Goodbye to the Master of Horror, Wes Craven
Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 1:50PM Glenn Dunks, our resident "Scream" fanatic says goodbye to Wes Craven...
It’s not easy writing about the passing of Wes Craven. The director who was synonymous with the horror genre, and in particular the slasher franchises A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, died on Sunday at age 76 from brain cancer after having battled ill health for several years and the news hit like a stab to the chest. His three-year illness likely explains why he hadn’t directed a film since 2011’s Scream 4, but it hadn’t stopped him from working altogether. He was completing a horror comic with Steve Niles called Coming of Rage, was developing a remake of his 1991 film The People Under the Stairs, and continued to executive produce MTV’s long-form TV adaptation of Scream.
There are few older celebrities whose death could hit as hard as Craven. He wasn’t just a great filmmaker, or a filmmaker with a lot of films that people liked. No, Wes Craven was quite literally a filmmaker that changed lives. A lot of ‘em – and that’s not an exaggeration. It’s genuinely hard to make even one, let alone two, generation-defining movies and it’s been wonderful to hear so many people, friends and strangers alike, share their stories on social media of how A Nightmare on Elm Street was the first horror film they ever saw and how it turned them into scare-seeking horror fiends. Or how Scream made them want to write about film. I’m one of those people, and there are a few extra Film Experience writers who share the same sentiments, but the numbers I've seen cite that seemingly inocuous 1996 slasher as a life inspiration has been surprising and actually comforting.
So when I went to write about his passing, I actually couldn’t. Not immediately, anyway. How do you describe the man who made the movies that defined our life? I hope he knew the effect his films had on people beyond simply scaring them.
Just to take you on a personal detour through my teenage years and beyond – Scream was my gateway movie. I hadn’t been allowed to see it in cinemas, but for a period of a few months in 1997 it felt like I watched my brother’s VHS copy every day. Likewise a year later with Scream 2, which Craven also directed. I would force friends to watch them and decorated my schoolbooks in pictures and posters. It became a thing I was known for with classmates. What I didn’t tell most people was that I was also a member of an online message board devoted to the movies (this was in the lead-up to 2000’s Scream 3). For a good while, these people were my best friends. They were the first people I ever came out to. They were the people I could discuss anything with, and to this day I remain close to most of them online and in the flesh. In 2013, one of those friends and I even spent a long day driving across northern California visiting filming locations (and nearly getting caught several times trespassing in the process). It was one of the greatest days of my life.
Yes, that is me cautiously approaching Stu Macher's house in '13
As for Craven, I suppose it’s lucky he could be so good at the horror niche within which he found his greatest successes, because apart from the Oscar-nominated Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep as a Harlem music teacher and a short segment in the omnibus film Paris je t’aime , he never got the chance to really go beyond it. He did begin, however, as a college professor before moving on to hardcore pornographic movies before eventually churning out the script for The Last House on the Left and directing it for producer Sean Cunningham (later of Friday the 13th fame) with whom Craven had worked as an editor and sound mixer.
There was no doubt he had a particular skill in staging a gruesome kill or a scary stalk sequence, something usually evident even in his bad movies. His strongest asset, however, was being able to tap into something real and psychological with his films. In the infamous video nasty The Last House on the Left he transformed (of all things) Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring into a deeply troubling tale dealing with the morals of good people turning to pure unadulterated revenge. With The Hills Have Eyes he explored nature versus nurture and the concept of the American family post-Vietnam. A Nightmare on Elm Street tackled the sinister and terrifying realities inherent in the suburban subconscious, while the lone Craven-directed sequel, New Nightmare, saw Craven in pre-Scream meta mode using himself as a tool to explore the consequences of screen violence. That his films were so often embroiled in censorship issues while bigger yet no less brutal films go out into the world rated PG-13 is surely one of the great ironies of his career given he spent so much of his career attempting to make sense of human nature’s propensity for violence in all of its forms.
With Scream, he yet again confronted these issues, but with the (er, look, let’s just use this phrase) post-modern hook of being a horror movie about people who had actually seen horror movies. It’s all very nudging, winking stuff courtesy of Kevin Williamson’s screenplay, but it works and what Craven was able to do with it, as well as with all three subsequent sequels, was make them truly cinematic. The mundanity of suburban menace rarely looks this classically beautiful and artful. Watching them again these last couple of days has really highlighted once more to me that he was an extremely smart filmmaker down to the smallest of parts.
It’s true that he had his missteps like Vampire in Brooklyn and My Soul to Take, clearly his worst film, and artistically compromised works like Shocker or Cursed, but that’s to be expected working in a genre such as horror where – like comedy – it can be harder to hit the mark every time. It has been nice to see his career and his films treated the way they ought to be, with respect and admiration because despite whatever the critical fads of the time or the lack of awards may suggest, horror is something that is deeply essential and, for many, is an integral part of youth. Many, myself included, owe Craven a great debt. While he was opening up our nightmares, he was also altering our realities.
To quote Rose McGowan on Twitter... please say there's a plot twist. What's your favourite Craven scary movie?
Horror, RIP, Scream, Wes Craven
Reader Comments (23)
"Scream" was really special to me. I was already a horror fan but in a more kid-friendly, "Goosebumps" and MST3k kind of way. Then "Scream" arrived and felt very adult (my second ever R rated movie in theaters, back when I still had to convince my Dad to take me), helped lead a horror resurgence, and made video stores, ironic quips, and excessive movie knowledge all seem kind of cool. (Not that I capitalized on that in any way.)
I don't know that I recognized it at the time, but the movie-obsessive nature of "Scream" was probably as influential to me as just the straight horror aspects.
I will also vaguely defend "My Soul to Take", which is kind of a mess but, it's a mess with real *moments*. There's a surrealistic quality and dream logic to it all (probably a charitable reading of bad editing) that I really enjoyed at the time, even though it doesn't cohere overall.
Hard to pick just one. Most of his movies, even the bad ones, had something to recommend them. Of course The hills have eyes, Scream and NoES are stone cold masterpieces, but I really like The serpent and the rainbow (even though the climax is cheesy as all hell) and The people under the stairs as well. But I don´t think there´s a greater, more spine tingling moment for me than the moment in New Nightmare where Heather accepts the fantasy and becomes Nancy again. And through the sheet comes Freddy! Pure brilliance!
Craven will be truly missed. Not many people can claim three all time, genre defining classics, as Craven can with Last House, Nightmare... and Scream - and across three decades, no less. Look at the growth curve across those three movies and it also gives you a sense of how restless, intelligent, and engaged he was as an artist. Non-horror opportunities were few and far between, but I've always been a big fan of Red Eye, an ace Hitchcockian thriller that he knocked right out of the park. RIP.
Really, really well written piece Glenn. It's interesting to see how Craven had a major impact on multiple generations and in different ways, even within the same genre.
He'll always be important for inventing the most substantial movie monster icon of the modern era: Freddy Krueger. And despite what Wes and others felt about Freddy becoming more comical and less menacing, I appreciate the Michael Jackson level of penetrate he had for us 80's babies.
Scream is the prefect horror movie. Well executed from top to bottom.
RIP, Wes Craven. For ANOES alone he is a horror film icon; adding in the original Last House and Scream makes him one of the greats.
I'm not a huge horror fan, but I do love the Scream movies. And Red Eye is just one of the tightest thrillers out there (with one of the all-time great trailers), proving that he was just good with suspense, horror or not. RIP indeed.
3rtful: (Wiggles claw hand) Hey! You forgot the Power Glove! (Comedic gold.)
The news of his passing ruined my Sunday night.
I have never seen Scream. Not it's the right to correct that.
I'd like to take a moment to observe that Wes Craven helped pioneer horror cinema three times, in three different decades. I know others have touched upon that already, but really think about it. It's not just that he made three exceptional horror films over the course of three decades; these three horror films CHANGED the landscape of horror.
Usually any new movement in cinema is a response to the one before it, and it's usually a mixture of both being influenced by it and consciously departing from it. Although other filmmakers certainly had a hand in each of these movements, Craven was very much at the forefront of the gritty '70s horror movement, the subsequent '80s slasher movement, AND the subsequent '90s post-modern horror movement. The man didn't merely remain relevant in the face of the genre's evolution; he was the one DOING the evolving. The genre changed with him, perhaps even more than he changed with the genre.
It's a remarkable feat, and I'm not sure he'll ever truly get the credit he deserves for it since horror is looked down upon by a lot of film scholars, but name another director working in any genre or style of film that can claim this feat. It's not just that he changed the face of horror with a movie; it's that he did it repeatedly. It's quite simply impossible to even imagine what horror since 1972 would have been like without him. It's as if he didn't change to remain relevant over the years; the genre changed to keep up with him.
I was re-reading Vulture's oral history of "Nightmare on Elm Street" last night and found it so interesting that Freddy Krueger basically built New Line, in the same way that Frankenstein built Universal, and that it as nothing new for new film companies to be initially bankrolled by horror films.
I still think the part in "Scream 2" when Sidney and Hallie are locked in the cop car and the cops are dead but they don't know if the killer is dead AND THEY HAVE TO CLIMB OVER HIS BODY OUT THE WINDOW is the most suspenseful scene I've ever watched.
omg JAKEY!! That scene is HORRIFYING. It is so well executed and takes your breath away!
In " Nightmare on Elm Street" he created one of the true icons of modern horror cinema.
How many directors can say, they reinvented a genre, thee times, in three different decades?
In the 70's he dared to transform a Bergman drama into a horror ultraviolent nightmare, with "The Last House in the Left"
In the 80's he reinvented the genre again with "A Nightmare on Elm Street"
In the 90's he started the meta trend with "Scream".
Not all his films are great, but greatness was always expected to pop up, in his films. A true master is gone, and I saw again, today, "A Nightmare on Elm Street", just as a tribute to his memory... 31 years and still doesn't grow old, Freddy is scary as ever.
Jakey/David, I prefer Gale's chase through the campus and the sound-proof booths, but gosh that car scene is superb. I bump it down on my list of favourite scenes (after the Gale chase and the opening) because I think the way it ends with the killer leaping out from behind a stack of construction material and Hallie's disappointing exit felt like a bit of a fumble.
Denny, oh i didn't even have time to get into RED EYE! That trailer really is excellent.
Seriously, when I saw the news I was gutted (I SWEAR I did not mean to make that pun), I was so shocked. I had no idea he had brain cancer.
The Scream trilogy (I refuse to acknowledge the 4th) means so much to me. I was a huge Scream fanboy as a child, one of my first true movie obsessions after The Lion King lol. When I was in elementary school, a good Friday night to me was my mom picking me up from school, getting some snacks from the store (including jiffy pop sometimes), and watching the Scream trilogy with her. I'm sure I've shared this before, but it's true.
Probably part of the reason I'm such a mentally fucked up young adult, but hey. Haha. Thank you, Wes. <3
RIP Wes Craven, love Scream and Scre4m.
I cried when Phillip Seymour Hoffman died. Maybe Meryl Streep's death would have me crying into the eternity, just thinking about it depresses me.
If you all haven't already, you should check out Never Sleep Again, the four-hour documentary currently streaming on Netflix that covers every film in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise -- and I do mean each one. It's full of cast and crew interviews and various factoids that show you just how much Craven changed the game when he introduced Freddy Kruger to movie going audiences. The character virtually built New Line Cinema.
Troy H., thanks for that info re: Never Sleep Again. I saw it years ago and thought it was just excellent. Time to watch it again.
Never Sleep Again is fantastic, agreed. New Line was indeed nicknamed "The House That Freddy Built" since the profits they made from those flowed into The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which so on and so on eventually lead to The Lord of the Rings. We have Wes Craven to thank for The Lord of the Rings, folks!
Wow! Please tell me more about your experiences visiting the Stu Macher house! The gate has always been closed, and I've never ventured out to get a better look at the house...