[Grant]

Wes Craven -- who all but invented "sick horror" back in the '70s -- has a surprising admission on the release of a remake of his gory, influential, seminal film The Hills Have Eyes.

"I'm not a big fan of torture," he says, when we ask about contemporary horror flicks like Hostel. "It's not something I like watching a lot of."

Huh? Didn't he launch his career with the painful Hills and the even more graphic Last House On The Left? (By comparison, his later creation, Freddy Krueger, was a bit of a wussy).

"Yes," he says, "but I did it once. I didn't want to go back."

Which is why a young horror filmmaker, Alexandre Aja (High Tension) remade The Hills Have Eyes, nearly 30 years after the original. "The Hills Have Eyes and Last House On The Left are the only films I co-own, and as producers we're able to have these films made the way we want and actually benefit."

This is as opposed to the slew of "slasher" films out there that steal liberally from his oeuvre (a recent one, Wrong Turn, had almost exactly the same plot as The Hills Have Eyes).

"What can I tell you? Imitation is the sincerest form of blah blah blah. At least that's what I tell myself as I weep knowing how much money they're making," he says, chuckling.

And while Aja was retreading his footsteps, Craven was busy editing the kind of thriller he likes to make now, the sleeper hit Red Eye with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy.

The Hills Have Eyes -- starring Ted Levine, Emilie de Ravin and Dan Byrn -- is about an RV-pulling middle-class family who take a desert "short cut" that leads them to a family of cannibalistic atomic mutants. After some of their number are slaughtered, the surviving whitebreads take revenge.

The plot and most of the characters are the same as in the '77 original (although famous horror face Michael Berryman, who played "Pluto" in the original, is not there). So what's different? For one thing, says Craven, there's no pesky subtext.

With a Masters degree from Johns Hopkins University, Craven's horror once leaned on academic allusions (Last House was supposedly based on Bergman's Virgin Spring).

"Aldous Huxley had a term, 'antipodes,' that I was trying for in The Hills Have Eyes. It's things on opposite sides of the sphere and their strange attraction for each other. I thought it interesting to have a classic American white family and mirror 'dark' characters, a father, mother and daughter. And the light side goes towards darkness and vice versa. They're not just cardboard villains. They have pain and alliances."

And now? "Those weren't things Alex wanted to do. The bad guys are much more of a loose conglomeration than a specific family. Alex thought of it more like a video game thing where you encounter something really horrible, and then it's gone and you go on to the next thing that's even worse."

Meanwhile, Craven continues his trek toward the light. He's got a romantic comedy script in development and is considering a teen comedy. He's also deep into planning a Vegas show, Wes Craven's Magic Macabre. "It's a Faustian legend show based on a stage play in Dublin. The project was brought to me by John McColgan, the director of Riverdance. It's high-end, shocking, scary and full of grand illusions, all handled by the engineer who worked with Siegfried & Roy."

That last paragraph may, in fact, have made some horror geeks' heads explode. As much as he's an icon, Craven knows it's fashionable among ardent horror fans to loathe his later work. "There's a certain segment of that subculture that just wants really bloody violence, that's their measure of truth.

"And at a certain point in your career you feel you've been there, done that. Maybe that's just a matter of getting older. You feel more acutely the reality of those things, I think. In your 20s and 30s, it's more abstract to you."

Source: Jam! Showbiz