It’s sometimes in the strangest places that the sweetest things lurk. Or such is the case with Mike P. Nelson’s 2021 sequel/reboot of the Wrong Turn franchise, a film series which began in 2003 and went on to spawn five sequels. Despite a dedicated fan base, the backwoods inbred cannibal horror franchise never managed any notable critical or commercial success but in flipping the script and starting basically from scratch, Nelson and writing partner Alan B. Elroy have breathed new life into a series that now shows no sign of running out of gas and a whole new highway of ideas to explore.

From our review,

“This new iteration of Wrong Turn is a top-down reinvention that abandons perhaps the most defining feature of the series in an effort to revitalize the franchise, starting from scratch with a whole new set of characters, circumstances, and carnivorous appetites. Whereas hopes to reboot long-running horror series more often than not fails miserably, Nelson’s Wrong Turn makes all the right moves by deconstructing the genre and really narrowing in on what makes horror writ large and this particular franchise so endlessly enjoyable. 

In discussing his methodology for finding novelty within the genre and franchise, Nelson broke  down his main tonal inspirations, the political subtext of post-MAGA America, and how his movie was originally rated NC-17 and had to make cuts to get it down to an R-rating. Be aware, the following interview contains ***several key spoilers*** for the film, so be sure to watch the film before diving in.

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One of the things that I loved about the film is how it seemed to combine so many different facets and sub-genres of horror and had a lot of winks and nods to horror lore. What are some of your horror reference points that you were coming from while making this?

MN: There’s a little bit of Carpenter, a little bit of ‘Texas Chainsaw [Massacre]’, a little bit of ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Surprisingly the one I go to all the time is ‘Temple of Doom’, the Indiana Jones horror film. I’m a huge Indiana Jones trilogy junkie and to me that’s the one that always resonated. When I read the script for the first time, it was very much like that. Especially with the movie cutting itself in half, like Indiana Jones, you have the adventure and then you have cult. You have the survival story and the adventure in the woods, crazy stuff is happening, and then you have court and a strange civilization. It was very similar so I watched that movie a bunch, and though it’s definitely different from our film, it has that type of flavor.

For me, one connection that was a little more broad is ‘Twilight Zone’ because ‘Twilight Zone’ is very much about dealing with social issues and how humans react to one another. And I felt like this was like that: these kids step into the Twilight Zone and they’re almost in this different time. And they get put in this court and they get judged and it’s a nightmare, just like most of those ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes were: you were living through a nightmare. To me, those were some of my inspirations. What did you see in terms of inspirations?

The entire sequel with the “judged” – the see no evil, hear no evil aspect of it – very much gave me ‘Descent’ vibes.

MN: *Laughs and claps* Yes! Totally.

That was utterly horrifying. I love that you bring up ‘Temple of Doom’. I wouldn’t even call myself a ‘Temple of Doom’ apologist because I think that movie is legitimately great and hugely underrated. But you also bring up ‘The Twilight Zone’ and the social aspect of this film. Horror movies have always been a political response to their times and comment on the zeitgeist in a way that other genres often do not. There’s some some pretty clear lines that you’re tethering between the American Civil War and our current political situation. Can you talk about when you guys were working on the script for this and incorporating that material into this and what you want people to take away from that aspect of it.

MN: When I read the original script back in late-2017, it’s almost as though Alan [B. Elroy], the writer, knew what was coming. We were already boiling at that point, we just hadn’t quite yet boiled over. Alan wanted to tell a story about the differences of points of view of people. That good people can do bad things and that people we see as bad people maybe aren’t as bad as we think they are; or maybe they have a point of view that we can agree with even though they’re maybe not the best kind of person. You know what I mean? So what he wanted to play with was, when we started talking about this, was where do those lines start to blur? As people, where do we start stereotyping and judging other people that we know nothing about?

That was really interesting because you have three factions of people in this movie: you have the townsfolk, the young city adults, and The Foundation. Each one of those groups makes that mistake: they all stereotype each other. And they don’t really know each other. Even John Venable who says, “I know about your people. I know you have nothing to go home to.” There’s some truth to that, and he’s talking to Jen, who doesn’t know her path in life, and he says, “You are alone” and she kind of is. She feels trapped and she doesn’t know what to do. But when he says, “You’re not as strong as you pretend to be,” he doesn’t know what resides in Jen. It’s like Adam doesn’t understand that you can be people who live out in the woods and not be psychotic killers.

Even the townsfolk who think that they are these stupid city kids who think they know everything and then you think, there’s this red-stater, bible-thumping, gun-loving dude, he’s probably a racist, but what happens? He comes through in the end. To me, there was something unique about that. The lines that blur can be challenging. In a story sense, we want there to be a good guy and a bad guy and we want someone to defeat the evil – and we do get that in this movie because Jen gets to be the final girl and gets to enact and get revenge in the end. What’s interesting is you get to play with those three sides. It’s going to be challenging for an audience to accept that we are playing with those sides and saying that the side that they don’t like has a point of view. That’s something that I thought was commendable and the script really wanted to explore.

There are plenty of really disturbing sequences and some great gore in this. Can you talk about creating moments that make the audience squeamish? How far do you want to push the envelope in terms of that and was there anything in the process of writing and producing this that went too far and has to be scaled back?

MN: Yes. I haven’t really told anyone about this yet but I’ll reveal this interesting piece: we did have to scale back a bit of the blood and violence at one point. The scene where Adam gets executed: we got an NC-17 for that moment because we didn’t cut away. We just watch as his head gets smashed in over and over. The MPAA didn’t like that. What was hard about letting that go, because for me there was a very particular thing I was trying to do there. Up until that point, a lot of the violence was offscreen, you might have noticed that. You’d see a lot of aftermath and characters had died and it was violent but you didn’t necessarily see active violence enacted onscreen so much. You saw a bit of Adam smashing the head, but only a grief little glimpse.

What I was trying to do was do this ramping of violence and tension until Adam was executed and you’re forced to watch the brutality of this moment. Maybe someday we’ll get that scene release online or maybe get an unrated version where you can see if that plays the way I wanted it to. That was the one thing that we got called out on and I couldn’t see all the way through unfortunately. And we needed an R-rating so.

Are you guys in development on a sequel to this? Because I personally would love to see this story continue.

MN: There’s nothing official yet because there haven’t been any back and forths on the possibility of this but I can say that Alan and I have been talking.

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WRONG TURN is available on VOD, Digital, DVD and Blu-ray February 23rd. 

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