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?