One of the most surreal conversations I have ever had in a movie line was in Cannes a number of years ago, explaining to Jack Shepherd that it was Wes Craven who directed Meryl Streep inMusic of the Heart. ‘Oh yeah,’ said Shepherd, ‘I know Wes.’ Wes Craven is a giant of horror cinema. He broke taboos with The Last House on the Left. He gave Johnny Depp his big screen break in the highly lucrative A Nightmare on Elm Street series, making a star of Robert Englund. He collaborated with writer Kevin Williamson to create the first ‘meta’ horror film, Scream. He noodled around with other horror fantasy films like The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker andThe People Under The Stairs. And, improbably, he worked with Meryl Streep and Eddie Murphy (the latter in Vampire In Brooklyn – not one of his finest).
A quick google search of Craven concludes that he is a master of slasher cinema. There is more to him than Freddy Krueger’s kitchen knife finger nails and the preferred method of killing in the four Scream movies that he directed. In the 1970s, he, George A. Romero and John Carpenter were the big three in horror cinema, though Carpenter’s reputation was based on one film,Hallowe’en, about a masked stalker killer - cinema’s first, but definitely not the last.
Craven came to filmmaking in his thirties. He describes the experience to Jim Hemphill inFilmmaker magazine:
‘I was almost 34, and I was teaching, with the idea that I wanted to be a novelist or a short story writer. That was going just nowhere, and I had two kids right away. When I got out of graduate school I had seen maybe three films in the theater, because I came out of a religious background. I moved to a small town in upstate New York to teach humanities, and there was a little art theater in the town showing European films. It just knocked me off my chair, the imagination and everything…guys like Bergman and Fellini really appealed to me and the idea of filmmaking just somehow rang my bell. I quit my job and went to New York, where it took me two summers to get my foot in the door, and even then it was this fluke of looking up an older brother of one of my ex-students who was cutting industrials. He said, “I can’t give you a job, but if you want to stick around here I’ll tell you what I’m doing.” The older brother was Harry Chapin, just before he became a folk singer, and he taught me this cutting style that was very nuts and bolts.’
The film he ended up directing was The Last House On The Left, nominally a knock-off of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring but made by Craven instinctively, without any sort of film school training. His was a naïve talent but an effective one. Nevertheless, it took him a few years to make his follow-up, The Hills Have Eyes, a cannibal horror film that became a modest hit and spawned a remake.
Now I have to own up and say that I was never a big Wes Craven fan, mainly because I scare easily – just the poster of A Clockwork Orange frightened me as a child. I was relieved to find I could sit through A Nightmare on Elm Street at a late night screening in London’s Leicester Square– it was inventive but not that terrifying. Craven left the directing of subsequent Freddy Krueger films to others, but his other fare, notably The Serpent and the Rainbow and Shocker, made with proper studio cash, wasn’t that special. After Rachel Talalay had sunk the franchise with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Craven returned to the Franchise with the ‘meta’ New Nightmare movie, a pseudo horror documentary. This led him, stylistically at least, to the Scream movies.
Unlike the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Craven stayed in the director’s chair for the original trilogy, which was responsible for making a star of Neve Campbell and showed that there was more to Courtney Cox than Monica from Friends.
Horror films are rightfully criticised for the amount of violence against women that they show –Last House on the Left was no exception. But horror films also feature women in heroic roles, battling with and defeating the monster. This was the case with Campbell’s Sidney, a college kid who tackled the Hillsboro killer. I wonder, incidentally, how many horror films pass the Bechdel test (for conversations in movies between women that are not about men)?
The Scream movies led Craven to direct the airborne thriller Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams, one of his more successful projects. It also led him to Meryl Streep. He was definitely a left field choice to direct Music of the Heart, released in 1999, about a shy school teacher trying to get inner city kids to learn the violin. Craven remains the only horror director who has secured an Oscar nomination for his leading actress.
There are a number of Craven films that don’t bear remembering: My Soul to Take (2010), Cursed(2004), Swamp Thing (1982). He also contributed an instalment to the portmanteau film, Paris, Je T’Aime alongside the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Gerard Depardieu and Alfonso Cuaron – the latter segment is in a single take, who knew? Craven’s story, featuring Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer was set in Pere Lachaise and discussed Oscar Wilde and was notable for casting Alexander Payne as the ghost of the aforementioned writer.
Will Craven be remembered fondly? Undoubtedly, though more by horror fans than what I might politely term regular film critics. He certainly created one iconic character and one iconic series – more than many of his contemporaries.
