Hatchet

All Adam Green ever wanted to do was a make an extremely gory and entertaining Slasher film. So while toughing it and working a shit job in the film industry, he went and shot a trailer in Louisiana and put it online. A rather massive Internet buzz started and through that he was able to secure funding to make Hatchet, a throwback to ‘80s Slasher films like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Every Slasher needs a loveable bad guy, the unstoppable beast in Hatchet is Victor Crowley, a deformed backwoods freak who roams the Louisiana bayou looking for unsuspecting tourists to kill in a plethora of creative ways (e.g. hatchet, gas-powered belt sander, bare hands, shovel). Equal parts marketing strategy and fanboyism led Green to cast a trifecta of Slasher legends including Robert Englund (Freddy), Kane Hodder (Jason), Tony Todd (The Candyman). Like all Slasher films from the ‘80s, Hatchet is totally ridiculous, a lot of fun and never takes itself seriously. After an eternity spent on the festival circuit, Hatchet got a theatrical release back in September. While Green may have achieved his dream, along the way he accumulated a gigantic debt and had a high profile battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the charming and anonymous group of old people who protect children from hearing the F-word or seeing a bare boob by coming with ratings for all films released in the United States.

What made you want to make a movie about a deformed and unstoppable killing machine?
I was eight years old and my parents sent me to summer camp. I was having an awful time because it was like a concentration camp. It wasn’t like the movies. I thought there was going to be a lot of naked girls. They had this abandoned cabin and they told us this ghost story about how if we went there, Hatchet Face was gonna get you and that’s all they had to their story. It was really just the cabin where the counsellors had their orgies and did drugs. I had an older brother who had already shown me all the Slasher films. That night when we went to sleep the kids were talking about how Hatchet Face was gonna get us. I said Hatchet Face was this deformed man and his dad kept him hidden behind that cabin. Then the cabin caught fire and his dad came home and chopped down the door with a hatchet and hit him in the face. All these kids started crying and the counsellors threatened to send me home from camp. So for about 20 years I just sat on that story and waited for the moment to make my own Slasher movie.

What do you like most about ‘80s Slashers?
I think it’s always relative to what people grew up on. I don’t find the 80’s Slasher movies to be exceptionally well-made films. I don’t think that they’re actually scary, at all. They’re just cool. What was cool about them to me was the villain and the mythology behind the villain and the creative way that the villain was going to kill you. Back then it was a magic show. I was always interested in how they did the effects. It didn’t scare me when I saw a knife go through somebody. It was more, mathematically, trying to figure out how they did it in my head. Then in the ‘90s we started with the whole PG-13 horror which was just a waste of everybody’s time. Then it was always a teen whodunit where at the end they pulled the mask off. And now, in 2000, we have two options. It’s either torture bullshit or it’s remakes.

Let’s talk about the ‘torture bullshit’. It’s remarkable you were able to make a name for yourself without torturing any women on screen.
All I did is make a fun movie. That’s all it is. It’s not groundbreaking. It didn’t re-invent the wheel. It’s not the scariest movie you’ve ever seen. It’s just massively entertaining and people walk out of it really happy. Borat is the only movie I can think of where the audience has been that loud. In a packed theater it was like a rock concert the way people would scream and cheer and laugh. That’s what made it effective. The torture stuff? The original Saw, should not be called torture porn. There’s no sex in it and there’s really no violence in it. It’s all implied, there’s nothing that gory, like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I thought Saw was a really clever film. Even Hostel, the original idea behind Hostel, was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever heard. I thought that worked. All the knock offs after it and the fact that every horror movie has to have that scene of someone begging and screaming, it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s not scary. It’s not entertaining. It’s just boring and misogynistic and I don’t care. Our gore in Hatchet outdoes anything that those movies ever had and is done with it’s heart in the right place. You’re not walking out feeling like your eyes just got raped.

But even though you didn’t go the torture porn route, you still got hit with the NC-17.
The NC-17 on Hatchet was completely political and had nothing to do with the film whatsoever. There’s a documentary out right now called This Film Is Not Yet Rated and those are the exact people I had to go up against. They’re even worse then the way they were portrayed in that documentary. I wish that I had a video camera to tape the whole thing but they literally put a gag order on me and said you’re not allowed to talk about it. They silently threatened me by saying “you can cause a big stink about this but some day you’re going to make another movie and then wait and see what happens.”

Why do you think you were singled out?
Because it was an independent movie that went all the way. It’s competition for the studios and they don’t like that. As much as they say they support independent cinema and they love it, they hate it. It marginalizes their paycheques and it marginalizes what they do. If some idiot like me and my friends can go make a movie with no money and all the sudden it’s in festivals and getting a theatrical release… they don’t want that to happen. The movie they spent a $100 million on needs to make that money. They also do it because they can. They have to throw the gauntlet down every now and then to prove that they’re still in charge. In Hostel 2, if they want to cut off a guy’s dick on camera and feed it to a dog and tie women up naked, it’s fine. Because Quentin Tarantino can walk in and go “C’mon.” Actually a lot of the people on my panel judging me were from Sony. I even said “Why is it okay to torture women, to have people doing drugs, to have onscreen sex, swearing and homophobic remarks, all this shit you have in your movies? But I have a swamp monster chasing a bunch of comedians with a gas-powered belt-sander and killing them in a cartoonish way and it’s obviously fun… how can you say this is pornographic?”

A few movies got hit with the NC-17 for violence this year. Saw 4, Planet Terror, Frontier(s) and Eastern Promises. It seems like the violence in those movies was way more extreme than the violence in Hatchet. Hatchet is like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
They even banned our poster. It was just a hatchet on a black background. They said it was too violent. Saw’s poster has pulled out teeth and severed limbs on their poster. 300 had people falling to their death with blood splatters all over the poster. That’s fine. We made about eight new posters and then submitted the hatchet one again and they said it was fine. They don’t know what they’re doing and [the head of classification at the MPAA] Joan Graves is Hitler. Everyone was really excited when the head of the MPAA [Jack Valenti] died this year. There were parties all over town. He was the most hated man in town and now she’s stepped up and is trying to show that she’s more badass than he was…. The panel that you have to appeal to is all senior citizens. They haven’t seen a horror movie since Nosferatu. When I brought up Grindhouse, which to me was the same tone as Hatchet, they said they’ve never seen it. Well what about Hostel, what about Saw, what about The Hills Have Eyes remake? They all shook their heads and said they’ve never heard of those movies. I had no leg to stand on. And of course they’ve heard of those movies because some of those people work at the studios that put them out.

So obviously you’re saying there needs to be some reform to the ratings system. Do we need one at all?
I believe we need a ratings system so parents have a way to tell what their kid is going to see. However it needs to be rated G, PG, PG-13 and R. NC-17 does not mean anything. R is R and that’s it. Why is Hatchet any worse than Hostel? They can’t just look at the amount of frames where there’s red blood in the shots, they need to look at the overall movie and what the message is. Walking out of a movie like The Hills Have Eyes remake, which I actually really liked, where one girl is being raped, while a mutant is holding an infant in his hand and sucks on the mother’s tit till she lactates, shoots her in the head, bites the head of a parakeet, drinks the blood, runs off into the night with the baby while dad is crucified and on fire outside… no one was fucking laughing in that audience. It wasn’t funny. But that was okay. Victor Crowley ripping somebody’s arms off with his bare hands and blood flying 50 feet in the air like Kill Bill they were like “ oh no, no, no, you can’t do that.”… The MPAA will crumble, but it won’t crumble until someone who doesn’t need them goes after them. That’s the problem. Right now I’m starting out and I’m an easy target. Hopefully in 20 years they won’t car about me anymore and they’ll be after somebody else. That’s when I need to go after them. If Steven Spielberg started a big thing about how this system needs to be refined, something would happen. Why doesn’t he do something? With him, they made up PG-13 for him. There was a shot in a Friday the 13th where Jason punched into a guy’s chest and pulled out his heart. They said they would give him an X unless he got rid of that shot. The same summer, Temple of Doom, no problem.

Words: Michael Mann