The bar is set pretty high for any thriller written and directed by horror uber-maverick Wes Craven, creator of the classic Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes; and a couple little franchises named A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. You might have heard of them. He’s an American movie icon and the go-to guy with his finger on the pulse of what scares the hell out of you. And me. That’s no mean feat. I caught up with my lifelong hero Craven to talk about a nasty, well-written and well-acted little film named Red-Eye, a riveting new mano-a-womano starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, locked in a death struggle aboard a major airliner and a political execution about to go dangerously awry.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic: Red-Eye would be classified as a thriller, but it is being called a departure of sorts.

Wes Craven: It was an intentional departure. I wanted to try something different than a horror film. So much depends on the drama between these two people and they are virtually immobile, just sitting in a chair. I knew it had to be performance and faces. I was aware of working harder than I’d ever worked but also better than I’d ever worked. I was just excited by the real human emotions and psychology.

LS: Explain to me how you shot so effectively in that confined space.

WC: We found this place that rents different airplane configurations, and they come in eight different modules, because some people just use one and shoot sideways. We went for enough to get an eighty-foot airplane. We assembled it and went in to shoot as if we were doing almost like a documentary. We didn’t pull chairs to get angles or anything so that it would be more convenient to shoot. I felt very strongly that a lot of the tension would come from being packed into this thing like we all are.

LS: Cillian Murphy is really intriguing here. At times he seems like the nice guy next door, then suddenly there’s this icy chill in his eyes and he’s a complete maniac.

WC: I liked the complexity of both characters. With Cillian’s, I told him at the beginning to start it as a love story, but I think this love story on his part, almost without his realizing it continues, that he has to admire her for her courage and how she more and more stands up to him, which enrages him at one point and then when she looks at her weakest, he will at times be very tender. He’s a guy that doesn’t really know himself. He thinks of himself as a total professional and the most honest guy she’ll probably ever meet. He’s talking about male-driven logic and just seeing that chipped away, so at the end he’s been almost emasculated, and that whole façade that he has, has been destroyed, I find [that] so interesting.

LS: Red-Eye explores a theme you return to time and again—that a put-upon, everyday person is faced with pure evil and has to dig up some almost inhuman strength that they didn’t know they possessed.

WC: Throughout my life, I’ve always been asking myself how I would react in the situations that seem to be the machinations of the powerful in our world, the people that actually do kill each other as part of their daily lives, and who will make war among civilians and not be bothered by that. So looking for the substance of the narrative fiber or maybe the human fiber of ‘decent’ people, how they can stand up to that and also how they are changed by standing up to that, so they can’t go back to where they started from after it’s over. They’ll never be the same.

LS: Some of your best work very clearly weaves in social commentary and criticism. I get the feeling you’re pretty endeared toward Rachel’s character Lisa Reisert and her status on the food chain.

WC: People like Lisa are almost invisible and are there almost to be pretty and to be efficient. You never treat the person like the a**hole that they are necessarily—things like that. That kind of class is really the people who are getting hurt. It’s just fascinating to me that the only way to survive for some is to be, as she says, a ‘people pleaser,’ and that the only way to survive ultimately is to lose that trying to be the nice guy, you know?

When you’re doing some of the smaller pictures like The People Under the Stairs, which basically was a metaphor for the Reagan era, you can do that and nobody gives a damn as long as you scare, make people scream and have a good time. I think horror films are metaphors for the working stiffs of the world, that are seeing things as they are because they are down there in the nitty-gritty, scrambling for a living. I love that about it.

This is such a flexible genre. When I was studying Eastern religions I came up with the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street. I just took it from the whole idea of levels of consciousness, and they would call it sleeper being awake; the whole thing about ‘whatever you do, don’t fall asleep’ or ‘Glen, stay awake!’ Things that to me were really intriguing and quite deep, and yet you almost just slap that right in there and it makes perfect sense. All of that spiritual stuff is about really nitty-gritty stuff: what the hell are we doing here, how do you deal with evil and why the hell is it there in the first place? If you don’t get sappy about it and just be kicking a** at the same time, it’s amazing what you can talk about.

LS: Speaking of evil, do you believe in the concept of good and evil?

WC: I never think of good and evil as two distinct and discreet entities. In Last House on the Left, after the killers do this really heinous murder, suddenly they can’t stand the blood on their hands and actually go down to the water, wash their hands and try to put on good clothes and they’re appalled by what has happened. They don’t understand how it happened. I find that fascinating. When the parents take their revenge and the last shots of them are just like¾ these are shattered people and they have become really brutal in a way they never thought they could. The only time it happens routinely for people from regular life to be exposed to that is during combat. It’s an old theme—loss of innocence, but since America presents itself as such an innocent nation, with Disneyland and all that, it’s interesting to me to tear that to shreds and see what’s underneath.

LS: When you talk about this moment in Last House on the Left with the washing off of the blood and its ramifications, what you’re really talking about are the emotional consequences of violence. And I think that’s exactly what is missing from most American films that parade explicit, gratuitous mayhem as entertainment.

WC: That film was totally uncensored. The point was to show the ramifications that if somebody gets stabbed, they don’t die, they say ‘ouch’ and try to crawl away, and they don’t die quickly. And if you kill somebody, rather than being something quick and easy, it’s something that takes a big chunk out of your own soul too, even if you’re defending yourself. Those kinds of things to me are really interesting.

The quandary for people that make horror films—those that care about this—the more real it gets, the more threatened the MPAA is by it.

Ironically, they would rather have people with machine guns laughing as they slaughter people and they’re all flying off and you never see any of them really suffer. The MPAA is very comfortable with that kind of stuff, so it’s frustrating. If you really show people suffering, then they say, ‘Ooooh, that’s going to traumatize some kid.’ Basically you’re continuing the myth that guns are cool and violence is the way to solve things, which I think is a very, very dangerous fantasy.

LS: When you are writing, how do you determine what is scary?

WC: I usually write about things that scare me—that’s how you do it successfully. For one thing, you have to be unpredictable. I tell film students that the first maniac you write must be so dangerous. He doesn’t follow the rules of society and is liable to do something so outrageous you didn’t expect to see it in front of you. That doesn’t have to do with blood and guts, it has to do with getting under their skin in some way. Then you have a villain who is really intelligent and is a jump ahead of you. Those two monsters, if you will—the film villain and the director monster—are playing a mind-game with the audience. I will go into their subconscious as far as I can get in there and pull out every demon I have and scare the sh*t out of them with it, and watch it evaporate into the air a little. I think that’s what happens.