Fangoria Magazine, Issue #102
"The Thinking Man's Scream Queen."
Bright, articulate and appealing, Jill Schoelen doesn't quite
fit into the current horror-heroine mold. Perhaps it's her dark-haired, dark-eyed
attractiveness which, while striking, is miles away from the blue-eyed blondes
that populate many a horrorfest. Or perhaps it's because she seems to radiate
a wholesome, sensible quality, matched with a real intelligence and sense
of self–all unique attributes in the horror cinema these days. Unlike
the horror heroines who seem to be hired solely for their looks, Schoelen
is interesting on an intellectual as well as a physical level.
Schoelen's unorthodox image, charming as it is, has sometimes worked against
her, however. Although she ended up with the lead role in Popcorn,
she initially lost the part to blonde Amy (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids)
O'Neill. In a double switch, Schoelen replaced O'Neill after filming had begun,
just as first-time director Mark Herrier took over for Alan Ormsby. "The
(former) director had a direction that he wanted to take the picture, and
I didn't fit in that direction," she confides. "And, strangely enough,
that direction is the same reason I almost didn't get Phantom of the Opera.
They wanted to cast me in Phantom, because they thought I could
walk in and do the job–and I feel like I did very good work. But I was
not their idea of...the victim. They wanted that princessy, blonde look.
"Men have their ideas of what sexy is," she continues. "They
want tight clothes and big pouffy hair. They don't necessarily see sexy as
just getting out of the shower and throwing on a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt
and tennies, while I do."
Schoelen, a Southern California native, broke into the film business in 1981,
when she sang in a Fame-type TV pilot called Best of Times. Her first
genre credit came in Wes Craven's 1985 TV movie Chiller, a tale about
a man thawed out after a decade in cryogenic cold storage that starred Michael
Beck. Two years later, she made it to the big screen as Shelley Hack's daughter
in the sleeper hit The Stepfather, heroically fighting off the murderous
advances of Terry O'Quinn's chillingly delineated middle-American madman.
"I don't really view Stepfather as a horror picture–although
it certainly has some horrific elements in it," she notes with a laugh.
Plenty of horrific elements were also on tap in her next major genre effort,
1989's The Phantom of the Opera, with Robert Englund as the titular
character. "The killings, and everything else that takes place in Phantom,
are a part of the story, part of a classic book," she maintains. "What
I object to in horror films is when they arbitrarily kill people, and do things
that make it grotesque, and chances are children will be seeing it.
"Phantom was a beautiful picture," she continues. "It
was beautiful to look at. And I probably shouldn't say this, but I personally
feel that, in the editing process, too much emphasis was put on the killings.
Yes, you had to show them. But why show 10 seconds when you only need to show
three? The story shoud be about how he killed for the love of this girl, and
therefore they didn't need to overemphasize those (gore) scenes. That did
the picture a great disservice, and Robert is so good that it did him a disservice."
Since Phantom, Schoelen has turned up in the direct-to-video Curse
II: The Bite, which found her contending with not only Jamie Farr, as
a bumbling doctor but also J. Eddie Peck as a boyfriend who's body is appropriated
by snakes, and Cutting Class, in which she deals with high school murders,
Donovan Leitch's bad haricut and being the daughter of Martin Mull. As Maggie,
a young woman menaced by an apparition from her mother's past, Schoelen got
top billing in her latest Popcorn. That role is just the kind she likes.
"Maggie is a girl who has a lot of life, a lot of creativity, and who
is very much in tune with her feelings," explains Schoelen. "She's
very strong-willed. I have a big problem with pictures in the horror genre
that want to play the girl as weak, that want to play her as the victim. She
can be victimized, because even the strongest of us can fall vicitm to a certain
situation. But it's very important that if she's victimized, it's because
her will has been taken away. Eventually, she has to prevail. I find it a
mistake in a lot of horror pictures when they make the female characters so
victimized from the inside. I don't feel that Maggie is this way. Although
she is a victim, she's strong. She has a mind of her own."
And despite her abhorrence of the V word, Schoelen insists that she's not
putting horror movies down. "I happen to love certain kinds of horror,"
she smiles. "I just don't like cheap horror, made for the sake of slashing
people up."
– John Wooley
