension in terror.
I begged my parents. I begged and begged and begged.
And they were like, "No, no, no.
Under no circumstances can you see that movie.
You're too young. You'll have nightmares forever."
Because these are Jason's woods.
And nobody leaves them alive.
So they were going away on a ski weekend with their friends.
And they had my babysitter, Jill,
who lived across the street, stay with me.
And I remember very vividly them, like, giving Jill
the rundown of, like, "Here are the rules.
Here's the food and some extra money" and yada, yada, yada.
And they were like, "One last thing.
She's gonna try to get you to take her
to see Friday the 13th."
In 3D.
"Under no circumstances-- and I mean no circumstances--
is she allowed to see that movie."
And Jill's like, "Okay, like, how hard is it
to not take a kid to a movie?"
Like, pretty easy. We have a super-fun night,
watch TV, have popcorn, listen to Madonna.
We go upstairs and go to bed, and I hear talking downstairs.
And I snuck downstairs, and I see Jill on the couch
wearing my mom's nightgown with her boyfriend
underneath the quilt that my grandmother made!
And I was like, "Oh, we're gonna go see that movie."
And the next day I said to Jill,
"I'm gonna tell your parents and my parents
if you don't take me to see Friday the 13th in 3D
in the movie theater."
And she was like...
So, sure enough, Saturday matinee.
It was the scariest-- Am I allowed to swear?
The scariest fucking thing to this day
I have ever, ever seen in my life.
I won't go see 3-D movies at all now,
at all, because of it.
It was so fucking scary.
My parents were 110% right.
I should never have seen that movie.
I mean, still to this day, I have nightmares.
But I never told my parents why I was having nightmares.
Fucking hockey mask, man.
I swear I felt like I was born to play that character.
It felt so natural, even from the beginning.
Villains are so scary behind a mask.
It has to be the unknown.
I mean, that has to be a factor to it,
that you're looking at someone, you don't really know
what they really look like.
And not that you'd necessarily want to,
but just that mystery of,
"Who could possibly be behind that mask?"
and the expressionless-ness of it,
whether it's Michael Myers or Jason,
it never changes.
So it's just a scary, unknown entity,
I think, is what makes it so terrifying.
The truth is, Friday the 13th started out
with a reality-based killer, more or less.
You know, it has turned into this sort of iconic story
about this abused kid, Jason.
And I think that inside of that story is something
that's so irresistible to a lot of people.
It's like Revenge of the Nerds on steroids, you know,
and you get to kick ass
all these people that are bugging you.
And I think it is very dependable.
If you're gonna go see a Friday the 13th movie,
you know at this point what you're gonna get.
And we always try to deliver on that, and then a little more.
Probably the biggest thing about Jason
that the audience fears
is the unstoppable nature of the character.
No matter what you do to stop that guy from coming after you,
it doesn't work.
You light the guy on fire,
you blow him up,
you stab him,
you hack him with an ax...
...he still keeps coming.
After Friday the 13th,
it looked like these little movies,
you know, relatively low-budget movies
that featured a lot of blood and special effects
were going to be successful.
The success of this new wave of genre films
attracted exciting young filmmakers
and inspired them to make horror films infused with fresh ideas,
creative storytelling, innovative cinematography
and spit-and-glue special effects
to get the biggest bang for their buck.
The only reason we ever got into horror in the first place
for my first film, Evil Dead--
we were terrified of losing the investors' money.
And we knew that horror films was a staple that was out there.
You could get them into drive-ins.
You didn't have to get in fancy theaters.
You could use no-name actors
wearing regular clothes, driving regular cars.
Nothing had to be that fancy.
Why have you disturbed our sleep,
awakened us from our ancient slumber?
Sam I met in eighth grade.
I was walking down the hallway, West Maple Junior High School.
He's sitting in the middle of the hallway
dressed like Sherlock Holmes, playing with dolls.
I was like, "Oh, man.
I'm going around that guy."
I mean, he really left an indelible mark.
I'm like, "People don't do that.
They don't dress like Sherlock Holmes."
And he claimed later he was making a movie.
I'm like, "I didn't see a camera.
I didn't see it anywhere.
I think you were just being a little whack job."
Oh, God. Look at this.
Sam Raimi took a class and read about the Necronomicon.
It was like the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
And he thought, "Hey, that's cool.
Like, that's just this weird book that has conjurings,
and once you conjure them, like, what happens?
I don't know."
So that was really intriguing to him.
And so I think he brought that up
when we decided to make a horror movie.
This guy was a real turd, you know.
Everybody hated him. Everybody.
Like you, kinda.
Released in 1981,
The Evil Dead is the story of a group of friends
that unleash an ancient curse conjured from a Sumerian text.
The film did what horror does best--
created a meta world with layers of subtext.
You never see the villain.
The evil spirit possesses these kids one by one.
As one critic put it,
"The monster is the camera itself
and whoever is behind it."
In other words, the viewer is part of the scene,
whether they want to be or not.
You hear an incantation. Something comes up.
It possesses you, you know, and has malevolent intent.
So you open-- you opened the wrong book, man.
And so I think Sam kind of ran with it from there.
And Evil Dead came along.
Evil Dead is the most simplistic plot ever,
and it's one that we see to come over and over--
group of kids go to a cabin,
they find some fucked-up shit there,
and then the movie just keeps going.
But what Evil Dead did is at a time period
where if you were going to a cabin,
you were going to encounter a maniacal redneck killer.
Instead, the entire house is demonic.
Everything is cursed around it.
And just by being there, you're getting the curse, too.
Our special effects were very crude.
Tom Sullivan's like, "I know how to make these
special, cool molds.
We'll make a mold of the actor's face,
and then you can sculpt it
and then put an appliance on their face."
Right? So we'll use plaster of Paris.
Well, anyone who's used plaster of Paris knows
it heats up and as it dries.
Well, okay, so we put a light coating of Vaseline
on Betsy Baker's face.
She was the first guinea pig.
This thing starts to heat up. She's like, "How much longer?"
So finally like five minutes later, we go,
"Okay, Betsy, no problem, we're gonna get you out of that."
So all you have to do is lean forward, right?
'Cause the weight of it, of the plaster of Paris,
will pull it off your face.
So it did-- went right off her face, right into her hand.
She looks into the mask, and all of her eyelashes
were in the mold.
It pulled all of her eyelashes off of her face.
And she said, in the most kind of remarkable way--
she was like more fascinated-- she goes,
"Those are all my eyelashes."
We're like, "Yeah, Betsy. Sorry."
And that was just the beginning.
And then when it finally did come out,
we started to get some pretty bad reviews.
A paper in Atlanta called it
Evil Dead: The Sickest of the Sick.
Sam Raimi took every bad idea he's ever had..."
Ever had. He only made one movie.
"...and put it into a low-budget blender."
I'm like, "What a dick. What a dickish thing to say."
But this new kind of filmmaking,
one that threw in everything
audiences come to love about horror films--
the campy special effects, ham-fisted dialogue,
and handsome action hero--
impressed the one guy that mattered.
Enter Stephen King.
He sees it at the Cannes Film Festival.
It's a horror movie. Let's go see it.
And he writes an article in Twilight Zone Magazine
and calls it "the most ferociously original
horror film of the year."
We spit our coffee. We're like, "Wait a second.
Stephen King said that?"
And I don't even know how we tracked him down.
But, "Sir, could we please-- please, can we use that quote?"
He goes, "Yeah."
We were like, "Oh, my God."
So that's on the poster to this day.
Stephen King-- I mean, what an endorsement.
Evil Dead was banned in most countries
and slashed by censors.
It was also on the video nasties list.
Sam Raimi made Evil Dead as this homespun,
guttural exploitation film,
and it's really freaking scary.
We forget about how scary the original Evil Dead is
in light of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness
and everything to come.
But that first film was horrifying.
It's violent.
The decision to make a completely carnage-filled
horror movie was also a business decision of like,
"We don't want to get lost in the shuffle.
We have to-- This has to be, like,
something people remember when they watch it."
Aaah!
The Evil Dead was a hit.
Audiences ate it up,
and Sam Raimi had a franchise on his hands.
My theory is that horror works.
It's one of the few genres that can get
an audience to react viscerally.
You know, after we put the first Evil Dead out,
we would sit in movie theaters to watch it play with audiences.
And we didn't care about the movie after a while.
It was, we just watched the audience.
You'd see a couple, they got a jacket over their head,
and they're screening the movie
through their sleeve of the jacket,
'cause they only want to see parts of the screen.
They love that feeling that they got of like,
"I'm dead. I'm gonna be dead."
And then after the movie, "I'm not dead."
It's probably very cathartic, why horror works.
As if teenagers didn't already have enough to fear
in their waking hours,
Wes Craven came up with something
even more terrifying to torture their subconscious.
We think of Nightmare on Elm Street
as being mainstream now,
but it was a bit alternative back in the day.
I think the original fans were dorm rats
passing around the same old video
and heavy-metal kids
and then their brothers and sisters
or their younger brothers and sisters,
and then, you know, it just began
to permeate the entire culture.
The idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street
came to Wes Craven after he read stories
about healthy young adults screaming incoherently
before dying in their sleep, a mysterious disorder
that came to be known as Nocturnal Death Syndrome.
Craven conjured up the story of a villain
that terrorizes you in your sleep.
And if you die in your dream, you're done for.
While writing the script,
Craven named the nightmare killer after a childhood bully,
Fred Krueger.
Nightmare on Elm Street started on a Friday.
And I couldn't get anyone to go see it with me,
'cause I wanted to see it, like, at noon
and nobody would go and see it with me.
So I had to go see it by myself.
And, of course, who's in the theater at noon?
Nobody. Me. Just me.
So I'm sitting in the theater by myself,
and I'm in Greenville, North Carolina.
And I start watching this movie,
and I get so scared...
Shit.
...and I get a cramp in my leg.
I had to walk up and down the aisle
'cause I wouldn't leave the theater.
I had to see what was gonna happen.
And I changed seats and I moved closer to the exit.
And, I mean, I was terrified. That movie really scared me.
It actually scared me the first three times I saw it.
I had to go back and see it again,
and it scared me almost more so than the first time
because I knew what was gonna happen,
so I was scared before it happened.
That movie was awesome.
Nightmare on Elm Street is about a serial killer,
Freddy Krueger, who haunts you in your dreams, you know?
And he is-- he's taken revenge on the children of Elm Street
for something that their parents did.
And he comes to them in their dreams,
and if you die in your dreams, you die for real.
Dreams are a safe place.
Dreams are where fun things happen.
Dreams are where you wake up and it's over.
And the idea that whatever taunts you
and stalks you in your dreams can come to reality,
or if you die in your dreams, you die for good--
I mean, that's beyond your control. That's terrifying.
As a horror theme and as a trap,
the nightmares-- the dream, the bad dream, the gimmick--
it's universal.
To have also it inhabited
by this man that lives in that world...
this boogieman that inhabits the dream,
once you've heard of him, you know,
he can get to your subconscious...
Who are you?
...and take you down, down the stairs
into the nightmare boiler room.
That movie had such a deep impact on me.
Took place in the suburbs.
I grew up in the suburbs, newly integrated suburbs.
So there was sort of a feeling of unease.
You didn't know how your neighbors felt about you.
You didn't know what would pop off.
We had people throwing tomatoes against our house
and all kinds of stuff.
So the suburban horror feel had me from hello.
Wes wanted that.
He wanted this sort of damaged suburbia.
And he was making the adults in these movies
vulnerable and flawed.
That meant the kids were sort of without adults for advice.
It really dealt with the sins of our fathers.
I mean, these children were pretty innocent.
It was what their parents did
that they were being punished for.
It was out of their control.
This man was coming for them
because of something their parents did.
So that sort of "sins of our father" theme
that ran through that movie, I thought was really scary.
There's something about the way Freddy moves
that's animal-like, that's cat-like,
that's even reptilian at times.
And I think that that's what I bring
to sort of Freddy's scare factor.
The claw with the knife fingers
on the old gardening glove--
that not only manifests great in silhouette and shadow,
but it's something about it extending evil
or amplifying the evil that is just Freddy.
That is the scariest thing-- those knives,
the taunting nature of his attacks.
Freddy Krueger definitely was my scariest villain.
The push is on to find a cure for AIDS.
Since June of 1981, about 1,800 cases have been reported,
mostly in the gay community,
and more than 600 people have died.
In the early '80s, nothing was more terrifying
than an unidentified virus
that could incubate in the body for years
and, when it struck, was a death sentence.
There was panic in the air as the AIDS epidemic
decimated a generation of gay men.
During the process, many people lost their sense of compassion
and replaced it with homophobia.
And AIDS generally caused
and believed to be caused by homosexual promiscuity.
While doctors tried desperately to save lives
and scientists pieced together how to fight it,
the Reagan administration ignored the crisis.
But horror filmmakers did not.
When I moved to New York in the early '80s,
AIDS did not exist in anybody's awareness.
And then there was this thing called "gay cancer"
in the Village, which just seems arbitrary and strange.
And then suddenly it had a name-- AIDS.
And then suddenly people were dying.
And it was a slow-motion horror movie.
I'd been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex
for two and a half years now,
and there's absolutely no drug I can take,
and I'm slowly getting worse and worse.
That's why we're here, to make a point.
It took something which was potent and magical
at that point-- sexuality--
and mixed it with the possibility of death.
I was just coming into my own as an adult
during the AIDS crisis, and I moved to New York,
where The Village Voice was writing all of these articles
on the lack of response the government had
towards the AIDS crisis, and all these people were dying.
You know, you were like,
"Is being my true self gonna kill me?"
The political climate was such
that they didn't even speak of it.
And so AIDS was a very terrifying thing
because there was so much that was unknown about it.
It is hard to explain to people
who didn't live through the AIDS crisis how bad it was.
AIDS is surreptitiously spreading
throughout our population,
and yet we have no accurate measure of its scope.
I've asked the Department of Health and Human Services
to add the AIDS virus
to the list of contagious diseases
for which immigrants and aliens seeking permanent residence
in the United States can be denied entry.
You had people in Congress
saying you could get AIDS from mosquitoes,
water fountains, someone spitting at you.
You had idiots like me believing stories
that someone at the mall was gonna scratch me
with a needle and give me AIDS.
We were out of our minds with panic.
Movies like The Thing and The Fly
acted as a release valve for the feelings of helplessness
against a killer no one could see.
And you find that vampire fiction pops up
and gets super popular when there's a disease around.
Fright Night is a perfect example,
which really encapsulates all those fears of the sexually,
you know, dick-slinging dude who lives next door.
Like, what's he's spreading around?
When I did Fright Night, which would have been in '84,
uh, there was just some kind of disease
that seemed to be affecting a lot of gays,
but nobody knew why.
I was losing gay friends that I loved.
And I lost somebody that I really cared about.
But we-- it was a sickness.
We knew it, but we didn't know what the hell it was.
People were starting to die.
But the word "AIDS" was not around.
You don't have to be afraid of me.
I know what it's like being different.
Only they won't pick on you anymore or beat you up.
I'll see to that.
All you have to do is take my hand.
When I had Evil Ed,
and Jerry says, "Take my hand"--
Jerry Dandridge, the vampire, says, to Evil Ed, the boy,
"Take my hand and I'll make sure they never bother you
or bully you in school again,"
and that was speaking to every gay kid out there
that felt different and that couldn't come out about it.
I put the gay overtones into it.
Billy Cole's relationship with Jerry Dandridge--
he's the Guardian, the ghoul,
the one who protects him during the day.
But they could be lovers. Who knows?
What are you--
All that was in there and it was meant
to promote tolerance, you know,
but in the day when that was not fashionable at all.
So, yes, that was in there, and that was because
I was touched and I was moved because I was losing friends.
Horror movies are where we talk about
what we don't want to talk about in day-to-day life--
outcasts and marginalized people who society feared.
And I think it's a very, very short step sideways
to get to gay men and the fear of them during the AIDS crisis
and how sex and death and marginalized people
were all linked together.
When I came out with Fright Night,
it was about vampires,
and I went around with everybody,
all the studios were saying to me, "Vampires?
Nobody wants to see vampires."
Because nobody wants to see vampire killers anymore,
or vampires either.
Apparently all they want are demented madmen
running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins.
The vampire genre was dead and buried.
One of the things that's also really interesting
about vampires is they're the monster that looks like us.
They live amongst us undetected.
Hello, Charlie.
We don't know if our neighbor is a vampire.
I mean, they don't go outdoors at night.
There are no mirrors in their house.
They don't cast a shadow.
There's something very funny at the idea of that--
of a boy, of a teenage horror fan
trying to convince the police, his mother, his friends,
that there is a vampire living next door.
That's a funny idea.
You hear that idea, and you smile and giggle.
They did kill a girl over there.
How late did you stay up studying?
Mom, I'm not sick!
The guy did have fangs,
and a bat did fly over my head,
and a second later, he stepped out of the shadows.
Don't you see what that means?
Wait, let me guess.
What?
He's a vampire.
A what?
If you look at Fright Night,
it's Charley Brewster, the kid next door,
trying to stop the bloodsucker next door.
And his girlfriend is in danger of being seduced.
But the real hero's journey is Peter Vincent.
Peter Vincent's a great vampire killer
because he's a ham actor and his whole life
is built on what he considers a lie.
Vampire killers? There are no vampires.
That's the most ridiculous thing in the world, and then...
- Come on, let's get out of here. - Just a minute.
That goes for you, too, Ed.
I expect we have a lot of the same interests,
you know, in horror movies and the occult.
Something wrong, Mr. Vincent?
Peter Vincent rises to the occasion.
He goes in with Charley into the Dandridge house
to do battle with the most ferocious vampire
and his ghoulish assistant, Billy Cole.
He finds his courage. He's The Cowardly Lion.
He does that because he likes the kids.
He likes Charley, and he likes Amy.
And if he doesn't help them,
Jerry Dandridge is gonna turn her into a vampire.
A horror movie is effective in direct proportion
to how much you care about the people
whose lives are in danger.
Ah! Ah!
Aaaah!
No!
In 1987, the criticism of aggressive capitalism
in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street
was somewhat lost on a public
that saw glamour and status in the pursuit of more money
or drugs or cars or everything,
a culture that celebrated excess.
But horror films like Poltergeist and Society
made their own commentary
about America's conspicuous consumerism
and economic inequality.
Just a year after Wall Street was released,
They Live tackled America's existential crisis
of averse and greed
and the conflict between the haves and the have nots.
I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.
And I'm all out of bubble gum.
My favorite two films are The Shining and They Live.
Like, the first time I ever heard of They Live
was a friend of mine in middle school,
and he couldn't remember the name of the movie.
But he kept telling me about-- he's like,
"There's this film where this guy,
he puts on a pair of sunglasses and he sees aliens."
And I thought he was completely making it up.
I've got one that can see.
They Live is sort of a movie
that's light-years ahead of its time.
It's really a film about the reality that we live in.
They Live is incredibly about Reaganomics.
Like, that is the focus of it.
We see this guy. He is working-class.
He's going from gig to gig, trying to start-- find jobs.
The movie even opens with him in kind of an encampment
in downtown L.A., trying to find another gig
and figure out what's next.
And through a course of events,
he happens upon a pair of sunglasses
that literally reveal the world to him
and show him that everything
that he has believed about society is utter shit.
You're always looking for a visual way in movies
to get your point across.
And in this case, in They Live,
I wanted to show the difference
between the reality that we all live in
and the reality that exists for the aliens,
which is very different.
So I came up with sunglasses.
What's your problem?
With the glasses on, you see the truth.
You take the glasses off, it's all deception.
I said, what's your problem?
The first time I saw
you know, the reveal, it's like,
"That shit's creepy."
I was like, you know, "What was the inspiration
for that," you know? And I asked John and he said,
"Well, it came to me in a dream one night,"
and I said, "Whoa. I don't want to be in your head."
Well, the role in They Live of John Nada
was a working man.
He was a guy who works with his hands.
He was working poor.
So a movie star-type guy doesn't-- I don't believe.
But Roddy I believed 'cause he came from the streets.
He had some mileage on him.
He was perfect for the role.
Frank and Nada met as two homeless guys.
There's a place over on Fourth Street.
They got hot food and showers.
I'm going that way if you want me to show you.
And what we represented was the working homeless.
Nobody ever talks about that.
But there are a lot of guys who are homeless.
They just can't afford housing.
It reeks of how our government does not take care of us.
In the richest country in the world,
still you have all this, you know,
devastating homelessness.
You have, you know, a lot of haves.
And nobody wants to deal with the have nots.
They Live doesn't feel like a lot of '80s horror films,
because when we look at 1980s, what we're seeing
is these really flashy horror films,
and they're about upper middle-class kids
who are ripped from their, you know, fancy lives
and forced to deal with a killer.
But They Live is talking about poor society from the beginning.
It's a marginalized group who is fighting this massive machine.
Look, you crazy mother--
- Put these on. - Hey! Stay away from me.
I'm telling you, you dumb son of a--
I think, like, the thing that I found most impressive
about the film initially was the big fight scene...
...that they just did this long sequence without any music,
and it's just these characters beating up each other.
I don't want to fight you. Stop it!
No!
Roddy Piper, the actor who plays John Nada,
is a professional wrestler.
And what better opportunity than to do a very long,
involved, extended fight scene?
And Keith David was his costar,
and Keith was absolutely ready to go.
So they rehearsed for a month and a half,
and in the backyard of our office.
Jeff Imada was the stunt coordinator,
and he worked with them, and they came up
with this big fight,
and we shot it in an alley, downtown L.A.
God, we had a good time.
I loved working on that fight. It was great.
The worst part was fighting in that stinky-ass alleyway.
They had to put rubber on the floor
and paint it like it was the ground
so we wouldn't have to be on a nasty, you know--
'cause downtown L.A. is no fun.
Fuck!
And it wasn't until years later that I looked at that
and I realized that the reason that works
is because it's not a pointless fight scene,
is that that's a fight scene that represents
sort of the reality we live in.
It represents the differences in people's political beliefs
and the fact that you can't change somebody's mind
in a very simple way.
That's the American way.
They want us to fight with each other.
But our cause is common.
They pit the poor Black man against the poor white man
and tell them that he's better than him, he deserves--
when, you know, together, you're far more powerful
than you are apart.
They Live is about what happens in our American society
when greed is unchecked...
and the society loses its core values.
The underground terrorist network
has been destroyed here on the west coast.
Well, I've tried to avoid statements in my movies
since I think they don't work.
But in this case, in the case of "They Live,"
I was so fed up with Reaganomics.
What I mean by that is unrestrained capitalism.
It was a cry in the darkness
because Reagan was enormously popular
and no one else saw things the way I did.
And I just had to. I had to do it.
- ...like shit. - What happened?
So that's what They Live is about.
It's about [chuckles] the fact
that Reaganism is controlled by aliens.
- - You're moving on.
Hey, what's wrong, baby?
By the late '80s, after a decade of hits,
the great slasher franchises
seemed to have burned themselves out.
The genre seemingly stalled.
By the early 1990s, Gen-Xers turned disinterest
into a cultural trend.
Disaffected and cynical,
the so-called "slacker generation"
was bored of everything, including genre films.
The horror movie tropes were played out.
Audiences knew all the rules,
or at least they thought they did.
Well, I'm getting ready to watch a video.
Really? What?
Oh, just some scary movie.
- You like scary movies? - Uh-huh.
In 1996, I was working on my PhD
at Florida State University.
There was a knock on my door.
A guy I know from class, he said,
"Hey, man, I'm taking you to a movie."
And I said, "No, I'm halfway through a story.
I gotta do this," and he said, "No, I'm taking you to a movie."
And it was Scream.
Why do you want to know my name?
'Cause I want to know who I'm looking at.
And I was there myself alone for the next six nights.
I saw Scream seven nights in the theater,
in its first run, I guess.
And ever since then, I watch it probably every four weeks,
if not more.
I think it is fairly genius.
Is this some kind of joke?
More of a game, really.
The idea for Scream was a little twofold.
I wrote a one-act play in college about a young girl
on the phone with a serial killer,
and it just sat in a box and nothing ever happened to it.
And I forgot all about it, and then years later,
I was housesitting for a friend, and I walked into the den
and I saw that the window was open.
And I went, "Has this window been open the whole time?"
And I got so terrified and called a friend of mine up.
And I said, "All right, I think someone's in the house."
So I got a knife and I walked through the house,
just like a final girl,
and I was looking through the-- in the shower.
I was looking under the bed. I was looking in the closet.
And I got so scared, and my friend was on the phone,
going...
Terrifying me, scared.
And then we got into this big debate about horror films,
and then I went, "Oh!
I wrote a comedy about this in college."
And so I dug it out and I brushed it off.
That was the first scene.
Scream was another one of those kind of like, you know,
touchstone kind of horror movies for me growing up,
one of the best theatrical experiences I ever had.
And I was so blown away by especially the first
like six or seven minutes or whatever it is
with Drew Barrymore.
Drew Barrymore opening up a horror film
and then dying, you know, in 10 minutes--
that was unprecedented.
That's the alternate ending to the movie.
She lives.
It was a calculated risk, and we didn't know whether
the audience would even forgive us for that.
They did, thankfully. But yeah.
It was a very risky film in many, many ways.
That first opening scene was like, I think--
I think still probably one of the best sequences
in any movie, not just horror movies.
It's one of my favorite of all time.
I think that the film resonated with a large audience
because it was this beautiful blend of camp and culture.
It felt extremely relevant.
Okay, bye now.
If you hang up on me, you'll die just like your mother!
I remember my parents--
like, when my dad got a cellphone in the car,
like, that was, like, mind-blowing, you know?
Like, the killer having a cellphone in your yard?
It's like, what?
Like, that is brand-new for the killer to be like
also really, like, technologically savvy.
Horrifying.
Before Scream, slasher movies had kind of existed
in a side world where there were no slasher movies.
What Scream did was it allowed
that Halloween existed, that Jason Voorhees existed,
that this whole history of slashers existed.
And, to me, that was revolutionary.
You know, Scream was sort of the first movie
that I feel like actually talked about horror movies so openly
and allowed them to be exposed.
There are certain rules that one must abide by
in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
The rules of horror-- I had the luxury of the '80s.
I had the luxury of all the tropes.
When I went into Scream, I was able to look
at all the movies that had come before it
and sort of acknowledge them.
Scream revitalized the genre.
The meta, self-referential winks and nods to the horror films
the audience had grown up watching
thrilled fans and sparked renewed interest
in scary movies.
Scream treated its audience with respect
by acknowledging all the clichés of the genre
and then using them anyway to scare the hell out of them.
Once again, clever filmmakers were elevating
and refreshing the form,
and the audience was the true winner.
You know, what I love about Scream
is that it's a love letter to the genre,
but it's a love letter that calls out the formula,
the conventions, the excess of the genre.
But it's not the kind of parody
that undercuts and seeks to destroy.
It's a kind of parody that hopes to burn off the excess
and let the genre move through better.
This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer
comes back to life for one last scare.
Ah!
Not in my movie.
I think Scream, because it was able to summarize
all the great things that we loved about these movies
and kind of also do a really good version of that itself,
it's almost like the genre really peaked there
because, you know, after Scream,
there wasn't a ton to say 'cause they kind of said it all.
They at least summarized it.
First test screening we had,
and the only test screening we had,
the test scores went through the roof.
I just had the feeling filming certain scenes
that this was extraordinary stuff, you know?
I had no idea how big it would be.
I had no idea its everlasting impression
or its everlasting effect that it would have on horror.
I just wrote a movie I wanted to see.
I was just trying to get noticed.
I was just trying to get a career.
I just wanted to tell a story.
I wanted to tell a horror story.
It's been always my goal to do my Halloween.
I look back at it as just a bunch of memories, you know?
It was all my memories with Wes Craven.
He was always a mentor to me.
He was always selfless and giving of his time,
and he always had answers to my questions.
I remember asking him, like,
"What does it feel like to be the master of horror?"
And he would look at me and go, "I don't know.
You should ask John Carpenter."
I think horror is a funhouse mirror
that reflects society's anxieties and dreads back at us.
Horror is most vital in times of stress,
be it political, economic, environmental, whatever it is.
I think horror is always a pulse on our society.
It never really goes away, you know?
So horror stories allow us to process through
from beginning to end
of whatever the bad experiences in our life.
Horror lets us imagine
a light at the end of the tunnel.