After
making his way from academia (he was, for a time, a college humanities
professor), Craven made his way to New York into the wilds of pornography and,
eventually, more mainstream exploitation filmmaking, and the fledgling director’s
first feature belied the cowardly implications of his surname with an
unrelenting fury. Last House on the Left
(1972), which recast Ingmar Bergman’s The
Virgin Spring with relentless, pitiless sexual violence, refused to look
away from either the misery of its two central, female victims, raped,
mutilated and murdered by a gang of thugs in the woods, or the angry vengeance
rained down upon them by one of the girls’ parents, and the movie,
inadvertently or purposefully, reflected the dark undercurrent of political and
social tension tearing at the country during the Vietnam era. The filmmaking
was raw, artless and sometimes inept, qualities which actually served the film’s
purpose of simultaneously implicating the audience in the horror and submerging
them into a much more immediate, difficult-to-digest experience. (Last House on the Left was, of course,
the movie whose advertising encouraged potential audiences, when the going got
rough, to continually keep repeating to themselves, “It’s only a movie… It’s
only a movie…”)
In 1977 Craven
unleashed The Hills Have Eyes, in
which a vacationing family is stranded in the desert and subjected to assault
and terror at the hands of a deranged mirror-image clan of cannibals surviving
in the desert hills, themselves victims of mutations brought on by exposure to nuclear
radiation. Again, Craven’s unrefined approach was perfectly appropriate for
keeping the audience under his thumb, and the movie’s lack of superficial
finish makes it look even better, and play far scarier, in comparison to the
slick, up-to-the-minute ghastliness of the 2006 remake and its even more
revolting 2007 sequel. (Craven himself directed a 1984 sequel to THHE which is also held in low regard.)
But it
was when he dared to invade the audience’s dreams—specifically, the nightmares
of the kids in the audience—that
Craven managed to up his game as a storyteller and an image maker, in the
process delivering the first truly frightening serial killer of the slasher
era. In A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984), Freddy Krueger (Robert
Englund), scraping the elongated
finger blades of his gloves along the walls of an abandoned boiler room in
pursuit of yet another sleeping victim, built a legacy of horror on, of all
things, the foundation of a child’s prayer (“If I should die before I wake…”)
and turned the respite of slumber into the absolute worst refuge a terrified
teenager could take. (The director would return to that same prayer at the end
of his career which far less resonant results.)
The
culture took to Craven’s monster on a first-name basis, and Freddy became not
only a figure of genuine fear, but also one who opened up the possibility of
self-awareness within the genre with his penchant for pitch-black wisecracks
and the outright glee he took in punishing the younger generation for the sins
of their mothers and fathers. Sequel after sequel, most of which Craven was
only tangentially involved with, eventually diluted the effectiveness of the
concept, until the director was moved to revisit Kruegerland with his New Nightmare (1994), which brilliantly
deconstructed the Freddy mythology, and the very idea of the morbid attraction
of the slasher phenomenon, in the process pointing the way to Craven’s last
great achievement in genre subversion.
In the
wake of the first Nightmare, Craven
seemed to be satisfied working themes of racism and classicism and social
justice into an uneven string of pictures like Shocker (1989) and The People
Under the Stairs (1991), the best of the bunch being his weirdly earnest
and unsettling look at the world of Haitian black magic in The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), which was based on the
first-person accounts of anthropologist and author Wade Davis.
But it
was in Scream (1996) that he seemed
to find the perfect distillation and balance between sincere genre practice and
the detailed examination of same, and he brought his own sort of pop-anthropological
sensibility to the party in spades. Here was a movie which succeeded in having
fun with conventions that had become worn-out and tired from overuse, an
exhaustion to which Craven himself had contributed, that was at the same time
deadly serious about the violence and the emotional toll inflicted upon its
cast of characters. That Craven and writer Kevin Williamson would subject this
most self-aware of franchises to the same sort of process of diminishing
returns over the course of three sequels was one irony that went largely
unacknowledged within the movies’ increasingly convoluted plots.
It’s
unfortunate, too, that he also seemed, as he attempted to move further into the
mainstream, both pre- and post-Scream,
to have so much trouble shepherding good material past the meddling influence
of the suits. Movies like Vampire in
Brooklyn and Cursed may have been
bad ideas to begin with, but studio tampering surely did little to ensure that
Craven would deliver on the promise of his reputation as a horror master. But even
in acknowledging that reputation, there’s a whiff of desperation about movies
like Shocker and especially My Soul to Take, both of which saw
Craven angling for new horror franchises based upon faint, anemic echoes of
past glories rather than attempting to craft solid stories to tell. (In 1999 the
director even made a bold attempt to separate himself from his stature as a
horrormeister by directing Meryl Streep as a music teacher in the
middle-of-the-road would-be Oscar contender Music
of the Heart, but few seemed to notice.)
Thankfully,
Craven will instead always be remembered for his successes, and he can lay
claim to creating some shocking, potent, original horror imagery during a
period when much of what was coming out of American efforts in the genre was
satisfied with the simple repetition of worn-out plots and ideas. A friend of
mine posted on Facebook upon learning of his death that “(Craven) made
his mark, more than once, and it's a mark that is uneraseable,” and such a claim seems about as
undeniable as anything that has or will be said about the director upon the occasion
of his death.
Wes Craven
seemed to me more a meat-and-potatoes storyteller who had an undeniable talent
for occasionally tapping into resonant, zeitgeist-flavored themes than an
artist driven by personal expression. But when he was in peak mode, he was
among the genre’s most fertile and socially engaged practitioners. His
influence upon a generation of self-aware and self-examining horror filmmakers
may be a double-edged sword (as Tarantino’s has been as well), but I suspect
his unique penchant for creeping past their defenses into the dark corners of
the audience’s collective fear centers will continue to be the envy of upcoming
directors for a long time to come. “The first monster you have to scare
the audience with is yourself,” Craven once said, and at his best he cast an
unblinking eye on the sort of unforgiving horror that on its most fundamental
emotional and visceral levels could only be described as personal.
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