Ahead of the world premiere of Jakob’s Wife at SXSW Film Festival, STARBURST caught up with horror icon and actress-producer Barbara Crampton to discuss her lead role in Travis Stevens’ horror feature, and her work as producer. Read on for our spoiler-free interview with the genre legend.
STARBURST: You have become a staple of the horror genre and have been cast in a number of movies that are now considered cult. What keeps you coming back to to horror cinema?
Barbara Crampton: I think the horror genre allows us to grapple with one of the most basic emotions that we have in life, and that’s fear. And it’s about survival. And that we’re able to see how others deal with their fear, that can potentially make us all a little braver; that’s what keeps me coming back. I think you can tell so many different stories with the horror genre and how we deal with things that scare us. I mean after all, fear is our basest emotion… and I have a psychologist friend who once told me that more people make decisions based on fear than they do on love. And unfortunately, she’s right. That’s the reality. But I think in addition to horror being about dealing with your fear and survival, it is also a genre that allows us to trade in empathy and understanding, and can push us to relate to, and understand why, people do the things they do. Horror really illuminates the human condition in a way that a lot of other genres don’t.
It’s interesting you emphasise the focus on fear, because in Jakob’s Wife your character Anne finds power through horror, more than she does fear.
She’s very fearful in the beginning, in that she’s afraid of her own power. And the movie is about reaching for that power, that newness, and that change that maybe you’ve been afraid of your whole life. So, I think that Anne at the beginning of the movie is really small. And then something horrible happens to her, something tragic and frightening, but it forces her to transform and to finally grow into that power. And I think, you know, that’s a parallel for a lot of stories in human nature.
This is a project you’ve been developing and producing for around four years now, and you’ve spoken before about how older women in horror don’t receive many roles as protagonists. Do you feel like you have to create more mature roles for yourself because of that bias?
Yes and no. I came back a number of years ago with You’re Next after not working as an actor for a very long time. And it was for the reasons that you’ve mentioned. I hit my mid-thirties and people weren’t offering me anything. That was thirty years ago, and we have come a long way since then. There are now more roles available for older women than there were.
When I came back to You’re Next, I decided that I wanted to rededicate myself to my career because I just really enjoyed it. And I had missed it. Around that time, I saw that all these young people that I was working with on that film – Joe Swanberg and Amy Seimetz, and Ti West, and Adam Wingard – they were all hyphenates. They were all doing other things on top of acting. They weren’t just waiting around for the phone to ring. And maybe that’s what I was doing in the 80s and 90s, maybe I was just waiting around until the day the phone stopped ringing. But thank God it rang when I was offered You’re Next, because it was then that I realised that if anything was going to happen, I would have to make it happen for myself.
And it wasn’t that I was looking to produce movies that only I would star in. I just happened to find this script because it was sent to me by Denise Gossett, who is the Festival director at Shriekfest where it had recently won Best Screenplay. I’ve continued to work on and develop other projects while I’ve been working on Jakob’s Wife, and some of these projects I’ll be in, and some of them I won’t. But for this particular project, I was really wanting to play the role of Anne because I felt like it paralleled my own life in a way. You know, I was given a second chance when I did You’re Next in the same way that she’s given a second chance when she goes through that pivotal transformation.
And it alters her and allows her to recapture her youth and gain a hunger for life that she’d lost, or that she never knew she had. So it’s almost like a second chance at life. And I feel like Barbara was given a second chance too! So very much parallel to my own life in that regard. Now though, I do see things changing. And I feel like with recent movies that have come out like Relic and Anything for Jackson, we’re seeing some older women being given substantial, complex roles. I’m very, I’m very buoyed by that, and very happy to see that times are changing and we’re incorporating more people into stories about human life.
And it’s interesting that female roles have long been restricted to archetypes or stock characters in horror since, like you said, it’s all about fear. And who’s got more to fear than minorities, women, or the elderly?
So it’s about the vulnerable. So I think a lot of times, you know, especially with women being depicted in our movies… not so much in the 70s, because I feel like they were more experimental then. But more so in the 80s and early 90s, I feel like the women were always portrayed as vulnerable, and then there would be a hero to come in to save you. And many times, that could have been a man and yes, sometimes that was a woman. Sometimes that was Heather Langenkamp in A Nightmare on Elm Street, or somebody like Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton – but you didn’t see as many of them. Mostly it was a bubble-headed co-ed screaming for her life, kind of like my role in Re-Animator. But I think that as we evolve as a society and women gain more positions of power and control, we’re now seeing that reflected in our stories.
See Barbara Crampton in Jakob’s Wife, which has its world premiere at SXSW on Wednesday 17th March.
