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Show fr ' ' The i i I Take Tribune, Sunday. June m ' V. ' ( 29. 19K0 ; v, "igi r "cry'll ,, t, , ip?' , Confessions of a horror movie writer By Victor Miller Special to The Washington Post I wrote "Friday the NEW YORK 13th. I also went to a prestigious New England prep school and major in English at Yale University. I have a lovely wife and two more or less children. But I still wrote one of the more frightening and gory movies ever made. Now I have to deal with the consequences. My children are proud, my neighbors are aghast, my parents are shocked, my friends are mystified and my agent is euphoric. My kids are impressed. (They are 11 and 7, and I wouldnt let them see Friday the In fact everybody under the age of be impressed. This 113th.") tothriller has reportedly grossed well over $25 million for Paramount and the . producers. Most of that money has come from the deep designer jean pockets of the crowd. My mother, a grande dame from the French Quarter in New Orleans, was not similarly impressed. After she and my dad spent their working lives putting me education, they through all this high-claare somewhat puzzled by the fact that, instead of imitating Keats, Shelley or T. S. Eliot, I am slogging in the sodden footsteps of George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and heading for twin bills with Texas Chainsaw Massacre." My mother, in her late 60s, and my father, in his 70s, went to see my efforts at a theater on Canal Street the week that Friday opened. Fearing cardiac arrest for one or both, I had told them they didnt need to see this film. I imagme it took some time and effort on their part to assimilate what they had seen and integrate it into their image of me. My parents had spent my entire youth turning on my night light and checking my closets for the monsters I was sure were there. They may even remember the number of times I called them home from dinner parties because I was afraid the baby sitter couldnt adequately protect me. Yet they sat through, by actual count, one knife in the gut, two slit throats, one hunting arrow in the neck, one hatchet in the face, one body through a window, one arrow in the eye and one decapitation. I imagine that they must have been somewhat aggrieved to see the cinema of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard transformed into Grand Guignol. But when they called me the following day, my mother said, It is a marvelous parody of horror movies. I was not always a writer of gore and mayhem. I began as a playwright, attempting to delineate the depth of my artistic consciousness. The first play I produced went into rehearsal at 125 pages and came out at 70. The actors had trouble with the depth of my artistic consciousness. Once burned, I turned to a less communal form of expression the novel. I also decided to deep-si- x my neuroses in favor of story-tellinFor years, I wrote detective books, the novelizations for the Kojak TV series, thrillers and sagas for six different publishers. well-adjust- i low-budg- schoolkids being kidnapped written six months before those nuts did the same thing out in California. But it wasnt until my friend Sean a producer responsible for Cunningham the cult terror favorite, Last House on the Left asked me if I ever attempted horror for the silver screen. He said, I have $500,000 to make a very scary film that should grab as large an audience as possible. Never having seen many horror films (1 get scared when someone goes boo), I went out and saw everything I could. Then Sean and I sat in his kitchen drinking coffee for hours before I came up with the location and the villain. a summer camp The modes of destruction took more coffee and a careful recollection of every physical fear Ive ever had. I put the killer can under the bed because any I am the man who thought up , the hand that comes out from under the bed and sticks the hunting arrow through the throat . . . ss g. Perhaps I should have had a premonition that I was doomed to a grisly fate. In 1977 1 wrote a novel called Hide the Children for Ballantine. It was about a busload of old-lin- liberal-human-ty- tell you thats where killers hide. I put the ax in the face because Im terrified of having my face messed up, and theres nothing quite as messy as a scout ax. Sean would edit each draft with phrases like, Keep it relentless. When the final draft was accepted, I cheered and took my wife out to several long dinners, but I did not go to the set where they were filming my movie. For one thing, the making of a horror film is about as fascinating as watching somebody spray for aphids. Worse yet, the actors look at the author as weird for having invented all the terrible stuff they have to do. Varietys critic hated the film but couldnt change the fact that it was the e hit m the country and that Variety for three solid weeks still lists it as second only to "The Empire Strikes Back. My neighbors and friends are variously impressed or aghast. The impressed all seem to ask me two questions: 1) Do you have a percentage? 2) Are you going to move to Hollywood? I continue to be stunned by the first question. It seems to me a little like asking somebody if hes rich, or how much she The question makes a week take-homis answered in behavior, so it doesnt even have to be asked. If I trade in my Ford Fiesta for a Mercedes 300SD, you know I got a percentage. The aghast folks are legion. For the past five or six years I have been active in my childrens schools, their Cub Scouting, baseball, soccer and all the activities that an aging father is heir to. For one year I had my own Cub Scout den, and every Wednesday we played games, did "artsncrafts and helped each other grow up. Little did these boys parents know that every morning I was writing sadomasochistic terror (as well as a terrifically funny and altogether dirty book called Toga Party for Fawcett.) Now my cover is blown. I am the man who thought up the hand that comes out from under the bed and sticks the hunting box-offic- e. to 75 20 a clear arrow through the throat impossibility, but who cares m horror movies? I am no longer the pleasant-face- d man with the children and the pretty wife Mothers now have to think a few times before letting their children come and play ball in our yard. (They can never quite be sure I wont spring from the cellar looking like Tony Perkins on a bad trip ) I have a number of friends who are truly distressed with me, though they cannot figure exactly wherein my culpability lies. I would characterize these nice people as e humanists with deeply ingrained liberal frames of reference. Out of affection for me, they saw the movie. They understood on the way in that this was a horror movie, and that actors would be cruel to one another in bizarre ways. But they were shocked and surprised in a way they had not coimted on and neither had I. as Without spoiling the ending for you New York Times critic Janet Maslin did Ill say that our heroine becomes locked in a terminal struggle with the villain. Time and again the heroine cannot bring herself to kill the villain. The audience, whether middle-clas- s or not, ends up screaming Kill her! Kill her! Kill Her! (WE have a female villain, another victory for ERA and another defeat for Phyllis Schlafly.) The effect on the person is incredible. Surrounded by heretofore friendly theatergoers, you are now in the midst of a Roman mob scene, and the Christians are tearing the lions apart! At the very least Friday the 13th lifts the veil of civilization and says, There but for the grace of a modicum of conscience is a bloodthirsty rabble. I asked a knowledgeable friend why we should be singled out so terribly, and he said that our fault lies in the fact that our film attempts to do nothing more than appeal to the emotions. Our country, being still caught in the web of Puntamty, finds it necessary to punish anyone who has no higher goal than to entertain or to zap the nerve endings. That sounds just complicated enough to be correct, but it doesnt help me assimilate the feelings. Its very much like being back in grade school when me and the guys were caught doing something offensive to decorum, and the teacher made us feel like bad boys. As far as the critics are concerned, Friday the 13th is the cinematic equivalent to belching in art class. What makes them angry, I suppose, is that this is a belch. Okay. So how do I feel about what Ive done? In the main, pretty damn good. I am a storyteller and, judging by the figures, Ive told a story that a lot of people are enjoying. My audiences have elected me to a very exclusive club whose members have written movies that reached the top and stayed there just long enough to keep from being anomalies. It is a strange feeling, one that makes me wonder where Ill be in a year, and what Ill be doing and so forth. And finally, I am happy to be a working writer. There are quite a few of us whose names are hugely unknown. We feed families by our efforts, we preserve shelf space for publishers, we work for a great deal less than the media superstars, we constantly disappoint the critics, we cant get a good table at Elaine's, we love our families and we pray for a hit. To do anything else would seem like work. SOFT DRINKS (med. size wfood puichese) FREE BALLOONS FOR THE KIDS! FREE TENNIS AND BEACH TOWELS! PLAY SOUTH OF THE BORDER BINGO WITH A PRIZE ON EVERY CARD. 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