'Godfather of Horror' rejects film link to Virginia shootings

(AFP)
Updated: 2007-04-22 09:41

LOS ANGELES - Acclaimed horror film director Wes Craven on Thursday rejected accusations that violent movies share the blame for Cho Seung-Hui's murderous rampage at Virginia Tech.

The bloody South Korean revenge movie "Oldboy" has been cited as a possible inspiration for Cho after the discovery of a photo of him striking a menacing pose with a claw hammer that is similar to a shot from the film.

Korean national Cho took his own life on Monday after gunning down 32 students and staff at Virginia Tech in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

Craven, the man behind spine-chilling flicks such as the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Hills Have Eyes," said spree killers such as Cho were usually driven to violence by events early in their lives.

"If someone has violent thoughts, they're going to be attracted to things with violence in them," Craven told AFP. "But are those things making them have violent thoughts? I don't believe so.

"You usually have to go way back to the beginning, to look at an individual's past, or what their brain waves are telling them, before you can start making any sort of conclusions.

"Horror films and violent films are not a cause of violence itself," he added, while acknowledging that he always tried to avoid glamorizing violence in his movies.

"Every time I do a film with violence in it I try to not make it look cool," said Craven, who was speaking in Beverly Hills during a publicity event for his involvement in independent French movie "Paris, je t'aime."

Craven, 67, said he was angered when authorities sought to blame Hollywood for tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech, suggesting that the daily reports of mayhem in from Iraq were more violent.

"There's a lot of violence out there," Craven said. "Like starting a war where 150 people were killed in one day alone. Those are real bodies," he said, referring to the bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday that claimed 172 lives.

"There's a part of me that sees red when people start pointing the finger at film-makers. This is a very violent world right now. And there's a tremendous amount of focus on this violence with the war."

Craven also said he believed that the fact that President George W. Bush's administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques such as "water-boarding" lay behind a spate of recent films that included graphic torture sequences.

Horror films such as "Hostel," "Saw," "Wolf Creek" and "Turistas" have been dubbed "torture porn," while popular television shows like "24" have also stirred up debate.

"It doesn't surprise me that there's a lot of torture in horror films, because it's coming out more and more that it has been happening, whether it's Iraq, or the CIA taking people off to secret prisons," Craven said.

"That's the reality -- so it's going to creep into films."