INTERVIEWS: Eliza Dushku on Wrong Turn

Eliza Dushku is kind of a horror veteran, after a season and several guest appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and movies like Soul Survivors. She's got another horror movie out this weekend, Wrong Turn, the story of a group of kids pursued by inbred mountain men when they get lost on a backwoods road. It was the villains themselves that set the movie apart for Dushku.

"I think that one of the things that convinced me to do this movie was meeting with Stan Winston," Dushku said. "I just straight out told him that with all due respect for the monsters that he's made in the past and the creatures, I just didn't really want to do a movie about a bunch of kids getting chased through the woods by ooga booga boogie monsters. That just didn't feel real to me and it didn't feel frightening right now. He said, 'Well, do these monsters make you giggle and are these monsters frightening to you?' He showed me a picture of the three mountain men and they were so just terrifying and grotesque and disgusting, because I liked the fact that they were real men and there's a story behind it."

Always a woman of action, the film also allowed her to be physically active. "Climbing, falling, running and being whipped by tree branches. We jump out of a 40 foot watch tower and we go flying through the trees and we manage to land on the limbs and we're running along the limbs of a huge like Lego Land forest of trees. It's so physical but it was so much fun."

Dushku acknowledged that movies like Wrong Turn are different from more serious films like City by the Sea, in which she played a drug addict. "Definitely it's a plot driven movie as opposed to a character driven movie. I don't know if it's more fun or if it's harder or easier, but it's cool because it's physical. We literally spent running through the woods in Toronto and running through the trees and getting cut and dirtied and bloody and that physical aspect of it."

During one stunt scene, an accident threatened a stunt man's well being. "There was actually one awful moment in shooting the scene, the finale in the cabin, I run over and grab this burning log and come up and hit the mountain man from behind. I did what they said, they're like 'It's perfectly safe. The board is just going to crack him over the back.' Well, he was wearing prosthetics all over his body which are so flammable. I hit him with a burning stick and he catches on fire. So, he went from screaming like growling screaming to all of a sudden a real man screaming who's on fire. So, they came in and they doused him down with the fire extinguisher and he was seriously burned. I felt so bad even though I knew that I hadn't done anything wrong. It's pretty intense when you're making movies and all of a sudden there's real blood and there's real wounds and pain. He was okay, but probably a little pissed off.

Wrong Turn opens Friday.