Wes Craven: A Tribute to the ‘Scream’ King
It was hard to see writer/director Wes Craven, who died yesterday at the age of 76 after a battle with brain cancer, in person without experiencing a sense of cognitive dissonance. A dignified man with an academic air, kind eyes, and an easy smile, Craven defied the expectations created by his films, which sent character after character to their deaths, usually in imaginative — and always brutal — ways. Could the man expanding on the cultural roots of horror be the same man who turned Johnny Depp into geyser of blood in A Nightmare on Elm Street?
Craven’s teacher-like qualities can be easily explained: Prior to turning to filmmaking, he worked as a humanities professor. His career in horror has less likely origins. The product of a strict, fundamentalist upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio, the future director grew up in a household that viewed the outside world as a place of sin; his strict mother allowed him to watch only Disney cartoons. After college, Craven developed a passion for film, which he’d use it to express repressed emotions he’d long kept under the surface. “I had so much rage as a result of years of being made to be a good boy,” Craven told author Jason Zinoman in the 2011 book Shock Value. “When you’re raised to be within such rigid confines of thought and conduct […] it makes you crazy. Or it makes you angry.”
After a period working in the sleazier sections of the New York film industry, Craven made his directorial debut with Last House on the Left (1972), whose poster and trailer featured the famous tagline, “To avoid fainting, just keep telling yourself, ‘It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.'” Yet part of what makes this grindhouse landmark so unnerving even today is how easy to forget it is a movie — or at least a fiction film made by professionals. Inspired by the chaos of the Vietnam War era in general and Charles Manson in particular, Last House follows a pair of teenagers as they’re kidnapped and tormented by a gang of criminals; one pair of parents then exact some equally vicious payback on the perpetrators. A loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (but with a much bleaker ending), the film is made all the more effective by its low-budget and technical limitations. It plays less like a horror movie than evidence of a crime, an example of the awfulness and inevitability of violence.
It wouldn’t be the last time Craven would touch a nerve. Subsequent films, like the drive-in classic The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Deadly Blessing (1981) would showcase his growing technical skills even as they continued to get under your skin; if nothing else, the goofy but endearing comic-book adaptation Swamp Thing (1982) would prove that he was capable of doing more than assembly-line slicing and dicing. But it’s his best-known movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), that would use the slasher-flick template to dig beneath the peaceful surface of the Reagan era to find secrets, lies, and hidden threats. With the story of Freddy Krueger, a murderer of children in turn slaughtered by parents, Craven once again made a film about how violence works as an endless cycle. The big difference was that he grounded it in a bucolic small-town setting and made his boogeyman manifest himself in the seeming safety of suburban streets. Again, the tagline says it all: “Every town has an Elm Street.”
Wes Craven: A Tribute to the ‘Scream’ King, Page 1 of 3