11th: You've written another movie, a thriller called "Icebound" set in the Arctic. What happened with that? Is it going to be made?

Hansen: Gary and I have pitched that to a number of places, and we had some good responses where it was taken to the studio and we had a couple of meetings. But we've not been able to sell it yet. I talked to Gary a couple of weeks ago, and he's got Bob Kurtzman, who directed Wishmaster and wants to direct it. He's got four or five more producers he wants to mention it to, so we're hopeful. The complaint with it was that it wasn't a teen horror film, it's a real horror film. It has adults in it.

11th: God forbid.

Hansen: The irony of that is that TIME magazine last week ran a story about this new set of horror movies that are coming in. And finally, finally, teen horror is out. Unfortunately, you can't take the story back to the same producer.

11th: You've worked as a writer, a director and an actor. Which of these mediums do you find most satisfying?

Hansen: Oh writing, definitely. Writing is what I always wanted to do. Early on, right after Chainsaw Massacre came out, I had the chance to be in a couple of other movies. And I turned them down, and part of it was because working as an actor never had been my ambition. Also, right around then a met a number of film people, and realized what scumbags they were. And I thought, I don't want anything to do with people like this. That wasn't the basis of my decision; it just confirmed it. If I was going to struggle and suffer and starve to try to develop my skill, I'd rather do it as a writer than as an actor.

11th: Of course.

Hansen: The last straw was when Bob Burns -- who was the art director in Chainsaw -- called me. This was in the fall of '76. He said, "I'm out in LA working on a film, and we want you to come out and be in the movie. It's called The Hills Have Eyes." [The film, directed by Wes Craven, went on to be a horror classic.] And I said, "No, I don't do movies anymore." It was an easy choice for me. But it was 12 years ago when Fred Allan Ray called me and said, "I want you in this picture" [Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers] and I said "Oh, why not?" That was when I realized that I could certainly work in films as an actor part-time, on the side, as long as I kept my wits about me.

11th: It's unusual nowadays to find someone with such a strong affinity for classic American literature. What attracted you to the work of the authors you admire -- Melville, Hemingway, Thoreau?

Hansen: The book that really got me interested in American writers, at least nineteenth-century American writers, was Moby Dick. Everybody talks about how its such an unreadable book, especially when you're in high school, but I picked up a copy and read it and just loved the book. That just got me started reading Melville.

11th: Moby Dick has often been referred to as the greatest novel in American literature. What do you think it is about the book that strikes such a chord with people?

Hansen: Well, I think it works on a lot of levels. To use a mundane example, it's like going back to watch The Haunting; you see it a second time and you have a very different experience; you're seeing other things in it. I mean, with Moby Dick, I thought, "Hey, this is great; look at all the stuff I'm learning about whaling. What an adventure!" At the same time, it's a very mystical book in a way. Well...

11th: It's a very spiritual book.

Hansen: It's a book where there's this whole underlying issue of, if you want to be Freudian about it, the deep unconscious that the sea represents. Or as Jung said, the lake in the valley of the unconscious. And at the same time, it's a tragedy about Ahab. It's the kind of book where there's so many things going on, but what worked particularly for me was that it seemed to be dipping into the idea that there was this mass of unknowability. The book, in a way, was about that great unknowable that was below the surface of the ocean which was represented by Moby Dick. I think what I liked about the book was that it was this huge book that has all these seams in it. Sometimes you read something and you feel that everything is just polished as smooth as a stone, and I never had that feeling with this book. The book was bigger than the author was.

11th: Have you read Typee [a Melville novel which includes graphic depictions of cannibalism]? Why do you think there is this fascination with cannibalism, as seen in a nineteenth-century author or in Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Hansen: Yes, I've read it. And in a way, I think the fascination is that it's the ultimate violation. Clearly, that was why people wanted to read the book. Cannibalism's got everything -- it has death, but it also has your own death, in a sense. It's the ultimate kind of dying, or to think about it another way, the ultimate kind of killing. You're killing your own, and gaining their strength. That's why it has this fascination: it is the most hideous thing you can do, but it is also the most powerful thing you can do. Have you seen Ravenous?

11th: Yeah, I thought it was very good.

Hansen: I really liked it too; I'm surprised it got away with a couple of shots. At the cave, when he kills the first of the soldiers and he's standing at the stream, and he's obviously got a chunk of someone's flesh there, and he's eating it. I mean, they don't cheat that shot at all!

11th: I was just relieved to see an adult horror movie, instead of another "I Know What You Did..." kind of thing.

Hansen: The problem with these "I Know What You Did..." movies is that they stack a bunch of clichés together, and think the movie is not a cliché because they're winking at you. It's like, "I know this is a cliché; isn't that brilliant?" While in fact, it's like, "No, that's an even more tired idea, isn't it?"