Actor Robert Englund is best known to millions of horror fans around the world as the man beneath the latex of Freddy Krueger. These days, Englund remains active in horror. He’s a producer and star of the Fear.net original series, “Fear Clinic,” in which he plays opposite the man behind the hockey mask of Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th movies, Kane Hodder. Englund took some time away from his new series to talk about the influx of 3D horror movies, as well as some hands-on time he had with NVIDIA’s GeForce Vision 3D technology at the Wired Café during Comic-Con in this exclusive interview.


NVIDIA: We’re seeing a resurgence of 3D horror movies with recent hits like The Final Destination, My Bloody Valentine 3D and upcoming movies like Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D, Parahna 3D and Saw 3D. What are your thoughts on the latest wave of 3D horror movies?

Robert Englund: Well, I worked 3D on Freddy’s Dead – The Final Nightmare, directed by Rachel Talalay back in ‘91. My God, the technology’s come so far since then. I remember the cameras we had to use, and this is even as late as the 90s. We were all excited because they had improved the technique, but it was still so cumbersome. But apparently the new technology is like the new digital technology, it’s very portable and lightweight, which really is a difference. I mean, there’s still a lot of tricks that you have to do in post, and the technology itself is very sophisticated. But I really think there’s a time and a place for 3D.

We’re also now seeing 3D migrate to the PC with NVIDIA technology. Have you seen the NVIDIA Vision 3D?

Yes, I was down at Comic-Con on my Spiderman panel -- I do the voice of the Vulture on the Spiderman animated show on Saturday mornings. I was down there to talk about this show and to talk about Fear Clinic, and my new book, Hollywood Monster. I got invited to the VIP Lounge for some cool swag. I didn’t even make it to the free t-shirts, and baseball hats, and sunglasses because somebody got me at the tequila shot bar and turned me right into this game. They were showing off the new technology there for 3D gaming. I did a driving game through Route 66, it was a familiar road, which was amazing. It was sort of like this Death Race 2000 road, but you got to pick your highway in these great places around the world like Monte Carlo and Big Sur and Milan. Various things happen and occur, and you lose control, and all this. It rains, and there’s hail.

So you got to play with the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses on?

Yes. They put this virtual reality 3D headset on me, and I have never seen anything like that. If that’s what they can accomplish in any kind of a movie theater, even if it was like a small octaplex that we have in a lot of the malls now. If you could go in there with another 120 people and sit down, and every seat had one of these 3D goggles, I would certainly pay top dollar for it because it was just amazing. It wasn’t that old red and blue (Anaglyph) experience that we’re all so familiar with. It was a completely new experience. There’s almost a sensation that you are the camera, if that makes any sense.

Yes, I’m very familiar with NVIDIA’s 3D technology.

You are actually the moving camera, and it’s really thrilling stuff. I’m looking forward. I mean, I don’t think it’s for everything, and there’s obviously things you don’t want to see in 3D. But it also might be fun just also to have just limited effects sometimes in a film. There might be plot points for instance, or hallucinations, or one character’s point of view that might be enhanced by a 3D effect. There might be some really novel ways to explore it as a kind of new cinema shorthand for point of view that might be really interesting to get in to. But I’m excited about that. I’m a complete techno weenie when it comes to explaining how they’ve improved the technology, but as a fanboy, I can tell you – and from doing that game down at Comic-Con this year, I got to tell you, it was extraordinary.

The cool thing about the NVIDIA technology is that it works with games as well as 3D movies.

Yeah. If they went in and upgraded those screens and made one of those eight theaters 3D and they al have those headsets, that would be great. You hire an usher so nobody can sneak out with the goggles. I think it’s something that people would be so pleased about getting bang for the buck from it…especially the fan boys, that they would treat the stuff right. As long as they couldn’t steal the ones from the theater and take them home and hook them up onto their own stuff, I don’t think there’d be any problem with theft. I mean, that’s obviously something has to be worked out, but that was something that these people were worried about. But it would seem to me to be a win-win for everybody. It would rejuvenate some of the octaplexes out there, without having to completely remodel all of them.