 [home]
[news]
[reviews]
[features]
|
|
"GORE IS AN ORGASM!"
Jason Arnopp interviews Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday
director Adam Marcus...
It's October 22, 2005. LA's excellent Screamfest event is hosting a Friday The 13th party, in honour of the franchise's 25th year. As a big fan of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, I make a bee-line (what exactly is a bee-line, mind?) for that flick's director Adam Marcus. The tape recorder comes on and the man is voluntarily grilled to within an inch of his damn life!
Slasherama: Hello Sir! I don't say this to all the directors, I swear, but Jason Goes To Hell is one of my favourite entries in the series. For one thing, it's different to everything else. It's certainly got the best quality splashy gore, too.
Adam Marcus: "Well, I think we have the single goriest death in any Friday The 13th, which is the campsite girl split up the middle. Getting carved in half is about as heinous as it gets. Making that movie doesn't seem too long ago - although it's weird that the girl who played Baby Stephanie is here tonight (see the John D LeMay feature for picture). She's 13 and that's a mindf**k. That's crazy! Other than that, though, nobody has changed all that much. I was hanging out with Erin Gray (Diana Kimble in the movie), who really should be called Dorian Gray, because she's ageless. It's just awesome that finally horror has become so respected. Now, people are looking back at these movies and thinking, 'Y'know what? Maybe there is something of value here'.
Slasherama: Jason Goes To Hell was the first Friday to be produced by New Line. How did that go?
Marcus: "Well, a big part of our process involved going to them from Paramount. Being sort of The House That Freddy Built, in some respects, they really knew how to treat a movie like ours. They were actually very loving and respectful with the film - they treated it like it mattered. I got the impression that Paramount's attitude would be, 'Oh these things make a lot of money, but let's not talk about them'. But New Line embraced it. When they first made the poster with the snake coming out of the mask. I said, 'That's really heinous - who's gonna want to look at a poster like that?'. Their response was, 'We'll get banned. That's what we want!'. It did indeed make a cover story on USA Today, two days before the movie opened, because some theatre openers didn't wanna show that rather phallic snake - it looks like an angry penis, coming out of the mouth! All that stuff only made people wanna see the movie more."
Slasherama: As a 11-year-old, you spent a few days on the set of the original Friday The 13th, right?
Marcus: "That's right. Sean (Cunningham) has always been like a spiritual father to me and Noel (Cunningham) is very much like a brother. It's kinda great - tonight's a really nice get-together."
Slasherama: When Jason Goes To Hell... came out, a certain proportion of fans lashed out at it. With the passing of time, has it come to be reassessed?
Marcus: "I think so. Look, some people only want to see Jason in a Friday movie and I understand it. But my feeling was that there were already eight movies to rent on video. Enjoy them! Why would you want to do the same-old same-old? For me, the people who love JGTH love it because it's a breath of fresh air. It had more of a sense of humour, like Part VI, which was more of a template for us than any of the other movies - apart from the first one, of course. As horror evolves and people are more accepting of all its sub-genres, maybe people are starting to think that our movie is kinda cool, despite not being what they expected. The other part of it is, the advent of DVD. When (co-scripter and bit-player) Dean Lorey and I did the DVD commentary, we really took a tongue-in-cheek approach to it and had fun. Perhaps because we explained why we took that route with the movie, suddenly I'm getting a lot more e-mails from fans, going, 'Wow, I didn't get it the first time'. The thing is, we still bring Jason back at the end. When Jason burst up through the floor at the end of that film, even people in theatres who were hating the movie went out of their minds! We just didn't wanna tread over the same ground again, that was all. People started saying it was like The Hidden, and we were like, 'Yeah, I guess. It's also like a lot of movies where people jump bodies'. We weren't necessarily doing The Hidden by any means. For us, it was more about introducing more mythology. Freddy's history was so creative and we wanted to do the same with Jason. I didn't wanna do a wrestling movie."
Slasherama: So who's idea was the mad final scene, which paved the way for Freddy Vs Jason?
Marcus "That was my, Noel and Dean's idea. A lot of people think New Line set that up, but it's not true at all. We've actually been in a lawsuit situation where someone else claimed they came up with that idea! We were a bunch of screwed-up guys talking about all the in-jokes we were putting into the movie, then I said, 'Hey, New Line owns Freddy. Do you think we could get Freddy's glove?'. Then we thought about how cool that ending would be, with Freddy dragging Jason down to Hell. At the first screening of the film, (New Line top brass) Bob Shaye, Mike De Luca and Mark Ordesky were all sitting together. When the hand came up and pulled that mask down, I have never seen three film executives smile bigger! They were so thrilled, because suddenly that whole idea was born!"
Slasherama: If you were offered another Friday The 13th movie, how would you tackle it now?
Marcus: "God, what would I do? I don't know if you could go back to a 'regular' Friday The 13th movie now. It's interesting: because they're almost taking the series in this King Kong vs Godzilla direction, pairing Jason up with different villains, I think they can capitalise on the idea that these two guys are really Hell's assassins. What if there's a bigger, higher purpose to these characters? Freddy Vs Jason is a great wrestling picture, so maybe now it's time to get a little heavy with the concept. Maybe it's time to create a little mythology for these two characters. When you look at the monsters of old - Dracula, The Mummy - there was a higher purpose to that, a larger story being told. So that's the way I would go."
Slasherama: But what would you do if there was another Friday movie, focussing on Jason alone?
Marcus: "Let's see. I thought that Jason Takes Manhattan was such an amazing idea: take the baddest guy and put him in the baddest city. I think that if you really wanna do something with Jason - and this comes back to the fact that things like Texas Chainsaw and The Devil's Rejects are big again - you need to return to old-school Jason. Go back to roots and make it, 'Oh my God, we're in the dark'. But I would take it away from Crystal Lake. What happens, say, if Jason's in the middle of a gang war? What happens when you put him into settings with a larger age range of people getting killed? Today's horror audience isn't just kids any more - they're reaching into their 40s and 50s. Some of them want to see themselves onscreen. The first Friday The 13th movies, and even Part Two, were real down-and-dirty, scare-the-crap-outta-ya movies. The gore was a big part of it, yes, but... I really feel that the gore is the orgasm. The real fun is in getting to it. The thrill of the chase is the stuff that makes Friday great."
Slasherama: Jason Goes To Hell is, for me, one of the series' scarier entries. Maybe because Jason has a human face - or, rather, several.
Marcus: "Thankyou. Maybe it's the idea of not knowing where Jason's going to come from. The real inspiration for Jason Goes To Hell was not The Hidden, it was John Carpenter's The Thing, which is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. When you consider that Carpenter's shooting with nine or ten guys in a scene, but covering them all brilliantly... the movie also has great effects, but it's more about the bump in the dark. The feeling of, 'Oh my God, what's coming?'. The more movies go back to that idea, the better. One of the things I was trying to do with Jason Goes To Hell - at the young age of 23! - was make sure it scared me. Sean, Wes Craven and all these guys really respect the art of scaring people. It's not just a gag. I gotta tell you man, there's a real reason why horror and comedies are still making money at the box office: they're a communal experience and they're not quite the same on DVD. You can't go a good rollercoaster ride at home: you've gotta go to the park! I wanted Jason Goes To Hell to be scary and fun, and sometimes combined the two by making people laugh then scream. There's one scene in which Adam Cranner - who plays Ward in the diner - comes out of the diner with the gun, pretending to be a cowboy. The audience giggled and then suddenly Steven Culp is coming through the parking lot and breaks Ward's bone through this skin. That creates a much deeper drop - you go from laughing to, 'Oh my God, did that just happen?'. I was trying to take people on a wider ride of emotion."
Slasherama: In the original Friday The 13th, we see Steve Christie in a diner. Was your JGTH diner meant to be the same one?
Marcus: "Honestly, no. It was interesting: Sean had actually mentioned the first movie's diner when we were putting JGTH together. We didn't wanna recreate that diner, because it was so small and we knew how much action needed to take place. But trust me: I went back to the first, second and sixth movies, which inspired us. Part VI had some great humour and acting in it, which made it one of the best entries. Tom McLoughlin is an excellent actor's director. In our movie we changed the county to Cunningham's County, but you have to have a certain amount of respect for what came before you, in order to re-write the book."
Slasherama: What are you up to at the moment?
Marcus: "I'm working on four movies at the moment! I'm directing a film which my wife and I wrote, called Rage, which Kevin Spacey is producing - we've been calling it a cross between War Games and Silence Of The Lambs - it's about a teenage kid who's a genius, but is terrified of the world because when he was 11 his best friend was murdered and he found the body. Now he's 17 and another little girl is killed by the same killer. There's another movie I wrote and directed called The Hill, which is a horror film. Kind of an ode to the 70s: dark and scary, somewhere between the original Assault On Precinct 13 and Race With The Devil. Not a gorefest, but scary-scary-scary. Gravity is a hardcore action movie, sort of in the Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels area, about a woman who runs a crew. On the eve of this big job, she witnesses the murder of a prostitute but nothing is what it seems. Black Autumn is a Fox movie, and it's a cross between Suspiria and Harvest Home: it's about an orphan who gets accepted to this remarkable girl's prep school. She has epileptic spells which get worse at the school: we start to wonder whether the school itself is affecting her."
Slasherama: Jesus. You've got a lot going on. Are we witnessing the crest of your career, sir?
Marcus: "Well, I nearly walked away from directing for several years, because all I was being offered were movies with Part numbers at the end. I was offered Leprachaun In Da Hood, one of the Amityvilles and Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings. I respect all those movies and I'm in no way snobbish about it, but I'm a writer as well as a director. I wrote a bunch of stuff for different studios, then made this romantic comedy Let It Snow in 2000, which did very well and burst it all open for me. It's a sweet little movie: a romantic comedy which is like nothing else I've done."
Slasherama: Congratulations, sir. For giving us one of the finest Friday sequels, you well deserve it!
Marcus: "Thank you very much!"
Thanks to the Screamfest event for inviting us in 2005. We'll be back in 2006, just as YOU should be, sir/madam!
[Interview with JGTH star Steven Williams]
[Interview with JGTH star John D LeMay]
[JGTH review]
[Features Menu]
[Back To Top]
[Home]
© Copyright Slasherama 2005. No part of this interview, or the photographs, may be reproduced without permission.
Or Jason'll get ya. And we don't just mean Arnopp. Or Donovan.
|
|