Most directors dream of coming up with one game-changing movie. Wes Craven, who died on Sunday of brain cancer, at 76, redefined horror not once but three times.
After early, pseudonymous efforts in X-rated porn, Craven kick-started his career with a pair of low-budget movies that redefined psycho-sexual gore: 1972’s “The Last House on the Left” (produced by Sean S. Cunningham, who’d go on to direct “Friday the 13th”) and 1977’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” in which a vacationing family falls prey to deranged hillbilly cannibals. There may have been gross-out movies before, but those two cheapies pushed their cocktail of sex and gruesome violence to novel heights — and ushered in the New Horror era.
Less than a decade later, Craven did it again with the extraordinarily influential “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984). While “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” had just revived the slasher flick, “Nightmare” put an almost arty twist on it with its iconic character, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a monstrous, razor-fingered killer who operates in dreams but whose violence is very real.
Craven always loved inserting subtle political and social commentary into his films, so you could say Freddy was his metaphor for movies in general — a made-up world with real-life consequences.
And our guy wasn’t done.
In 1996, he unleashed “Scream,” which embodied horror’s new mainstream positioning, starting with a cast that featured stars — from TV, but still! — like Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox instead of the usual no-namers. The knowing humor was also a welcome respite from horror’s usual grimness. Score three for Craven.
Craven was the transitional stage between 1960s schlock-meisters like Roger Corman and the vile torture-porn sadists of the ’00s, like Eli Roth. Craven’s horror never felt exploitative, and was just as much a smart take on the genre itself. “Horror films don’t create fear,” he said. “They release it.”
The director’s lesser-known output wasn’t too shabby, either. Probably his least Craven-like movie was 1999’s inspirational “Music of the Heart,” in which Meryl Streep played a violin teacher in a tough neighborhood.
But even when he worked within horror’s boundaries, Craven showed unmistakable signs of personality — he was never a hack, because hacks don’t make movies as weird as 1988’s zombie (in the voodoo sense) thriller “The Serpent and the Rainbow” or as socially astute as 1991’s “The People Under the Stairs,” with its subtext about racial prejudice.
Hollywood needs people like Craven more than ever.