The “relentlessly terrifying” horror movie Stephen King needs you to see and the “troubling, erratic” director behind it
Separating the artist from their art isn’t as easy as it sounds, although Stephen King did at least preface a ringing recommendation by noting that the person behind it had done some despicable things.
As one of the most iconic voices in horror and someone who knows the genre inside out and back to front, a lot of people will gladly take King at his word when he says a movie is one that every self-respecting fan of things that go bump in the night needs to see at least once in their life.
On the other hand, many would refuse to watch it as a matter of principle, based entirely on who was on the other side of the camera. Hollywood is a place where most sins can be forgiven, but still, the industry allowing someone convicted of the sexual assault of a 12-year-old boy should never have happened.
Despite pleading guilty, serving 15 months of a three-year sentence, and registering as a sex offender for life, Salva found his way back to the industry, returned after a six-year hiatus with 1995’s Powder, followed it up four years later with Rite of Passage, before landing his biggest hit yet with 2001’s Jeepers Creepers.
Even after serving time behind bars for being a convicted paedophile, Francis Ford Coppola continued to back Salva, telling him of his prison sentence, “It will make you a better artist,” and personally vouching for him when MGM showed cause for concern over hiring him to make Jeepers Creepers, which The Godfather director also executive-produced.
“Victor Salva is a troubling, erratic director with a troubling, erratic history,” King acknowledged in Danse Macabre. “But this tightly focused film about a brother and sister who run across a supernatural serial killer in northern Florida is relentlessly terrifying, playing as it does on our feelings of claustrophobia (the pipe scene is pure genius).”
There’s no law that says a viewer can’t enjoy a picture made by someone who’s carried out some abhorrent acts, but still, insisting that any horror aficionado worth their salt needs to go out of their way to watch Jeepers Creepers sounds an awful lot like an endorsement of Salva’s talent for conjuring scares, regardless of King confronting the elephant in the room.
“If you haven’t seen it, watch it,” he intoned. “If you have, watch it again.” On the plus side, that’s as far as his admiration for the franchise went, with the bestselling author no fan of Salva-helmed Jeepers Creepers 2, summarising the follow-up in three simple yet entirely informative words: “It’s for shit.”
Based on how much it earned at the box office and how many DVDs it sold, plenty of folks have seen the movie at least once, and there’s a chance that many of them didn’t know of its director’s past. King does, but he still wants you to see it again anyway, which is a choice.
