Robert Englund, A True Hollywood Monster Part 2

Interviews

By Austin Brown • October 13, 2009

HorrorCrush.com recently had the opportunity to sit down with one of the biggest legends in the Horror community, Robert Englund, the man who brought Freddy Krueger to life! We published Part 1 last week and now we are back with Part 2! Robert is celebrating his new book HOLLYWOOD MONSTER: A WALK DOWN ELM STREET WITH THE MAN OF YOUR DREAMS which comes out October 13th, on Simon and Schuster. Click now to pre-order it off Amazon! Additionally, Robert Englund will be the guest of honor at Chicago’s Flashback Weekend Oct 23-25th! In Part 2 Robert discusses what it was like to recall events from his past to include in his book, how excited he is for Flashback Weekend, what the fans mean to him, and his date from hell!

While writing HOLLYWOOD MONSTER, I was wondering if a memory or story came back to you during the writing process that you had forgotten?

Well that happens all the time with me. I start talking and digressing and then things come very alive. It comes to the forefront. That happened a lot while we were talking, but not all of that made it into the book. I remember we were talking about some of the experiences on Nightmare on Elm Street part 4, I believe. I remember some very rough nights that I had very late at night. It was the first movie I worked on that had video assist. I could see the replay. While I was talking to my co-writer, Alan Goldsher of HOLLYWOOD MONSTER and wrapped up in a blanket in the middle of the night and watching a rough cut of the sequence we were working on - the junk-yard sequence from Nightmare On Elm Street Part 4. I literally became so inspired by this rough cut with this rock and roll temp sound track at like 4 in the morning out in the Goddam San Fernando Valley with ground fog. I think I had a cold and my hands were wrapped around a salty cup of Lipton soup and literally getting my second wind after seeing the scene and realizing that I was working with this hip MTV-style director from Finland (Renny Harlin) who would go on to direct Die Hard and movies like that. Knowing that we were really on to something, a new style with jump cuts and getting excited because I had just come off another movie and I was pretty beat up and I think I had a stunt injury. That story, I remember shooting the shit with Alan and trying to remember things about shooting Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4 and that’s a really nice process to have. He can pick out a story like that that he thinks the reader might be interested in. As an actor trying to relate the life I’ve experienced I’m not sure which stories the reader or the listener out there in the dark is going to respond to the most. There’s a certain kind of recall and continuity of stories that having a co-writer-he can kinda knit a common denominator together. I know I was telling him a story about a children’s show I was doing that I had done at a very early age-Pinocchio. I was trying to relate to him that in this children’s theatre I had also played one of the 7 dwarfs in Snow White and that was really one of my first experiences in makeup. They covered me in tin foil and they put foam latex over me, a bald cap and a big white beard that was always getting in my eyes when I acted and it was hot underneath this mask that had to be attached to me. Alan decided that the Pinocchio image was better because I had the false nose of Pinocchio. He could keep relating that as a one-liner joke because of all of my whining and complaining about all the makeup I wear as Freddy Krueger and Phantom of the Opera.

Wow, the early years of Robert Englund in makeup…

That was something I remember from being 12 years old! That was really buried back there. I’d keep gluing that nose back on back stage every time I whacked it off from doing a summersault or something in the play. He made that a kind of recall throughout the book and that was something I discovered in my kind of digressing and recall and sharing stories with him. It was something I’m really proud of in the book it’s a nice little memory that kind of shows up throughout the book as a kind of humbling recall as to my original origins as an actor in childrens theatre.

I think that’s going to be very interesting for the fans to read about

Well you know its kind of sentimental and its kind of corny. Its a little Disney but its also absolutely true! I don’t spend a lot of time with it but I remembered about a month before I started writing the book I had this memory of going to my godfather’s house and he was a book distributor for Simon & Schuster who in fact is releasing HOLLYWOOD MONSTER. So there’s a coincidence! But my uncle Jack had all these coffee table books floor to ceiling and I remember one of them was like LIFE GOES TO THE MOVIES or something like that but it had a great section in it on the horror movies and I remember looking at it and being obsessed with the whole section devoted to Lon Chaney the “Man of 1000 faces” and all of these postage sized pictures in a row of all these different makeup creations that he had conceived, even putting the placenta of a hard boiled egg over his eye to make his eyes look blind. Which you know was actually a concept from the original contact lenses. Its harmless and translucent and very thin and organic and it can adapt to the eye and that stuff is just this amazing thing. I think maybe this was all buried deep down in my subconscious and that was something that perhaps came back through all the re-telling and telling it back to my co-writer. We didn’t spend a lot of time with that in the book but we do casually mention it and its another one of those things that maybe had something to do with why I said “Yes” to the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” because I knew it had something to do with the kind of teenage boy thinking it was a cool challenge to wear makeup.

So I know you are going to be appearing at Flashback Weekend in Chicago…

I love Mike who runs this Flashback Weekend in Chicago! Mainly, because I found out when I did it before the first time that he also owns a couple of retro drive-in theaters in Illinois. I mean, I just love anybody that is into that. I love old dive bars and I love old movie theatres and I have a certain nostalgia for the old drive-ins, and Mike’s doing really creative theme nights there and you know he has the good old-fashioned pizza and popcorn but he also does fun foods as well, whatever that might be in the Illinois, Chicago area. It even falls a little towards the gourmet side whether its desserts or whatever. I just love the idea that he’s using a lot of his profits from his fan shows to sort of support this belief he has in restoring these old retro drive-ins. I’m really looking forward to going! I’m going to be there at the O’Hare Wyndham and that’s on October 25th. Im looking forward to it because I just actually finished a movie in Chicago for some kids from Second City, you might recognize a couple of them from those Sonic commercials on television. These crazy Second City actors doing these really silly commercials and they are kind of funny and wonderful. I just worked with a couple of these guys doing a crazy little low-budget Ghostbusters meets Second City Horror-Comedy called “The Mole Man of 2nd Ave”. It was so great they kept taking me out to their favorite dive bars all around the Chicago neighborhoods I hadn’t been to recently, so I’m kind of anxious to go back in October and maybe get out early one night and take a taxi to one of these great bars. There was one called the Green Mill that’s just amazing and you know, just an amazing old, I think it was the African American neighborhood at one point, the kind of Harlem of Chicago. But this bar had a grand piano behind it. I think it was like Fats Domino’s piano, the bar goes on forever and the booths you can fit like 6 people in. They are all old brown leather. Then the actual stage is like an old carnival Peter Pan Disney Day-Glo paint and it’s a Caribbean scene from whatever Caribbean Island a lot of the African Americans had come from. They would come up North to Chicago from the South to work in the factories and this was sort of like their fantasy memory and heritage from a particular Caribbean Island. Maybe St. Johns, I’m not sure. Its this sort of Tropical Day Glo paint from the 1940’s.

I’m going to have to check that out next time I’m in the Midwest!

It’s the Green Mill! The Green Mill was this sort of sugar plantation. Yeah if you are ever in Chicago on business you have to check it out!

I definitely will! Can you talk a little about what its like to give back to the fans that you meet at a convention like Flashback Weekend?

Well you know its weird for me I had these sort of moments early in my career, the discovery of celebrity. I had been a pretty busy actor from 1973 to about 1983 and right around then this big television show called “V”. With “V” we had really mined this sort of latent horny starving Sci-Fi audience out there in television land that had been neglected and I don’t think there was anything on television that was Science-Fiction except for re-runs perhaps of Star Trek. There wasn’t any new original Star Trek then. So when “V” came out we were sort of adopted by all of these starving Sci-Fi fans and they embraced our show and became not only the #1 show in America but we also became an international success. So, after rejecting 2 or 3 times I finally went to Italy and I was up for best supporting actor I think and V was up for an award. We won at this big television film festival in Milan Italy. I literally was torn from my limousine! It was great and I realized I had been missing this and that was my first real taste of international celebrity and I realized then that the genre fans of Horror and Science Fiction and Fantasy, this is the very early 80’s were beginning to come out of the closet, and they are now the fans that run the world. The fans at Comic Con, the fans of every Top 5 movie or whether it’s a slasher film or whether its “Final Destination” or whether its “Sorority Row” or if its a classy movie like “Rosemary’s Baby” or a blockbuster or a graphic novel or “Sin City” or whatever particular incarnation it is, this audience now is getting respect finally since the mid-90s. I was there at the beginning of all of that respect and so Im sort of an elder statesman with the fans because I have always acknowledged them and the thing I realized early on is just how literate these fans are. The ignorant critics who don’t understand these audiences who think they are blood thirsty and satanical, when in fact they read Steven King, they read their “Twilight”, they read their Cyber Punk, they love their various source material, they love their graphic novels, they are very literate, they are very serious fans, and I met them very early on in my career and I was embraced by them from Freddy Kreuger obviously but also from “V” and people forget that it was kind of like a 1-2 punch. It kind of crossed over a little bit for me from Science Fiction into Horror as well as Fantasy so I’ve been around the fans for a long time. I’ve had 8 or9 hit horror movies out there as well as the “V” series and now I wanted to kind of address them a little bit with my book and tell a couple of tales out of school but, its been really great! I mean the European fans, I was over in Spain and Italy right after Franco died and embraced by all the Spanish horror fans and then in Italy there was this huge crossover between horror movies and the Italian horror of Dario Argento and then cross-over to the Wes Craven and then also a crossover with heavy metal in Italy. You had Metallica and groups like that - a huge kind of meeting of the minds over there and horror gets a lot more respect in Europe. Its a respected genre over there. Its looked upon over there like a great American import like Rock n’ Roll and Blue Jeans. So it was fun for me because back in the early 80’s ya know horror still didn’t quite have the respect it has now. You would sort of be sitting at the bad table at the commissary. Even though the horror movie had saved Paramount studios! It was really kind of strange time but I sort of was really able to embrace the fans and now of course I’m lucky to have those fans because they are the ones who are the go-to fans whenever Hollywood or the gamers or anybody needs a hit now. They are the ones who have to be sought after first because there is always a genre film in the Top 10, or a genre game, or a genre television show.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with our site, but we are the premier on-line dating for Horror Fans…

Yeah! Horror Crush!

So I wanted to ask you a more personal question. What’s the most frightening date you have ever been on yourself?

Well, I gotta’ tell you I went on a double date. There was a new girl in high school and I didn’t have a car yet, but my best friend did. He had a really cool surfer station wagon and everybody thought this girl was great, she was sort of like a Heather Graham or something.

Nice!

And her sister was in the drama department with me and I had a lot of cred in the drama department and I had a lot of cred among the surfers and I went on a double date with my buddy and just before the double date I got a huge zit right between my eyes! I mean, literally I looked like I was an Indian guru…

(Laughs)

I looked like an Indian guru! So I went on this date and I put some Clearasil over it and I put some of my stepsister’s makeup over this zit and I sat in the back seat and my buddy drove and we were driving to the dance. I can’t remember where we were going and I was with this beautiful new girl with her ironed blonde hair and sitting in the back seat trying to keep my profile to her at all times so that my giant juicer between my eyes didn’t show, and my buddy leaned over to the front seat and turned around and pushed my forehead right between my eyes and went “Ding Dong! Avon Calling!”. That was my date from hell!