His first novel was published in 1956, and thirty-odd followups have made him one of the premiere writers of horror and suspense. His influence has extended to over a generation of his fellows, and no less than Stephen King has stated that as a young man, he "adopted" John's career as "a goal to be reached and an example to be emulated."

As horror writers go, John Farris is among the most devoted to the silver screen. He has optioned and/or written screenplays for the majority of his novels, including Brian De Palma's successful 1978 version of his novel The Fury, and now, thirteen years later, he's a frequent flier to LA While Richard (Lethal Weapon) Donner steps up to the plate with a film version of John's novel Fiends, there are a half-dozen other Farris-penned screenplays on deck and waiting in the dugout, including The Axeman Cometh, Sharp Practice, The Uninvited, and Nightfall.

In the following piece, presented by Kelley Wilde, Farris speaks quietly and, according to Kelley, "with the controlled intensity of a large jungle cat," about Hollywood's horrors ... and also its spoils.

In 1968, a friend in the record business, Jack Clement, who had a lot of money, said he was thinking of making an inexpensive horror film. They were just coming back at the time -- stuff like Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs -- and he wanted to do something along that line for a hundred thousand dollars, a hundred fifty thousand.

The only previous experience I had was on When Michael Calls. James Bridges was assigned to (producer) Larry Turman, when Fox bought it, to do the screenplay. Turman sent it to me and I thought it was lousy and told him so. I did a 130- or 140-page treatment of what I thought it should be. Turman said, "This is great," and took it to (executive producers) Zanuck and Brown; well, they said, "We've spent enough money on this and we're not gonna make it." So the project languished. Eventually, there was a TV movie made from the Bridges script. It had a good cast -- Ben Gazzara, Michael Douglas, Elizabeth Ashley -- a lot of people liked it, but it wasn't a very good film.

Then Jack Clement came in with his plans for a movie, and I ended up writing two screenplays. We decided to do both of them, back-to-back, for a hundred and fifty each. I thought Dear Dead Delilah was a little classier, so we put most of the budget in that. A good thing; we couldn't have done two of them. It was hard enough directing and shooting one in thirty days. But the movie we didn't shoot -- the little vampire number -- eventually became Fiends.

The next thing that was turned into a movie was The Fury, which I did the screenplay for. Fox didn't particularly want me to write it, but that was too bad; I insisted.

The usual amount of time lapsed while they dickered for a director. They gave it to Norman Jewison and a couple of others I thought were inappropriate.

In the meantime, I'd gotten a job with Brian De Palma on a thing called Where Are the Children, a Mary Higgins Clark book that had big problems as far as translating it into a film. I mean, it was a dead giveaway who the guilty party was.

About that time, Brian's option on the whole thing was up. Carrie had come out and suddenly he was a really hot item. One night we were up at his place in New York and I said, "This is the way we can work it ..." He said, "That's great, but I've lost interest. What are you working on -- anything else?" So I gave him the script for The Fury. Two or three days later, he called (20th Century-Fox executive) Frank Yablans and said, "I want to do this."

See, that's nothing new in Hollywood. Screenplays are all over the place. They're just awash in screenplays that somebody thinks they should do. The Writers Guild of America, West, registers, like, 25,000 scripts a year. All the movies in production last year in the US, including independent features, (total) about 170 films ... so you figure the difficulties! Everybody's writing movie scripts. Everybody thinks, wow, 120 pages -- and all it is, is dialogue!

The problem is, there are very few directors who can get a project moving. I think the key, right now, is first to get the director. If you've got a director, you can get the actors. You've got to have the director. Say you've got Tony Scott directing and you've got a good screenplay; they will let you cast somebody who is on the verge, like Andy Garcia or Ray Liotta. Even if you can't get Tom Cruise, they'll still make the movie. If you don't have the director, and you've got Ray Liotta É it's tough.

The guy that wrote Dances With Wolves would still be washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant if it hadn't been for Kevin Costner. At the time he was working on it, first as a novel and then as a screenplay, Costner was slowly rising in the world and becoming a hot commodity, and only because of that could they even get anybody to get the thing going. And then they couldn't find a director!

So, getting anything done in Hollywood depends on the attention of a viable director, "viable" meaning somebody who's got a fairly decent track record, or a star who is attached to the project. Better yet, these days, they like to have both.

After Carrie, Brian De Palma was hot. With Fiends, you've got Richard Donner, who is an A-list director. A-list is probably twelve or fifteen names, as far as directors go, who are busy all the time.

When I was writing Fiends, I never anticipated it as a movie. By my agent happened to know, since he's very good friends with Donner, that Dick had wanted to do another horror movie. Of course, The Omen was his big breakthrough. He'd been wanting to do another one for years and years, and had been looking for material, but it was all the same shit. He read Fiends over a weekend and things happened pretty quickly. My agent called me up and said, "You want to do the screenplay?" I said, "Sure -- if he's interested, I'm interested."

When The Fury was shot, in 1977, it came in for an average budget at that time, about $7 million. This one will come in at $25 or $30 million, and then they'll spend another $15 million on top of that to promote it.

Fiends will not be treated as a horror film. That was the first thing I heard from Richard Donner's lips. He was interested in the scary parts, and there's a lot of scary stuff in there. I was cautioned, though, before I started writing. I said, "How violent and gruesome and so forth do you want this? Do you want these elements?" He said no. Except for some scenes not in the book that I put in the movie, it's not really bloody or gruesome. We prey on the viewer's imagination. What we're really highlighting is the fantastic element. There will be an almost Kabuki-like atmosphere to it with the Fiends' robes and wings; the way they look. Donner will spend big money on great set designs and the caves, an element he especially liked.

The Fiends themselves, well, they're different. Like a family from Mars. In the screenplay, I wanted to emphasize the family aspect of them, give them the human qualities. They're not that far removed from being human -- fiends, yeah, but not monsters. There's a difference. I wanted to emphasize that aspect of community.

I don't know how they'll sell it É but it won't be as straight horror.

I prefer suspense. I think that's the only way to go today. This little corner of the horror world that Douglas Winter thinks so much of -- splatterpunk -- is a dead end if ever there was one. I think you have to scare people, but viewers are too sophisticated in all the state-of-the-art gore and there's a limited market for that. Nobody in his right mind at a major studio wants to make that kind of picture. You can, if you have the talent, write about people who are down and out, but still at the same time there's something human that comes through that makes you empathize with them. Why else are we watching this movie?

Straight horror is kind of a worn out market now, although I read that there are seven or eight vampire films in the works, including some old-timers like Interview with the Vampire, which has been around for years, and they've revised Dracula for Columbia, with Francis Ford Coppola directing.

But also, eighteen months ago, there were three Robin Hood films in the works &emdash; and of course the one that got made is the one Costner agreed to do. See, people think alike out there; everything goes in cycles, and for a pure horror movie, I can't think of anything that's been a big grosser. I guess Arachnophobia would fit into the category, but they tried to market it as something else. Pet Sematary was an out-and-out horror movie, there's no other way to describe it. That did about $56 million &emdash; the biggest grosser I can think of, and the only movie my kid ever walked out on. Someone getting their head cut off doesn't upset him; he knows that's just fantasy. But the flashback to somebody dying of some terminal, awful disease, that was just too close to home.

I'm afraid that horror may be going the way of the Western, except for the cheap stuff they grind out for foreign markets. It depends on what you call a horror film. If you call Silence of the Lambs horror ... I don't. I think it's a good thriller and extremely well-made. Some people think Psycho is horror. I don't.

And I'm not out to do "straight horror." There is a Stephen King type of book -- I mean, that's pretty well established. Like Summer of Night: Dan Simmons wrote it, but it's a Stephen King book. That's a whole genre that King actually perfected. I can't think of anything I've written that is remotely like anything he would even think about. I'm more interested in my own genre ... and I get harder to please as I go along.

Oh, Frankenstein -- the original -- the Howard Hawks version of The Thing (from Another World), which I thought was a ground-breaking movie. Alien would be really close to the top of the list. I liked Rosemary's Baby, but once you'd read the book, what was the point of the movie? The Exorcist was certainly eye-popping at the time, but I didn't react well to it. I thought the Hammer Films version of (Horror of) Dracula was sensational, the best they ever made. Nothing else really pops into my mind.

Learning wasn't tough at all. I just did it; it was in my head. I have an extremely precise and accurate visual sense, and a sense about things -- just from watching movies, I assume. I never read a book about how things should work, or took any courses. I had a couple of tips along the way from people who knew what they were doing, like William Goldman, who said, "If it's more than three straight pages of dialogue, it's too much." The rest of it, the visual sense, just translates into script terms, so I never had any problems.

Most novelists who write screenplays don't understand suspense. Basically, if you can make it believable in a book, it's a cinch in a movie, because people grasp so much more quickly and want to move on, impatiently. You provide them with a coincidence, and if it's not totally outrageous, you don't dwell on it, you just do it ... and they say, all right, let's get on with it. As Alfred Hitchcock said, "Is it a coincidence? Very well, it's a coincidence." Movie audiences are quick and really ahead of you most of the time. You don't have to belabor the point; it's all visual.

Gore Vidal goes out there, they pay him three or four hundred thousand for a screenplay ... it's relaxation for him. He enjoys the ambience, you know, once in a while. He goes out there, does his job, collects his money, and goes back to Italy to work on a book. You have to have that attitude. As far as being corrupted goes, there's an awful lot of mediocre and bad movies made, and the reason is, basically, that good screenplays are hard to find. I've made some catty remarks myself, about the ability that goes into them, and that's true up to a point. In a sense, Rain Man was made by the performances and the direction, but the screenplay had to add up before they had anything to work with. All the good performances and direction in the world can't save a bad script.

I've got another project, an original screenplay that I would direct on a shoestring budget. The suspense genre really lends itself to inexpensive movies. A picture like Blood Simple, they made that on a shoestring, about five hundred thousand, but they knew exactly what they were doing, and they had a good script.

I'm collaborating with a friend of mine who is a cinematographer. He's dying to make a movie because he's bored with what he's doing -- directing Brooke Shields and people in lettuce commercials. He's one of the highest-paid fashion photographers in the world, and he has about $3 or $4 million a year in income.

I said, "Look, why don't we do this? I'd like to have a movie that I direct, which I can show. You need a movie that you photograph, which you can show. We need it as a demo, really. But hopefully, since I'm good at this and you're good at what you do, we can make a movie that would be releasable and make some money for us. And we can do it for about $350,000, avoiding the unions totally. No unions, no nothing. I'll donate my time for expenses; your donate your time and equipment, and you know everybody in the world -- we need a penthouse apartment, you can call somebody and get the use of it for a day in New York. You know all the ins and outs of doing this kind of thing anyway; let's get together and do it."

He said, "Fabulous! Got any ideas?"

I said, "Well ... not at the moment."

Then I thought of something that just may work. (Pause; quiet, wicked laugh.) "Yeah -- the dark side of Pretty Woman meets Rebecca!"