Wes Craven changed the face of horror movie history three times, inventing iconic screen demons Krug Stillo, Freddy Kruger, and Ghostface. His five decade career began in 1972 with The Last House on the Left, still seen as a controversial film over half a century later. Much more was to come over the following forty years, from dream demon Freddy Krueger, who dominated commercial horror cinema for most of the 1980s, to more rewarding and mature works like The Serpent and the Rainbow and The People Under the Stairs. It was his triumphant post-modern return to his earlier haunt of Elm Street in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994 that relaunched Craven as a horror brand and prepared the way for the phenomenal audience response to Scream.
It often came as a tremendous surprise to journalists when they encountered Craven and found that the man who had committed a series of often disturbing, visceral images to the screen was softly spoken, sharply intelligent, and always prepared to justify his activities. ‘There’s basically two ways of looking at this,’ said Craven of his public perception. ‘One is that I’m a frightening person making films; another is that I’m a person who understands how people are afraid, and who’s making films about that fear and how to overcome it. I seem to be skilled in bringing them out through [my] characters.’
Craven fought an uphill battle against inadequate budgets and short production schedules; against intemperate censors who tried to control what he could show to adult audiences; and against Hollywood studios and ego-driven producers who gave Craven the chance to realise his vision, only to insist on their own commercially driven ‘shock’ endings or their right to re-edit his work.
Following Scream in 1996, Hollywood looked differently at Craven. He had repeatedly shocked and entertained audiences with his nightmare-inspired visions. The mainstream commercial success of the Scream series—even bigger than the Elm Street films—allowed the director to use the power of his brand to escape the genre which he felt stereotyped him as a ‘guru of gore’. In the late-1990s, Craven not only wrote a novel (Fountain Society, 1999), but wielded his new power to sponsor up-and-coming filmmakers under the ‘Wes Craven Presents’ banner.
As he entered the final phase of his career, making mainstream movies like inspirational drama Music of the Heart and Hitchcock-style thriller Red Eye, alongside horror films like werwolf movie Cursed and reincarnation drama My Soul to Take, Craven felt that he’d been too laid back for his own good. ‘I could have done better if I’d screamed at people more,’ he suggested. ‘That’s not a big part of my nature, but [movie] directors need that. It’s necessary, in the trench warfare of making a film. There are legions of people who want to diminish the film—make it safer, make it easier, make it cheaper—you’re constantly fighting to keep other people’s hands off your films.’
Battles with producers, studios, and censors dominated Wes Craven’s career, affecting many of his films and causing him to give up making horror films more than once. His fans have to be thankful that Craven persevered during the difficult years, as his work became more satisfying as it matured. He and his films have stood the test of time.
Brian J. Robb, Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven (Polaris Publishing, £16.99)