BE AFRAID: A Conversation With Acclaimed Filmmaker Adam Green For The Horror Channel UK Premiere Of VICTOR CROWLEY
Ten years after the events of the original movie, Victor Crowley is mistakenly resurrected and proceeds to kill once more.
Ahead of Horror Channel’s UK TV premiere of Adam Green’s VICTOR CROWLEY, the great director shares his personal tragedies, George Romero’s inspirational words, the importance of genre comedy and hints that the Bayou Butcher may rise again…
Adam, you’re back on the UK’s Horror Channel this Friday night with your latest ‘Hatchet’ instalment VICTOR CROWLEY. Excited?
I’m always thrilled to hear that another one of my films will be playing on the UK’s Horror Channel! It’s crazy to think that the US hasn’t had a horror specific television channel in 6 years now, only horror themed subscription platforms like SHUDDER. Then again- look at the real life horror we’re dealing with here as far as our current President goes. Clearly our country has made far worse decisions than doing away with our horror television network.
You've called VICTOR CROWLEY your most personal movie ever. Why?
I truly intended to be finished with HATCHET after the original trilogy. When HATCHET 3 was released in 2013 I had absolutely no desire to ever step foot back in Victor Crowley’s swamp ever again. However, life had other plans for me and in 2014 I underwent a series of personal tragedies that changed everything. Within a span of just thirteen days I endured a heart shattering divorce, the tragic death of Dave Brockie, one of my best friends and co-stars on my TV series HOLLISTON and the dissolving of HOLLISTON’s home network FEARnet, in a corporate merger which left my show trapped in television purgatory for six years. I’ll spare you the details of the dark year or so that followed but my health deteriorated down into a truly frightening state.
Then in October of 2015 George Romero asked if I would host his panel at a horror convention in my hometown of Boston, Masachusetts. There was no way I was going to say “no” to George. At the end of the panel he pointed out to me just how many in the crowd were wearing HATCHET or HOLLISTON or “Adam Green” T-shirts and then he turned me away from the crowd and gave me a short but extremely blunt pep talk about what my work means to “these kids” and that I have to get back on my feet and back to doing what I do best. The long story short is that George snapped me out of it and made me see the light, in particularly what HATCHET had come to mean to the genre.
However, if I was going to bring back Victor Crowley I only wanted to do it if it could be a surprise for the fans, we set out to make the film in secret. I still can’t believe we pulled it off! The end result was a much more personal and honest film than I ever would have had the courage to make otherwise. I worked out a lot of the pain I was going through during that dark point in my life. Several critics have called VICTOR CROWLEY “the best HATCHET film yet” but I am still far too close to the process of making the movie to be able to rank it against the other three films with any kind of clarity.
VC is more comical than ever, do ‘Hatchet’ fans expect that fun side of the franchise to be upped every single time?
HATCHET’s sense of humor is precisely what sets it apart from other slashers of its kind. The series may proudly wear all of the expected slasher movie tropes on its sleeves but it is the comedic tone of the films that make them a more entertaining experience overall than the slashers that came before it. Rarely were the 80’s slashers intentionally funny and as Kane Hodder always points out, with the sequels in the big franchises the audience merely tolerated the time they had to spend with the characters while they waited to see them die. If you look at the first three films as one long movie the humor actually gets toned down slightly with each entry as the story works its way to its action packed final act. So with VICTOR CROWLEY I got to hit the re-set button and really amp up the comical side of things once again.
This time around the film’s theme also holds a mirror up to an audience that has become shamefully numb to murder and obsessed with the next great true crime docu-series. Think about it, just twenty years ago major network sit-coms like FRIENDS and SEINFELD were “must see TV” not only in the US but around the world. Now it’s real life tragedies like MAKING A MURDERER, DON’T F*CK WITH CATS, and TIGER KING that have become our passionate water cooler conversations at the office and a major force in modern day pop culture. The sheer fact that more people are talking about Joe Exotic’s mullet than the mistreatment of the actual tigers in TIGER KING sickens me. I mean, our President’s own dim-witted son was asked what he thought of the Netflix phenomenon and his take away from the series was that he “didn’t realize a tiger was so affordable!” The characters in VICTOR CROWLEY are all looking to cash in on a massacre that left at least forty innocent people dead and they have absolutely no regard for the human lives lost. Sadly, that’s exactly what would happen if the events of HATCHET were real.
VICTOR CROWLEY is broadcast on Friday 15 May @ 21:00
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