Screams and Nightmares: Wes Craven Remembered

The man knew how to get into our nightmares, and stay there. A wholly dignified man who exuded an academic air in interviews and on film, always with a soft smile and kind eyes, Wes Craven was an imaginative and innovative director whose creations shaped and re-shaped the horror genre time and again over the course of his blood-spattered 40-year career. 

Craven's teacher-like qualities are often cited by those he worked closely with on projects over the years as one of the great qualities the director possessed, and can likely be traced to the fact that prior to turning to filmmaking in his late twenties and early thirties, Craven was a humanities professor. His attraction to horror was born from an unlikely environment; Craven was raised in a strict, fundamentalist, Baptist household outside Cleveland, Ohio, where he was taught that the outside world was a place of deep and aggressive sin and that he was, at all costs, to avoid sex, drugs, and the cinema. In his youth, the man who would one day fashion one of the 20th century's most chilling boogeymen was only allowed to watched Disney cartoons at home.

But as all true horror fans know, the lure of the forbidden is seductive, urgent, and powerful, and after college, Craven developed a passion for films, and particularly the most taboo of genres: horror. As he expressed many times during his career, film allowed him to express the repressed emotions from his childhood that he kept so long under the surface. Once he had left academia, Craven entered the world of filmmaking through a not-unfamiliar seedy sidedoor: the New York City X-rated grindhouse industry, which was in its heyday during the late 1960's. After a short time churning out fast-and-cheap sleazefests for the trench-coat wearing crowd, Craven finally managed to make the switch to horror, another genre deemed disreputable in the halls of Hollywood, but he never forgot the lessons he learned from directing pornography, namely that limits are there to be pushed, and that there's room for art in all types of filmmaking.

Craven made his directorial debut with The Last House on the Left (1972), a film that very much took advantage of the fact that the Production Code had been dropped in 1968. Featuring the now famous tagline, "To avoid fainting, just keep telling yourself 'It's only a movie. It's only a movie,'" The Last House on the Left was a brutal film, featuring an unrelenting barrage of violence, rape, murder, and revenge centering on an insane posse of sadists that torment and violate a pair of young women, and the pair of parents that then enact some equally vicious revenge on the perpetrators. A loose remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960), Last House remains difficult to watch even in our current desensitized age. It is a landmark horror film made all the more unnerving that it is easy to forget it's just a movie, but still a movie that stands as a harrowing portrayal of the savagery and inevitability of violence.

Craven was a staunch believer that horror films did not create fear, they released it, that they were mechanisms by which the audience could be freed from their deepest anxieties, and throughout his career, films such as drive-in classic The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Deadly Blessing (1981) exemplified this while also showcasing Craven's growing technical talents. But it was Craven's best-known movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) that would launch him to new horror heights. Craven took the teen body-count slasher flick template and spun it on its head to dig beneath the quaint surface of the Reagan era and unearth blood, bodies, and secrets. 

Now a horror classic, and the progenitor of a nine-film franchise, Nightmare follows a group of teens haunted in their dreams by the razor-taloned, horribly burned and demonic Freddy Krueger, a child killer slaughtered in an act of vigilante justice. A touchstone of the slasher decade, Craven's film was both a meditation on the murderous instincts ingrained in the adolescent subconscious and another commentary about how violence works in an endless cycle. What was perhaps so distressing and so terrifying for audiences far and wide about this particular Craven creation was that the violence was centered in an idyllic, small-town setting, and the seemingly safe suburban streets of middle America were now turned into a hunting ground. After all, every town has an Elm Street. 

This and Nightmare's memorable villain--who would go on to join Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees in the Big Three of slasher killers--helped the film stand out amongst the glut of 1980's brand-name horror. The success of Elm Street allowed Craven to enjoy an inventive and creative period, out of which came many of his best underrated but consistently terrifying gems, like the sinister, voodoo-centric Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), his monster movie Shocker (1989), and his fairy-tale urbanoia horror The People Under the Stairs (1991). He would eventually return to the Elm Street franchise for the series' seventh installment, New Nightmare (1994) and once again, a Freddy film would prove to be an influential turning point in Craven's career. 

Playfully postmodern, New Nightmare was a Freddy movie cheekily aware of the Freddy movies in which Heather Langenkamp, real-life star of the first film, plays herself and becomes increasingly convince that Freddy Krueger has found a way to manifest himself in the real world. Full of dark humor, Hollywood satire, folklore, a sense of unnerving dreaminess, and genuine moments of horror, the film is among the best of Craven's career, and acts as a sort of dress rehearsal for his meta-slasher box office hit, Scream (1996). 

As a dissection and a dissertation on the genre, Scream was an old-fashioned whodunnit informed by the conventions, tropes, and expectations of slasher films, with the added element of characters that had a scary movie-savvy knowledge of those conventions. The film combined intelligence with horror and introduced us to another Craven creation that has since reached the status of legendary horror icon--Ghostface, who knew all the cliches and conventions of the horror film. The killer returned, albeit always with a different identity under the mask, along with Craven in three sequels, each entry a commentary on horror filmmaking (in Scream 2 (1997) the killer's focus in sequels, Scream 3 (2000) trilogies, and Scream 4 (2011) remakes and reboots). 

The massive success of the Scream franchise allowed Craven to venture beyond blood-and-guts filmmaking, as he did with Music of the Heart (1999), but the film, beyond earning Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination, was not a success and though he occasionally expressed regret about not being able to work outside the horror genre more often, Craven never let his work feel confined and films of his later years like Red Eye (2005) and My Soul to Take (2010) show him eagerly plumbing new and fearful depths as he had in his early days. His calling was never melodrama, it was terrifying audiences, even after the credits rolled, and he was damn good at it. 

We'll never scream quite the way we used to at a Wes Craven film.