Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema continued the month-long Halloween theme with a look at the career of filmmaker Wes Craven. The writer-director-producer passed away on August 30, 2015 at the age of seventy-six. He left behind a filmography that is distinguished within the horror genre and across American cinema as a whole.
Overview
Wes Craven began his career in the early 1970s, first gaining experience as an editor and then becoming a writer and director with 1972’s The Last House on the Left. From there Craven would helm such horror classics as The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs,and the Scream series as well as the mainstream drama Music of the Heart.
Coming from a Midwestern working class background and a family that belonged to a fundamentalist church that rejected movies as literally the work of the devil, Craven was not disposed to become one of the great American filmmakers. But it’s difficult to deny that few figures in the history of horror cinema—and for that matter the history of American film—have created as many movies with the impact and longevity that he did.
One of the extraordinary aspects of Craven’s filmography is the role he played in reinventing the horror genre multiple times throughout his career. In doing so he created many of the scariest, most intelligent, and most influential horror films for three decades running. In the 1970s Craven was a key player in the new breed of independent horror cinema that occurred alongside the New Hollywood movement and The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes are as indispensable to the cinema of the 70s as Mean Streets and The Deer Hunter. In the 1980s Craven wrote and directed A Nightmare on Elm Street. In addition to creating slasher villain Freddy Krueger and launching one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood history, A Nightmare on Elm Street also changed the horror genre again by combining the realistic scares of the slasher format with surrealistic elements that paved the way for titles like Hellraiser and Paperhouse. In the 1990s he would reinvent the horror genre once again with Scream, bringing pop post-modernism and horror together.
Another of the exceptional aspects of Wes Craven’s work was the intelligence of his movies. Coming from an academic background, Craven approached his films with both the artistry of a storyteller and the cerebral qualities of an intellectual. He always attempted to give the audience their money’s worth but Craven was also interested in a cinema of ideas and in telling stories that questioned authority, interrogated the limits of rationality, and penetrated the cultural zeitgeist. Even movies that weren’t successful like Deadly Friend and Shocker had something in them that was thought-provoking. Because of that, Craven’s movies are not just spooky stories. They are also important cultural artifacts from the last four decades of American cinema.
Here are some of the highlights of Wes Craven’s filmography:
The Last House on the Left (1972)
Wes Craven’s first feature film was Last House on the Left. A reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (which itself was adapted from a 13th century Swedish folk song), The Last House on the Left told the story of two young women who are kidnapped, tortured, and killed by a gang of criminals. The killers inadvertently seek shelter with one of the victim’s parents and the mother and father take bloody revenge.
Last House on the Left is often cited as one of the most disturbing films of all time and that’s mostly attributed to its violence. Released in 1972, Last House on the Left was a key title in a swath of movies that changed the rules of on-screen brutality. However, the violence of Last House does not entirely account for the visceral reaction that the movie continues to elicit from audiences. The movie went beyond the prurient thrills of a trashy drive-in movie. This was a smarter picture than that and its story suggested that violence has no redemptive or regenerative qualities.
The impact of Last House on the Left was also enhanced by the circumstances of its production. The movie was made by people who had little or no experience in filmmaking. For his part, Wes Craven lacked an understanding of how to stage a sequence so that the action cut together in the editing room. As a result, the movie has a rough patchwork quality and many sequences play out in a gritty cinema verite style. Craven was also not entirely in control of the tone of the picture and moments of brutal violence alternate with slapstick comic relief. That contrast of violence and humor, along with a folk music score, creates a discordant tone that is perverse and nauseating.
Last House on the Left provoked an uproar in 1972, eliciting protests and calls for censorship. For audiences of 2015, the amateurishness of the production overshadows the controversial material and the movie is more interesting as a cinematic artifact than as a piece of entertainment. But Last House on the Left is an important film that led the way in dragging the horror genre into a new age.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
After 1972’s The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven attempted to work outside the horror genre but with the success of his first film the director found himself pigeonholed as a horror filmmaker. Unable to get any other projects made, Craven wrote and directed his second horror film, which remains one of his best: 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes. In this movie a vacationing middle class family is stranded in the desert and preyed upon by a feral group of cannibals.
In terms of its filmmaking, The Hills Have Eyes was a major leap forward from Last House on the Left. The movie was made with a more experienced cast and crew and Craven showed a great deal of improvement as a director. The action and violence are thoughtfully staged but so are the quiet moments before and after the scenes of high terror. This is especially true in the raid sequence in which the people of the hills break into the family’s RV. The sequence builds from the mundane to the creepy to the ultra-violent with startling impact.
Like Craven’s best work, The Hills Have Eyes delivers horror movie thrills by working on deeply embedded fears. The narrative is based on a template that is familiar from old westerns in which white settlers in covered wagons were attacked by Native Americans. But like Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes is also a reaction to the societal unrest of the 1970s and in particular urban riots and the war in Vietnam. Even as it borrows the template of the western genre, The Hills Have Eyes inverts its politics. As the civilized family members fight off their uncivilized attackers they are required to become just as vicious in order to survive. As the tagline to the movie stated, “They didn’t want to kill. But they didn’t want to die.”
The Hills Have Eyes was a modest success in 1977 but the reputation of the movie has continued to grow and it is now properly recognized as one of Wes Craven’s best works.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
In the early 1980s Wes Craven directed a couple of television thrillers as well as 1981’s Deadly Blessing and 1982’s Swamp Thing. These films were not very good but Craven subsequently came up with an ingenious idea that would become one of the great American horror stories: 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. In this movie a group of teenagers are haunted by Freddy Krueger, a bogeyman who stalks the teens in their dreams. If Freddy kills the dreamers in their sleep they die in real life.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was produced amid the slasher boom of the 1980s. After the success of Halloween in 1978, the slasher subgenre took off with the release of Friday the 13th and Prom Night in 1980. In the subsequent years literally hundreds of slasher movies were released but by 1984 the formula was worn out. A Nightmare on Elm Street rejuvenated and transformed the horror genre by introducing fantasy elements.
The metaphysical component of A Nightmare on Elm Street was more than a gimmick. It allowed the filmmakers to tell a more complicated story than the average slasher film. That’s implied in the very title. “Elm Street” invokes mainstream, Norman Rockwell Americana while “Nightmare” is of the suppressed madness and violence of the unconscious. This is a movie about the ugliness underneath polite society personified by Freddy Krueger.
The success of A Nightmare on Elm Street was partly due to the casting of Robert Englund as Freddy. Assisted by the script, the makeup work, the costuming, and the mechanical effects, Englund created one of the most memorable villains in the history of movies. The contribution of composer Charles Bernstein is also important and this film has one of the great horror movie scores.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was a film in which everything came together. It was an exciting concept that was extremely well executed and told a frightening story that appealed on primal, mythological, and sociological levels. Its success went beyond the box office and A Nightmare on Elm Street was the rare motion picture that become part of the fabric of popular culture.
The Freddy Krueger Phenomenon
One of the ironies about the making of A Nightmare on Elm Street was that writer and director Wes Craven shopped his script to virtually every studio in Hollywood and was universally rejected. Craven finally got a green light from New Line Cinema, which at that point was a small operation that was primarily distributing movies to prisons and college campuses.
New Line founder and president Bob Shaye saw the potential in Wes Craven’s script and Shaye raised the money to get A Nightmare on Elm Street made. The movie was a hit but in order to get his original script produced, Wes Craven had relinquished all rights to the property and New Line, because of its financing deals on the first film, didn’t make a tremendous amount of money from Nightmare’s theatrical run. What the studio did come away with was a copyright on a potentially valuable property and the decision was made to start producing sequels, something Craven was not happy about.
Wes Craven sat out of 1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. The sequel was a hit but it was regarded as a disappointment by fans, critics, and even the filmmakers themselves. Craven returned to the series as a writer and producer on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The initial script was co-written by Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and it returned the series to its roots while expanding the conceit. However, the final script was revised significantly by Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont, with Russell directing the movie.
Dream Warriors was an even bigger success and launched Nightmare on Elm Street into the mainstream. It also fundamentally changed the series. The tone was lighter and Freddy came out of the shadows to become the centerpiece of the franchise.
Throughout the remainder of the 1980s New Line Cinema continued to exploit the Nightmare on Elm Street series. In addition to movies, Freddy Krueger appeared on television, comic books, model kits, video games, and t-shirts. But the series became increasingly diluted and by the end Freddy had become a consumer-friendly corporate logo, much to Wes Craven’s chagrin.
The Universal Years
While New Line Cinema was preoccupied with the further adventures of Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven went off and made other movies. The first was Deadly Friend, a disastrous production for Warner Bros. that was supposed to be a PG-rated fantasy movie but was contorted into an R-rated horror film because of studio interference.
Wes Craven moved on to Universal were he made a series of very interesting titles. The first was 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow. Adapted from the nonfiction book by Wade Davis, the story dealt with an anthropologist who travels to Haiti in pursuit of a drug rumored to resurrect the dead. The Serpent and the Rainbow explored the limits of rational Western thought and linked medicine, science, and superstition. The storytelling is clumsy in places but The Serpent and the Rainbow is unlike any American horror film made before or since.
Craven’s next effort was 1989’s Shocker. In this movie a serial killer transforms himself into an electricity-based specter. Compared to The Serpent and the Rainbow this was a much more conventional scary film and it was intended to create a franchisable character for Universal. Shocker’s box office performance was tepid and so it never led anywhere. But the movie does have an off-the-wall performance by Mitch Pileggi as the killer and it is one of Craven’s first experiments with characters crossing between media and reality. The 1998 movie Fallen, starring Denzel Washington, is remarkably similar to Shocker.
The best movie to come out of Wes Craven’s tenure with Universal was 1991’s The People Under the Stairs. In this movie a young African American boy takes part in a heist of his landlord’s home and discovers that the proprietors are psychotics who have booby-trapped their house and keep people locked up in the basement. As a piece of entertainment, The People Under the Stairs is a wild mashup of gruesome horror and the madcap hijinks of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But like A Nightmare on Elm Street, this movie is also a contemporary fairytale with a political edge. In this case, it’s a parable about the haves and have-nots.
New Nightmare (1994)
New Line Cinema brought the original cycle of Nightmare on Elm Street films to an inauspicious close with 1991’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. But despite the subtitle of that film New Line president Bob Shaye felt that there was room for one more movie. Because of the way the contracts and financing had worked out in the production of the original film, Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven had been shut out of royalties on the Nightmare films he wasn’t directly involved with. In a very un-Hollywood gesture, Shaye offered Craven compensation and recruited him to make another Freddy movie.
Craven accepted the offer but the continuity and story logic of the Nightmare on Elm Street series was a disaster by that point. Instead of continuing the existing narrative, Craven came up with New Nightmare, in which the cast and crew of the original film would play themselves. In New Nightmare an evil force that looks a lot like Freddy Krueger haunts actress Heather Langenkamp (who played the heroine of the first picture) and movie reality gradually encroaches upon physical reality.
In making New Nightmare, Wes Craven was determined to return Freddy Krueger back to the menacing character he had originally envisioned but he also used the opportunity to reflect on what horror stories mean for the culture. According to the movie’s premise, an ineffable evil spirit that preys on humanity can be imprisoned by stories that capture its essence. When the stories stop the demon is set free. For Craven, New Nightmare was a warning to would-be censors. The movie suggested that attempts to clean up horror stories actually prevent us from confronting the dark and violent aspects of human nature and stopping these stories altogether allows human destructiveness to flow unimpeded and unidentified and eventually materialize in real life violence.
New Nightmare was a bold movie that was more successful creatively than it was financially. The movie did respectable office box but it wasn’t a hit. However, New Nightmare has since been rediscovered by critics and fans and it’s now regarded as one of the best horror films of the 1990s.
Scream (1996)
One of the underappreciated elements of Wes Craven’s work is his sense of humor. It’s a mordent sense of humor but it is nevertheless a consistent feature of his movies. Craven attempted to make a full-fledged comedy with 1995’s Vampire in Brooklyn which starred Eddie Murphy. The film wasn’t especially successful.
Wes Craven’s next project was 1996’s Scream. It proved to be one of his most popular movies and it effectively mixed scares with a biting sense of humor. Crossing the slasher film with a murder mystery, Scream told the story of teenagers stalked by a killer who offs his victims according to the “rules” of horror movies.
Within Wes Craven’s filmography, Scream connected the director’s early work with his later material. The movie is brutally violent in ways that recalled Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes but it was also self-reflexive in the manner of Shocker and New Nightmare. Scream aligned those elements in a way that packed a subversive punch and was very entertaining.
Craven certainly had a lot to do with the success of Scream but the contributions of other players shouldn’t be underestimated. Among them was screenwriter Kevin Williamson. Like John Hughes in the 1980s, Williamson had a feel for 1990s youth culture and Scream became one of the defining movies of the decade. The other major contributor to Scream was its cast. Horror films don’t always attract high caliber acting talent but the cast of Scream included some very good performers including Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Jamie Kennedy, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette.
While the movie delivered as a horror film and as a whodunit, Scream’s greatest asset was its intelligence. The slasher genre has a reputation for being stupid and that is not entirely undeserved. For every A Nightmare on Elm Street there are a dozen z-grade knockoffs with cliché-ridden scripts populated by dumb teenagers who only exist to be dispatched in hideous ways. The characters of Scream generally made reasonable decisions, fought back against the killer, and they were hip to the conventions of horror films.
Scream was a huge hit and the Ghostface costume soon became as ubiquitous as Freddy Krueger’s glove. For the third time in Wes Craven’s career, his film announced a seismic shift in the horror genre and in American cinema as a whole.
The Scream Sequels
After Scream became a hit in 1996, sequels and imitators quickly followed. The movie had tapped into the culture of the 1990s and laid bare the new rubric for hip movies. Within the horror genre it was no longer possible to tell a straight slasher story. One of the characters had to make a sarcastic remark or compare their situation to an equivalent scene in a retro horror film.
Unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven stayed on as director throughout the Scream series. Scream 2 was rushed into production and was in theaters less than a year after the release of the original film. Despite the accelerated schedule, Scream 2 was an impressive follow up. It couldn’t match the surprise of the first film but it was better than the average sequel. Like the first movie, its intelligence was key to its appeal. The characters of Scream 2 discussed the new string of murders in terms of a sequel and the film played on Hollywood serialization.
Several years passed before the release of Scream 3 in 2000. Wes Craven returned to direct but the movie was written by Ehren Krueger, who has since become known for writing Michael Bay’s Transformers movies. All franchises, if they go on long enough, eventually become self-parody and the filmmakers embraced their fate by making Scream 3 something of a spoof. It satirized Hollywood and has several connections with Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. However, it never fully commits to the horror or the comedy and so Scream 3 was the weakest link in the series.
Following Scream 3, the series was dormant for over a decade until 2011’s Scream 4. Between the third and fourth installments, Hollywood remade virtually every major horror title of the 1970s and 80s and Scream 4 played on the reboot craze. The screenplay is credited to Kevin Williamson but Ehren Krueger did an uncredited rewrite. This probably accounts for the diverted focus of the story and the patchwork ending. Like Scream 3, the final installment of this series is uneven but it is satisfactorily entertaining.
Scream has since been turned into a dramatic television series on which Wes Craven served as an executive producer.
Music of the Heart (1999)
Although Wes Craven was best known as a horror director, he fell into the genre by circumstance and throughout his career he tried to do something outside of horror and suspense. When Scream was a success, then-Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein signed Craven to a three picture deal in which Craven would helm two Scream sequels and 1999’s Music of the Heart. This film tells the true story of a violin teacher and her struggle to establish a music program in Harlem schools.
There is a small subgenre of movies about white teachers who go into inner city schools and inspire the students, who are usually of a non-white background, to work hard and escape their surroundings through art. Movies like Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers have achieved box office success but also critical derision because of the perceived soft racism of white savior condescension.
Music of the Heart fits that inspirational teacher template but the difference is in the details. For one, the movie addresses the racial criticism head on. The filmmakers deliberately clear the air and that leads to the second distinction of Music of the Heart. The movie doesn’t oversell itself. The teacher isn’t saving anybody and the students won’t be spared from the difficulties of life just by learning an instrument. But Music of the Heart does embrace the value of art education and the work ethic required to be a musician. Third, the film has characters who are colorful and complex. The music teacher, played by Meryl Streep, is a flawed individual and her students are distinct characters. Unlike some education stories, the other teachers and administrators aren’t demonized and there is a general good will about the movie.
There is one disheartening aspect of Music of the Heart. Wes Craven did well by the horror genre and movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes deserve to be taken seriously. But Music of the Heart demonstrated that Wes Craven had a broader set of skills that he might have applied to a wider range of movies had he been given the opportunity.
Red Eye (2005)
The last notable title in Wes Craven’s filmography is 2005’s Red Eye. In this movie a woman is held prisoner while on an airline flight and forced to cooperate with a terrorist attack.
Those who have made motion pictures or know something about how they are made can appreciate the skill on display in Red Eye. Cinema is about movement and as challenging as it is to coordinate an action sequence, a filmmaker’s skill is rarely tested the way that it is in a long dialogue scene. The bulk of Red Eye consists of two people sitting and talking on an airplane. What’s more, their conversation must be tense and that tension has to escalate over the course of the movie. Red Eye succeeds and the film is extraordinarily well put together.
Red Eye is in many respects the PG-13 version of Scream. It does not have the gore of the horror series but it does come down to an equivalent situation: a young woman is terrorized by a villain and she must draw on all of her wit and courage to survive. Like Scream, the success of Red Eye is due to the combination of good casting, a smart and witty script, and Wes Craven’s filmmaking skills. The link between Red Eye and Scream is most apparent in the ending and the finale has a lot of similar set pieces.
Red Eye showcases one of the underappreciated aspects of Wes Craven’s films and the horror genre as a whole: the regard for women. As it is, women are grossly underrepresented in Hollywood movies, comprising only about twelve percent of lead roles and only about thirty percent of speaking roles. Horror is one of the only film genres that consistently features female protagonists and puts women in situations in which they act with volition. Throughout his career, Craven consistently helmed movies with women in the lead such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Music of the Heart and he always portrayed these female characters with respect and intelligence.
Final Thought
Although his output veered wildly between classics and forgettable junk, there is no denying that Wes Craven was one of the most important filmmakers in the history of American movies. Most filmmakers are lucky if they create one indelible movie. Craven literally changed the landscape of American horror cinema not once, not twice, but three times and he created characters and images that have resonated around the world and continue to terrify audiences.
In October 2014 Wes Craven participated in a wide ranging interview with fellow horror director Mick Garris.
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