Robert Englund leads all-star horror cast in "Fear Clinic"

By Stacey Harrison

My interview with Robert Englund lasted more than an hour. I think I spoke for about five minutes of that. It's apparent his vocal gifts go beyond Freddy Krueger's dastardly bons mots in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Truth is, Englund had a lot to talk about. In addition to releasing his autobiography Hollywood Monster on Oct. 13, he's part of a bold new project that could be a game-changer for original programming on the Internet. Fear Clinic is a five-part series that will be available at FEARnet On Demand and FEARnet.com beginning Oct. 26, with a new installment coming daily. The five-to-seven-minute clips feature an all-star horror cast — including Kane Hodder, who wore Jason's hockey mask in four Friday the 13^th movies, and Danielle Harris, who fled Michael Myers in several Halloween sequels.

Englund portrays Dr. Andover, a maverick whose experimental treatments for curing phobias have made him an outcast in the medical community. Now operating in a remote location, he functions as a desperate last resort for troubled teens whose parents have tried everything else. His method involves placing patients in the Fear Chamber — a sensory-deprivation tube with a form-fitting faceplate — where they confront what terrifies them most. This being a scary show, things start to go horribly wrong. Episodes with titles like "Hydrophobia," "Scotophobia," "Entomophobia," "Misophobia" and "Claustrophobia" give a hint of what kind of terrors to expect.

Tell me a little about Dr. Andover. Was he always a bad guy, or did he lose his way somewhere?

The idea was that I was a good man, and I've really come up with some brilliant techniques. But I've made mistakes, and I've become obsessed. I've become particularly obsessed and unable to cure Danielle Harris. We will realize that I've been treating her since she was a child. I can't fix her, and it's driving me a little crazy, and it's taking me to that place we call, conveniently, mad scientist.

So you're there to get the good-looking teens into the Fear Chamber, and that's where the scary part starts. Do you have an active role in the terror, or are you more like an MC?

I'm not really an MC. That's more like Freddy's Nightmares, a series I did for Lorimar. Or even more recently on Showtime, Masters of Horror, where I was sort of like Joel Grey in the Cabaret from hell. With this, I'm actually a complete participant, and perhaps even I will become a victim, whether it's because of my own ambitions, or because I will become a conduit for something I've created. It's that old cliché, Dr. Frankenstein has created this monster. He's created this evil. I think that's sort of where we're going with this — that I've accidentally let the genie out of the bottle, and whether or not the genie gets up my ass I don't know yet. But in one of the original screenplays, that's where it goes. It actually takes over me. The chamber, it's like this sort of David Cronenberg tank, isolation chamber. After enough patients have gone through this, we're going to hint that there's a residue of phobias. What phobias are is fear, and there's this residue of fear building in there. While the patients that have been cured have been purged, where does that go? Where does that fear go? Kind of like the concept of ghosts being the residue of electrical energy from a living person before they die. So we're going to play with that. We're also playing with people who will revenge themselves on me. The Kane Hodder character, it's as if I perhaps sprung him from doing community service in some prison hospital, my male nurse. I'm holding something over him, and he's not happy about that, being a con. Perhaps he will revenge himself and his situation on me. Or maybe another character. Maybe our nurse (played by Nightmare on Elm Street vet Lisa Wilcox). There are going to be some hints that she and I did something fraudulent, perhaps sexual, when I was younger, and that got us the medical equivalent of disbarred. We're playing with all these concepts, and I'm looking forward to it.

This cast is a virtual Mt. Rushmore of the horror genre.

As soon as we get the go-ahead [for more episodes], I'd love to bring in Doug Bradley, who played Pinhead [in Hellraiser]. Doug owes me a favor, so I want to get Doug over here. I'll have to come up with an airline ticket, but I can do that. Doug would be great as my nemesis, maybe an Interpol agent who goes after illegitimate doctors, bringing back lamb placentas for Keith Richards. Or maybe he's a fellow doctor who's been wronged by me. We can get five episodes out of somebody in a hard six days' work, because they're so short.

Next: Fear Clinic looks a lot like a feature film. How did the production crew pull that off?

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