Crave Online: First I have to tell you I loved Zombie Strippers.
Robert Englund: [Laughs] Thank you. Yes, Zombie Strippers, that's something that we must have on our resume. Every boy needs Zombie Strippers on his resume.
Crave Online: If you're going to do a movie about zombie strippers, that's how you do Zombie Strippers.
Robert Englund: Exactly, yes. [Laughs]
Crave Online: Can you tell when it's going to be something special versus just something you'll have fun with?
Robert Englund: Well, I know I'm going to have fun. I've just been on a lucky curve. After I did Freddy Vs. Jason, I worked on a reality show for a year that did not come to fruition at CBS. After that in 2005, I had this stack of scripts by the side of my bed and I just said yes to all of them. It began with 2001 Maniacs and then Behind the Mask with Scott Glosserman and then I did a cameo in Hatchet for Adam Green and then I ran up and worked for another guy up in Canada and had fun up there in a movie called Heartstopper and I came back and did Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer. I've been working with all these young kids. What's interesting is there's sort of a nostalgic glance back to '70s and '80s horror that they all have. They have a kind of affinity for it, a kind of love for that hand made use of practicals that was back then, before CGI and some of the technologies that we use today. There's kind of an affection for that moment of time from these young directors, almost like young musicians discovering rock from a previous generation. So it's been really fun for me to play. With Jack Brooks, I was able to really have fun and do some physical comedy, some physical schtick that I haven't done since I was a stage actor, so that was a lot of fun.
Crave Online: How do filmmakers approach you?
Robert Englund: Well, it's pretty traditional. It's submitted through my agent and I get the scripts sent to me and I look at it. Sometimes it's pig in a poke. Any film you make is a crap shoot. Look at what happened to Speed Racer. I would have bet on Speed Racer before I would have bet on Scooby-Doo but Scooby-Doo, they made three of them and Speed Racer is the biggest failure of the summer. So it's hard. We all know it's a crap shoot out there but with these films, I remember Behind the Mask was just this incredible script and I loved doing it. It was kind of this deconstructed horror and it reminded me of Wes Craven's New Nightmare and some of the other more recent ones, a little bit of Blair Witch. With Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, I read it wrong the first time. I didn't have that Sam Raimi fix on it. My agent said, "Read it again. Think Sam Raimi. Think Evil Dead. Think Army of Darkness. Think of the fun value to it." In the meantime, they had submitted me a little short film that the director, Jon Knautz from Canada had done. It was like somebody giving you this really great long lost classic episode of Twilight Zone that you'd been hearing about, this rumor there was some great lost episode, the missing episode of Twilight Zone or something. It was so accomplished, almost to a point of perfection, this little black and white film called Still Life that I immediately picked up the phone and called my agent and said, "Look, I gotta work with these guys. They're onto something." I went up to Ottowa and worked with all these youngsters. It was really fun because it almost makes me young again to work that way. A lot of it's improvised. There's an energy, a kind of around the clock attitude, a can do attitude that these kids had and it was just really fun to do it. Also, they let me go schtick it up which I'll probably never be asked to do again, but when you get to be my age, it's kind of fun to be able to do a pratfall or two.
Crave Online: How hard is it to come up with new monster behaviors at this point?
Robert Englund: I think I have to play bad guys now until I die but after I came out of the makeup, after close to 20 years between all the Nightmare movies and Phantom of the Opera, a couple of Stephen King movies that I did. Even as far back as V I had lizard skin on for a lizard autopsy over at Warner Bros. When I went into the makeup in '83, '84, I was still a young man. When I got done with it, my face had changed. I'd been doing a lot of other stuff too. I'd had a couple television shows using my face, but by the time it was over, in the middle '90s, I looked in the mirror and I was definitely a grownup now. I'd looked young for most of my life but I was beginning to look like an old George C. Scott/Trevor Howard kind of face. The happy accident of that combined with doing horror and science fiction and fantasy is that now I'm like the elder statesman. I get to play the doctors and the fathers and the scientists and the professors. Those are usually pretty good roles, the kind of Vincent Price/Klaus Kinski stuff. I've sort of accepted that mantle now and it's actually kind of fun because I get a lot of dialogue usually. Sometimes directors now, they like to use me as a red herring because I have a lot of baggage. When you see Robert Englund in a movie, you think he is the bad guy but if I'm not the bad guy and I'm supposed to just kind of fool the audience, it makes it a lot easier for whichever actor is the bad guy. So I find myself doing a lot of those, I think they're called red herring characters, faking out the audience. That's fun to do too because I can go over the top a little bit because I want the audience to think that I'm the guy that's going to drink you're blood, and I'm really not. I think I'm kind of out of the makeup now so it's kind of fun to be able to use my own face and my own countenance and rework the evil with that now as opposed to relying on the makeup. Although in Jack Brooks, of course, it's just the opposite. I'm kind of this innocent, lovable old lonely community college science teacher who eats the evil black heart and begins to metamorphosize into a kind of Jabba the Hut meats H.R. Pufenstuf monster that we all have a lot of fun with.
Crave Online: And that's you slamming yourself into walls?
Robert Englund: Well, that's me doing all the stunts in this but they're not that difficult because some of that's speeded up a little bit. I think the hard part in this one was I had to hide an awful lot of projectile vomit in my mouth before I got to really eject it. It's like chewing tobacco. You're always worried about a little bit of it going down the wrong pipe. Then it's no longer special effects projectile vomit. It becomes actually a little bit of your own. That's always uncomfortable to say the least.
Crave Online: Are you in any of the monster suit at the end?
Robert Englund: No, they took some photos of me when I had my goat bladder makeup on. They took some low angled shots of me from different angles and then they kind of just made it into this sort of camp monster that they were going to do with the tentacles and everything. The tentacles was the main thing they wanted to really key on in that, that he sort of goes after every sort of slacker student in his class. He's sort of had it. The black heart makes him punish every kid that's given him sh*t or talked back in class. So I really loved how they worked the tentacles on that. But for the face, they were just sort of having fun with that. That was just a picture of me in my full inflated goat bladder makeup. It was as if the body had just continued to swell after the last face of me actually down on the ground being all puffed up. I had hydraulics running up the inside of my legs and up my back and up my underwear. I've done that effect before. I did it in I can't remember which Nightmare, but I've done the expanding head trick a couple of times before. It's really weird because you've got the makeup on to begin with that has to hide it before the shot, and then you've got the bladders which are like prophylactic thin and they're all glued down to you with a colostomy bag medical adhesive. Then that inflates, the little tiny fine hydraulic lines. They pump air into you and they inflate but it's not only expanding outward. You feel it pressing inward too against your skin so you know it's happening but it's a strange feeling. It's kind of like being inside a balloon.
Crave Online: I understand you're okay with the idea of a Nightmare remake and a new Freddy?
Robert Englund: Here's the thing. I understand Michael Bay is associated with it. I'm sure they're in pretty good hands if Michael Bay has decided he wants to be the producer on this. He must have some great ideas up his sleeve. If ever there was a film that was going to be remade that could use the benefit of the new special effects and technology, CGI, et cetera, it's Nightmare on Elm Street, the original, because so much of the movie is this moment of reality that transforms into a dreamscape, a landscape of the mind, a hallucination. I think that's really advantage point for CGI. I've also heard rumors that Billy Bob Thornton may be doing Fred Kreuger which I think is a really great idea, a really interesting choice. I'm a big fan of Billy Bob Thornton's and I'm getting awful old. I've already done Nightmare on Elm Street. We did it the Wes Craven way and I think it's time for somebody to reinterpret it. I don't think it's a bad idea and I hope they don't make the guy playing Fred Kreuger walk around dressed exactly like me and I hope the makeup doesn't look anything like me. I mean, obviously he has to be burned. He has to have scars because that's part of the mythology but I hope they reinterpret that and maybe put him in janitorial overalls or a different kind of hat. I don't think he should be dressed like our creation and I don't think it should look like the Robert Englund makeup, the Kevin Yeagher/David Miller makeup but I still think it's open for interpretation. I know having worked on the original that we ran out of money and would have liked to have had more money for some of the effects. I think that that's really where a remake can really sort of earn its cred is if they use the special effects right in the dream sequences because I think that's really the key to it.
Crave Online: Were there dream ideas you weren't able to do back then?
Robert Englund: It wasn't that we weren't able to do them but we sort of had to settle for doing them on the cheap and on the fly. Now, sometimes that really inspires the imagination of the art department, but on other times, you really wish you could do something a little more surreal, like you don't have a soundstage big enough if you wanted to have the Nancy character walking into a sort of oblivion or something like that. I can remember, the art department had borrowed the idea from the Stanley Kubrick movie, The Shining, where the blood comes out of the elevator doors. We had done a revolving room. Of course we're low budget and we're working around the clock. We got in there and we're doing the effect with the Johnny Depp bed, the death bed which is all upside down. The same thing with the girl on the ceiling and we had to rotate that room. They had Wes Craven and the cameraman, Jacques Haitkin in there in bucket seats, strapped down. As they rotated the room, they rotated it the wrong way, everybody was exhausted, so that when the blood came rushing out, it came rushing out on a different wall first and I think it almost drowned Wes and the Cameraman. I know that some cables fell out. There were a lot of cables going in there for hydraulics and for the camera cables and for the lights. Some of the cables fell out onto the floor and then some of the fake blood rushed out. I remember seeing those cables bark and snap. I was standing there with Heather on the soundstage over at the old Desilu stage on Cahuenga. I remember looking at Heather and we just booked out of there so quick. I don't like liquid and fire in the same area that I am. Those are the kind of things where that was costly and it was a great low rent effect by the kids at New Line Cinema, but nevertheless, I'm sure they wished that hadn't happen and they could have done that a couple more times and they didn't have the time on the schedule.
Crave Online: I know Sam Raimi didn't want them to do Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash, but were there no other Freddy Vs. Jason sequel ideas?
Robert Englund: I think there was some discussion for a while with Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash and I think Sam just realized it would be wiser to remake Evil Dead for a new audience, for a new generation, again with all of the new tricks that are available and just go wild. I think that's a better idea than combining it with Freddy. I've heard rumors. I've heard that they wanted Ash to win which I actually think is kind of cool. "Saving the world from sequels, Ash is back." I think New Line at that time was very protective of the franchise and probably thought Freddy should still win, or at least survive. So I know there were some pretty serious talks for a while. I think Sam and with all of his Spider-Man is certainly wise to probably remake Evil Dead for a new generation because that is a great classic film and a real corner turning project in the history of horror. A lot of the younger audiences haven't discovered it yet because they don't want to watch old movies, but it is great, great fun to watch. Bruce Campbell's terrific and the movie's terrific. So I think that was what happened there. I think there had been some talk with John Carpenter which leads me to believe that there might have been some discussion about maybe Freddy and Michael Meyers and Jason throwing down. There was some interest in that for a while. Probably all of that's precluded now by the choice to do a remake of the original Nightmare on Elm Street.
Crave Online: And you mentioned being out of the makeup now. Have they missed the boat on getting you back for one more?
Robert Englund: Well, I think that because they're remaking the original, they want it to all be fresh talent. I think that's the idea there. I'm not anti-makeup or putting on makeup again. Obviously, you've seen Jack Brooks. I'm out there with goat bladders up my butt, to quote Eddie Murphy. That was actually a dump truck up his butt I think but no makeup could ever be worse than the makeup I had to endure for Phantom of the Opera because that was makeup over makeup and hair combined. That was really a grueling six hours a day. So anything since there, I always play the martyr on the set but ever since then, makeup's actually been pretty easy for me. Even Freddy Vs. Jason, when I had to do some underwater stuff, and that was an awful lot of glue so I wouldn't leak and look like a used condom. No, I'm not anti makeup, but my face now and the fact that I've aged, I can use my God given face now, damaged over the years from too much colostomy bad medical adhesive and probably too much wine. It's a good face for horror movies. I've got a lot of character in my face so I'm hoping to use that more.
Crave Online: I always liked wisecracking Freddy. I'm sad people get so down on that.
Robert Englund: Yeah, I think those are critics that get down on it because I gotta tell you, the truth of that is that the fans love the wisecracking Freddy. The truth of it is when you get an audience to laugh and camp along with you, it's much easier to scare 'em again because they're using two sides of their emotions. It's much easier to set them up for a good cheap thrill scare again.
