‘Wes Craven was a horror pioneer three times over. In the 1970s, he wrote and directed several films that delivered a new level of intensity and explicitness to the genre. Most notorious was his debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), the relentless tale of the torture of two women and the revenge doled out to the killers by the victims’ parents. (It was inspired by Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.) Exaggeration and advertising are synonymous, but this was one instance where the poster copy – “To avoid fainting, keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie…’” – amounted to more than hyperbole. The scenes of sexual violence made the film the subject of continuing censorship for more than 30 years, particularly in Britain, where it was repeatedly refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification. “It’s not a movie I would go back and watch,” said Craven in 2011.
‘In 1984, Craven enjoyed his greatest success with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which lent a fantasy aspect to the slasher genre popular at the time. Whereas the killers in hits such as Friday the 13th or Halloween had been corporeal, Craven devised a monster, Freddy Krueger, who pursued his victims through the infinite space of their dreams. It was to be expected that the movie would be frightening. But scenes of the teenage protagonist struggling to ascend a marshmallow staircase, or being dragged by her pursuer into the depths of a bath that has become suddenly bottomless, possessed a haunted beauty worthy of Jean Cocteau.
‘The film became a lucrative franchise, spawning a TV series, endless merchandise, six sequels, a movie spinoff, Freddy Vs Jason (2003), and a 2010 remake. Freddy Krueger himself grew into a popular modern-day bogeyman and a postwar equivalent to Dracula. However, Craven was involved with only two of the sequels. He wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which included at least one disturbing image to rank with anything from the first film: the holes on a junkie’s arm turning into tiny mouths, pleading and insatiable. He also wrote and directed the sophisticated and rejuvenating fifth episode, entitled Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), which featured the director and some of the cast members playing themselves. It was witty, satirical and scary: a bloodspattered Pirandello.
‘Craven’s hat-trick was completed in 1996 when he directed Scream, best described as a horror movie that knows it’s a horror movie. Though the idea had not come from him (Kevin Williamson wrote the screenplay), it was consistent with his sensibility. The collegeage characters in Scream are well-versed in the conventions of the horror genre. The killer who is stalking them, wearing a ghostly mask elongated in a Munchian howl, is given to asking his victims: “What’s your favourite scary movie?” Scream 2 (1997) maintained the humour, horror and postmodern mischief: one scene included a discussion about how rare it is for sequels to improve upon originals. This foreshadowed a falling-off in quality across another two outings (2000 and 2011) directed by Craven.
‘Wesley was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents, Paul, who died when his son was five years old, and Caroline (nee Miller), were strict Baptists who forbade him from reading comic books. He attended Wheaton College, Illinois, graduating with a degree in English and psychology, then got his master’s in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. For several years he was a teacher before breaking into the film industry as a sound editor. He directed pseudonymously a number of pornographic movies and was credited as editor and assistant director on It Happened in Hollywood (1973), a porn comedy produced by the editors of Screw magazine.
‘The Last House on the Left originated when Craven and his friend and colleague Sean Cunningham were commissioned to make a cheap horror film (the budget was under $90,000) for the bottom half of a double bill. Craven described the picture’s coarse, gritty violence as a reaction to the horrors of Vietnam, and embraced a narrative free from moral certainties. In the wake of its notoriety, Craven found himself all but ostracised: “My friends barely talked to me after they saw it. My social life among New York academic types disappeared.” He was unable to raise the money for other scripts he had written outside the genre, but was promised the budget should he wish to make a second horror film.
‘In response, he wrote and directed The Hills Have Eyes (1977), about a road trip that goes wrong when the travellers find themselves at the mercy of mutant savages in the Nevada desert. Craven followed this with several TV movies and a handful of tepid films, among them Deadly Blessing (1981) and the lacklustre The Hills Have Eyes II (1984). After A Nightmare on Elm Street became a hit, Craven seemed to flounder. He made the TV movie Chiller (1985), about a man cryogenically frozen, the zombie voodoo horror The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and several episodes of The Twilight Zone. Though not a boxoffice success, The People Under the Stairs (1991) was powerful. It took the idea of an imprisoned race of creatures, bred in captivity by a tyrannical white couple, as his metaphor for the poor, African-American underclass in the US.
‘Outside the Scream series, his choices could be variable. The Eddie Murphy horror comedy Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) was undistinguished. But the fine suspense thriller Red Eye (2005), set largely on a plane, was positively Hitchcockian. Craven strayed far outside his comfort zone in the sentimental drama Music of the Heart (1999), which aimed for the tear ducts rather than the hairs on the back of the neck; it earned an Oscar nomination for its star, Meryl Streep, as a violin teacher in Harlem.’ — Ryan Gilbey
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Stills
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Further
Wes Craven @ IMDb
The Untold Truth Of Wes Craven
How Wes Craven Redefined Horror
Remembering Wes Craven, the Man Who Transformed Horror
“I Don’t Feel Like I Gave Birth to Jesus”: Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street
With Wes Craven (1939–2015), It Was Never “Only a Movie”
Wes Craven: One Last Scream
New Nightmare Is Wes Craven’s Meta Masterpiece
Wes Craven @ Letterboxd
The Sounds of Wes Craven
These Are Wes Craven’s Favorite Horror Movies Of All Time Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/785255/these-are-wes-cravens-favorite-horror-movies-of-all-time/?utm_campaign=clip
‘Scream’ Narrowly Avoided Losing Director Wes Craven and NC-17 Rating
R.I.P. Wes Craven
How Wes Craven Reinvented the Horror Genre Three Decades in a Row
IT’S ONLY A MOVIE: Wes Craven and the Ever-Changing Culture of Fear
Wes Craven, the horror master that got into our heads
Wes Craven: The Ultimate Horror Groundbreaker?
How Wes Craven Reinvented the Horror Movie
Director’s Essentials: 5 Underappreciated Wes Craven Classics
Farewell, Wes Craven, and Thank You For All the Nightmares
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Extras
Master of Cinema – Wes Craven
POST MORTEM: Wes Craven
‘Scream’ and ‘Elm Street’ Actors Tribute to Wes Craven
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Interview
from THE FRONT
YOU DIDN’T START OFF BEING A FILMMAKER.
Wes Craven: No. I had an interest in the arts without thinking of them as “the arts” for a long time though. I grew up in the Baptist Church, so no listening to records or watching movies, along with alcohol and dancing and everything else. Disney films, those were OK, that was the one exception. So I saw every Disney film that came out and at first I wanted to be a Disney animator. I drew and drew and drew. Around junior high I got on the school paper and started writing. Then I went to college and chose literature. I was a lit major and nobody in my family ever went to college, so I was kind of an odd duck. My mother always encouraged me and my brothers to take a safe job—she was suspicious of books. She read ravenously, but exclusively Reader’s Digest.
I got a double master’s degree in philosophy and writing and by that time I had wanted to be a novelist. A friend of mine told me that a master’s qualifies you to teach college. I said, “Really!?” So I applied to a bunch of colleges, and this is how my whole life was at the beginning, blindly following instincts and leads. I didn’t get in anywhere and I was being trained to sell rare coins at a department store in Baltimore.
RARE COINS!
I was getting into rare coins not because it was what I wanted to do, but I thought I could also write at night. Some English teacher in a college in Pennsylvania dropped dead in class two weeks into the semester. The phone rang asking if I could come tomorrow. So I packed my bags and went out to the woods of Pennsylvania and taught English there, and then the next year I got a better job in upstate New York and taught English at Clarkson College. And there I was, writing and trying to get stories published and nothing was happening. But the extraordinary thing that happened was that I got a chance for the first time to watch movies.
SO YOU DIDN’T START WATCHING MOVIES UNTIL AFTER COLLEGE?
I went to an inter-denominational school, Billy Graham alma mater. If you were caught in a movie theater you would be expelled. They had almost the exact same rules I grew up with. Sex was not mentioned. Senior year I decided to move when my literary magazine was cancelled because of something I published about an interracial couple. I was denounced from the pulpit in chapel. I was semi-radicalized. So I went to go see To Kill A Mockingbird.
WHAT A WAY TO COMMEMORATE BEING KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL.
It hit me like a thunderbolt. If this was a sin…it was clearly not. So then I went on to grad school and there was nothing to do there but read and write.
HOW OLD WERE YOU THEN WHEN YOU SAW THE FILM?
I was probably 20 or 21. I lost a year of school because of paralysis. I got paralyzed from the neck down when I was a freshman in college and had to drop out, it was a long recovery on that. I was laid up for half a year and then worked half a year to get out. Then I went back to college. The college town had an arts center. It was the mid-1960s; I was 24 when I got married. So I was 25 and I already felt old.
I found myself more preoccupied with film. I saw Blow Up and then I went back and saw it six more times. Nothing else had ever affected me like that. As a teacher, you get a lot of sample textbooks. All of us in the faculty would sell them at the end of the year, and I sold enough to get $300. I bought a non-sound Revere crank camera in New York and started taking pictures and reading film magazines. Some students saw this and asked me to be a faculty advisor to a film club they were starting. I agreed and we ended up making a series of small films. For one of them we had a budget of about $300 and it was 40 minutes long. We made almost $1,000 showing them around the local colleges.
Right in the middle of that my department head called me in and said, “I don’t know what you’re doing with this bullshit making movies. You were hired to teach English. You need to get your PhD and publish, or else I’m not going to have you back next year.” I thought about it overnight and went back and said, “Fine. I’m going to go figure out how to make movies.”
THANK GOD, RIGHT?
At that point I had a wife and child so we were paid through the summer. I went to New York and didn’t find a job. I had to come back and teach a year at a local high school, which was kind of a letdown. I talked it over with my wife and she told me to try again so I went back and slept on my brother’s couch in New Jersey.
One of my students told me he had a brother in New York who was making movies, something called “Industrials” for IBM. At the end of the second summer, still without a job, I went and saw him. He told me he didn’t have a job for me but he could show me what he was doing. There, he taught me the basics of editing. I just sat by him and sucked it all up. His name was Harry and my student’s name was Steve Chapin, and it was two years before he became the folk singer Harry Chapin.
I was watching him, learning, and the guy who ran the post-production house that Harry was running a room in fired his 16-year-old messenger. He asked Harry if he had anyone to fill in and I said I would do it. He said, “Are you the guy with the master’s degree who is a professor?”
“THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT ME THAT WAS DRAWN TO DREAMS. I HAD NIGHTMARES WHEN I WAS A KID.”
It paid something ridiculous, but I agreed. That was my first paying job. It was the ticket. Once you get your foot in the door you can show your skills. I worked my way up, first learning post-production, then I moved into synching up dailies and working in editing rooms. Then I met a guy whose tiny little film I worked on, got an offer by some theater owners to make a scary movie. He told me to go write something scary, and if they liked it I could direct it. He owned a little Steenbeck editing table, he said, so I could cut it on that and direct it; he’d produce it. That was Sean Cunningham who did Friday the 13th. That’s how I got started making scary movies. It was The Last House on the Left. Before that, I had no impulse. I immediately tried to move away from it.
FROM THE HORROR GENRE?
Yeah. That film was especially brutal and scarifying.
DID YOU MAKE A CONSCIOUS DECISION TO CHANGE THE CONSTRUCTS OF THE HORROR GENRE?
I never did anything to rewrite horror; I just tried to do something interesting. So it wasn’t that grandiose. It was just that I had no hesitation about writing something that was parallel to what I was studying at the time—Eastern religions and meditation, Sufism.
There was something about me that was always drawn to dreams. I had nightmares when I was a kid. My parents had a contentious marriage, my father had a hair-trigger temper and then he died when I was five. There was a lot of storm and drung. There was one germ that A Nightmare on Elm Street was based on—nightmares—and I was terrified to go back to sleep.
In my child’s naiveté I asked my mother to come to bed with me and she said that’s the one place I can’t come with you. And I was totally awake, just like “What!? What do you mean!?” She said she would be there when I woke up, but I would just have to be brave. I remembered that moment for a long, long time.
WHY DIDN’T YOU DIRECT THE SEQUEL TO “NIGHTMARE”?
They showed me the script and it was terrible. They just wanted to get it out the following year.
HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN A CHARACTER YOU CREATED HAS A TRAJECTORY THAT’S OUT OF YOUR GRASP?
It’s an interesting thing, you can fret about it or you can just leave. There was always a creative give and pull about who was in charge, because after the original contract Bob owned everything. He had creative control. I can’t take anything away from Bob, he was very influential on the script, erudite, and he was a Rhodes Scholar, a very interesting man. Robert took something and made it his own, and I chose to leave. Then I came back ten years later and did something.
IT’S ONE OF THE TOP THREE HALLOWEEN COSTUMES. DO YOU GET A KICK OUT OF THAT EVERY YEAR?
It’s not too bad. At a certain point you realize that on your tombstone it will say, “I gave birth to Freddy Krueger.” I wrote and directed it, and that’s what I did. A lot of people love it, a lot of people got inspiration from it, I got a lot of letters from young women saying I empowered them. It could be worse, you know? The things that came out of me that never would have come out of me if someone didn’t tell me to make them a scary movie…. I told my friends that I never even saw a scary movie. Sean said that growing up as a fundamentalist Baptist was enough, just go pull the skeletons out of my closet.
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20 of Wes Craven’s 36 films
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The Last House on the Left (1972)
‘Last House truly happened in the right place at the right time. It gave Craven, Cunningham and Miner the chance to learn their craft from the ground up and explore their artistic ideals with minimal resources. It introduced harder exploitation pictures to wider audiences, and undoubtedly set a trend for creating on-screen violence that would continue for decades, through the ‘80s slasher era into the so-called torture porn of the ‘00s. The highly influential horrors that Cunningham and Craven would later create owe their existence to this starting point, as do many characteristics of the genre that are now taken for granted. It is conceivable that, were it not for The Last House on the Left, modern horror would be a cleaner, more fictitious affair that preferred the safety of ghosts and monsters to straying, unfiltered, into the human psyche.’ — Luna Guthrie
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The Fireworks Woman (1975)
‘If you look up Wes Craven’s filmmography you’ll find this film sandwiched between THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Craven had a hand in making several porno movies but this here is the only one where we know he is credited as the writer and director. Abe Snake was the fake name used by Craven but it would be impossible for him to deny this film because he also serves as an actor here. So, is this a good film? I would say that it is and it perfectly fits in with the “mainstream” porn idea of this era, which meant that a hardcore movie could take on an adult subject and handle it in a serious way.’ — Michael Elliott
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The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
‘Before the filmmaker courted the mainstream, his claim to fame was the unexpected hit, The Last House on the Left. The gruesome and shocking 1972 film, propelled by a notorious ad campaign, typecast him as an exploitation director. Originally conceived as an adult film, the direction was changed after it was suggested it might make a better horror movie. The plot revolved around four criminals who kidnap two young women looking for drugs. The women are taken to a secluded area where they are raped and murdered. Fate leads the four to the home of one of the murdered women, whose parents take out bloody revenge. The film caused a lot of controversy during its original run and was re-released multiple times.’ — Screen Rant
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Deadly Blessing (1981)
‘“Deadly Blessing” lacks the dramatic power of Craven’s prior cult classics and his more consistently intense subsequent works. There’s also a quality to the screenplay where, although the tone is consistently tense, the film teeters between being captivating and quite silly. As a whodunit, it’s satisfying, if obvious. However, as a look at 20th century women who are harassed by a cult who cling onto 18th century values and religious beliefs, it’s both fascinating and chilling.’ — Barry Wurst
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Swamp Thing (1982)
‘Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing isn’t without its limitations, both story and effects-wise. But what it had lost in those aspects would later be gained in future iterations like the Swamp Thing TV series from 2019 and future comic book stories that further dissected who the creature really was along with his true purpose. Nevertheless, as a horror and comic book film, Swamp Thing laid the groundwork for many other similar films in the future and served as an underrated gem that, like so many other Craven projects, changed the genre forever.’ — Nicholas Brooks
the entirety
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Invitation to Hell (1984)
‘Like most of his peers in horror’s hallowed halls, Wes Craven contributed his share to the small screen; Summer of Fear (1978), Chiller (1985), and several episodes of The Twilight Zone revival (’85–’86) are indications of an artist who liked to keep busy and sometimes pay some bills. Invitation to Hell (’84) would seem to be a case for the latter, but it has an irresistibly goofy charm that’s impossible to resist. Invitation to Hell is silly. The performances are uneven. It’s beyond stupid. It is also, in a time of tepid stalker whodunnits, a blast of hot air with tacky effects and a willingness to go beyond the normal TV tropes with ideas. They’re not particularly great ideas, but they’re entertaining nevertheless.’ — Daily Dead
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The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984)
‘It’s hard to believe that the same man who wrote and directed one of the best horror films of the 1970s, THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1978), could have pulled the same duty on the sequel and come up with a film as shockingly bad as this.’ — TV Guide
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
‘The late Wes Craven was one of the greatest minds in the history of cinema. His creativity, even within the constraints of low-budget indie filmmaking, was boundless. The vision and savvy with which he approached scary stories is what made him famous — and deservedly so. Craven was one of those directors who knew exactly what he was doing, somehow always managing to stay one step ahead of the audience.
‘Case in point: “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” his 1984 tale about a group of teens caught between dreams and reality. Freddy Krueger’s chilling design, Robert Englund’s singular performance, and the ghastly inventiveness of the nightmare set pieces all make the movie iconic. But the fact that the film remains an overwhelming horror experience decades later can be attributed, at its core, to one thing: Craven knew how to keep the line between truth and fiction blurry. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” plays with our inherited preconceptions about horror movies again and again, until there’s no solid ground left underneath our feet. Of all the slasher classics, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” may be the most auteur-driven — and that’s why it remains beloved.‘ — Looper
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Never sleep again. Documentary of A nightmare on Elm Street.
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Chiller (1985)
‘It is my ultimate goal in life to have seen every Wes Craven film. I’m getting there slowly but it’s a tricky job. Partly because one or two of his films aren’t very easy to get hold of. And also because a few of them are absolutely terrible. This is now my least favourite, along with The Hills Have Eyes Part II.
‘The Hills Have Eyes Part Deux had serious production issues. It’s a poor movie, but I can understand why. Chiller is just a bad story, almost devoid of events of any description. Craven does his best with it, there is some moody atmosphere but it’s not enough to salvage the overall film. Like its protagonist, Chiller is a film devoid of soul.’ — Ken B
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Deadly Friend (1986)
‘Craven conceived Deadly Friend as a sci-fi love story with no emphasis on gore gags. But given his reputation by 1986 audiences expected something more sinister… as did the studio executives who found the first cut to be ineffective. Truthfully, I think Swanson does an alright job. But Laborteaux isn’t a good actor so the thought these two could pull off an emotional love story powered solely by their acting chops alone… I just don’t see it. At least the studio-mandated bloody punch-ups gave us the best scene in the movie, where a basketball pops someone’s head like a gory zit.’ — Anthony Arrigo
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The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
‘The Serpent and the Rainbow is overtly political, based on a book by Wade Davis about Haitian Vodou zombies. Craven tackles the effects of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti and the authoritarian influence of the real life Duvalier dynasty through fantasy-horror. Many see this as just a zombie movie. Remember Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead were all politically/socially conscious horror.
‘Central to the terror is an intense performance from Bill Pullman, whose fright is genuine as we follow him down a Haitian Vodou rabbit hole. His experience is nightmare fuel. As an allegorical story it’s terrifying— ironically, this may be the most human story Craven’s ever told.’ — C.H. Newell
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Shocker (1989)
‘Like a frenzied fever dream fueled by the power of righteous heavy metal, Wes Craven’s Shocker is certainly one of his more oddball cult classics, an amalgam of his most ambitious ideas & a viciously wild visual style.’ — Heather Wixson
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The People Under the Stairs (1991)
‘Writer and director Wes Craven based the story of The People Under The Stairs in part on a real-world incident. In 1978, a pair of burglars forced their way into a home in Los Angeles. When the police showed up, they made a shocking and unrelated discovery. The couple living in the home had locked their two children in the basement of the home. This led him to craft the story of the hero Fool, who lives in a Los Angeles ghetto. His family can’t pay rent to the Robesons, so he breaks into their mansion to steal their rare coins and discovers dozens of missing kids locked away. Craven made the real-life story into one of his best films.’ — Darby Hard
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Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
‘New Nightmare is sometimes summarized as “the horror movie about the making of the horror movie that you’re watching,” and that’s certainly how I remembered it for quite a few years after seeing it at a young age. That final shot of Heather essentially reading the script of the film you just watched is a lasting and powerful image that also left some with the cringe-inducing feeling that they had just watched an interesting (but gimmicky) movie in which a filmmaker disappeared up his own ass for 112 minutes in order to celebrate his works and brilliance. New Nightmare is so much more than that, however. It is a thoughtful, complicated, and critical look at the horror genre expertly delivered by one of the few people in Hollywood at that time with the perspective and power required to make even half of this movie’s best ideas work.
‘Craven’s displeasure with the Nightmare sequels (as well as his growing fatigue of the horror genre at that time) are hardly secrets, but there is something sly and amusing about the way that he seems to be saying that Freddy’s gradual transformation into a cultural icon fueled by a comedic turn Craven didn’t necessarily intend might’ve angered the demon by making us less afraid of him. At one point, Langenkamp even says that “every kid knows who Freddy is. He’s like Santa Claus or King Kong,” which was certainly true despite the fact that the Nightmare films were never meant to be seen by children. It’s less of a condemnation of those who “let” their kids watch those movies (Craven shows that kids will often find a way to watch them regardless of permission) and more of a darkly humorous way to portray us as the hapless humans so desperate to take photos of King Kong that we don’t even stop once we realize how much we’re angering him in the process.’ — Matthew Byrd
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Scream (1996)
‘When Wes Craven’s Scream appeared on the scene in 1996, horror was stuck in a rut. The fun, philosophical innovations that characterized the genre in the ’80s had been reduced to derivative, repetitive slasher flicks: stab, wipe, repeat. The cultural ascendence of 1991’s Silence of the Lambs kicked off an era in which stylish cat-and-mouse thrillers with horror elements had dominated mainstream cinema, while more traditional teen slasher fare languished.
‘That all changed when Scream debuted five days before Christmas in 1996. In one single, terrifying opening scene, and with one now-immortal line — “Do you like scary movies?” — Scream transformed ’90s horror and paved the way for generations of smart, genre-savvy filmmaking to come.
‘As this self-referential icon turns 25, horror is currently enjoying a renewed “golden age,” with modern horror films like Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018) being hailed as genre-elevating masterpieces. With so many of these cerebral horror films shaping cultural discourse, it’s important to recognize the role Scream played in the genre’s evolution.’ — Aja Romano
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Cursed (2005)
‘We all know the stories surrounding Wes Craven’s re-teaming with Kevin Williamson for their werewolf picture. Trapped in an incredulous ‘production hell,’ Cursed ended up likening its namesake more than anyone ever would have guessed. Originally written in 2000, execs at Dimension claimed that it was going to reinvent the werewolf genre. It would be half a decade and four reshoots later before Cursed finally made its way to screens in the spring of 2005.’ — Ryan Larson
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Red Eye (2005)
‘Like the best horror filmmakers, Craven showed a dexterity with his scares; he didn’t simply frighten the audience only with terrifying images (although he certainly had a talent for it), as his films were disturbing on a more psychological level. Craven displayed classical filmmaking techniques that gave him dexterity in the genres he tackled, and his 2005 Hitchcockian thriller Red Eye is a brilliant modern take on the old-fashioned thriller concept.’ — Liam Gaughan
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Paris Je t’aime: Pére-Lachaise (2006)
‘It was really an opportunity that kind of came up out of nowhere. I think I shot it in the middle of a press tour, more or less. I know I did the location scout between two cities in a press tour, and then came back, I think, right at the end of the press tour and did the actual shoot. I wrote it sort of in transit, in various airplanes. It was done very quickly, and it had the feeling of something that was spontaneous and fun. The idea came very quickly, once I came upon Oscar Wilde. I actually wrote two different scripts, one for Edith Piaf and an earlier one on Jim Morrison. At the very last minute, I wrote this one and I actually think it turned out better than the other two.’ — Wes Craven
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My Soul to Take (2010)
‘Weird film. Wes Craven’s examination of ironic detachment. Basically if the opening of Scream 4 was a feature-length film. High school kids trying to escape the myths that they’ve been confined into. Most of it doesn’t work, the scares especially, but it has a haunting, goofy energy that is a clear precursor to what Craven did more successfully in his next film.’ — Silent Dawn
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Scream 4 (2011)
‘The film, Wes Craven’s last as director, opened at a time when the horror genre was in a different place. Blumhouse Productions (which launched Insidious just one year before Scream 4) and James Wan were only beginning to revitalize Hollywood chillers into something genuinely crowdpleasing and less hideous than the “torture porn” sequels and knockoffs that took the wrong lessons from Wan’s own groundbreaking Saw (2004). Meanwhile the resurgence of terrific arthouse horror (or “elevated horror”) was still a long way from having its mid-2010s renaissance. A24 hadn’t even been founded yet!
‘Instead the context Scream 4 found itself in was almost as bleak as the dark genre moment the original Scream tore down in 1996. In 2011, horror was the stuff of aforementioned torture porn and cynical, soulless remakes of all the horror classics from the 1970s and ‘80s, including many originated by Craven. Whereas the slasher genre was long in the tooth when Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson first deconstructed it with affection via 1996’s Scream, it had circled back to a Sisyphean repetition in 2011—an endless sea of remakes and retreads, none yet realizing there was more money to be had by getting the cast of the original back to bless “the next generation” in a torch-passing sequel. In ’96, Craven and Williamson’s hyper-articulate smartass teens revived the genre with meta-textual humor and self-awareness. Scream 4 had less success in its day, even though it plays sharper than ever as satire in 2022.’ — David Crow
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Behind the scenes
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!!! Me too, resuscitate my French, except I don’t much to begin with. Oh, Jeffers quote, oops, I should reread that old post more meticulously. Cool. Yes, my love did his job. The DP we met with, who was our dream DP, said yes! We’re really happy. Having the right DP, someone who really gibes with how we’re envisioning a film but has exciting ideas we haven’t thought of, is kind of the most important part of making a film, and she’s exactly that. Yay! Ha ha, I think your love can safely just answer yes to that burning question. Love giving you and me free Watusi lessons, G. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Yes, that’s it. Those three novels make up ‘The Book of Lies’. Awesome that you’re going to try them/it. I hope you’re taken by them, obviously. But, you know, no sweat if you aren’t. I’ve read something by Aaron Peck that I liked a lot, but not that book. Sounds like a total must. I’ll start hunting it down today. Thanks, pal. I hope your Thursday follows your every command. ** David Ehrenstein, No, she won’t. But it looks like she’ll be the candidate in the finals against Macron like last time, which is stressful and depressing enough. ** Misanthrope, Good, I hope it goes similarly as easily with your mom this time. I envy you being so into your fiction. Mine has had be pushed way, way off to the side for the time being due to the billion-seeming projects I have to put my mind to simultaneously. If you like things epic, I hope it is or, rather I trust it will be. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, happy some things sat well with you. YEAH YOU is lovely live if you ever get the chance. ** Mark Stephens, Mr. Stephens! Well, well, well! How are you, my dear friend? Oh, wait, I can read your comment and presumably find out. Hold on. Of course I’ve been thinking about you guys and that Disney stuff, especially now when Florida just gets more hell-on-earth-ish by the day. I so hope you guys get to stay where you are, but I’ll shut up because I don’t want to jinx anything. Oh, you’ve been to Tor House! Wow, nice Jeffers story, man. I guess you don’t know whatever happened to him. I’ll just presume he’s a famous poet now ‘cos why wouldn’t he be? Sounds like he had all the makings. So, Zac and I should be out there in your/my hood for a while in the next month or six weeks because we finally got the green light to shoot our new film out/around there in September/October, and we need to get there and find our locations and actors and stuff. Whoo-hoo! So hopefully you guys will still be there, I trust. Biggest of the biggest love to you and J from Paris’s humble servant aka me! ** Steve Erickson, Ha ha. Happy that a couple of gig things stuck with you. I don’t know about that Tian Zhuangzhuang film, but I’ll find out. The title is, you know, promisingly charming. ** l@rst, I can’t say that I’m not relieved that the slap didn’t make it posterity. Congrats on the poem acceptance, mostly to the venue at hand, of course. Everybody’s getting Covid around here, but still not me. My immune system must be really something. Or I’ve had it multiple times and just never knew it. ** Brandon, I remember when LA was almost never hot other than between, like, mid-July to early October. That’s scary. Me too, I like to be icy. Why couldn’t it have been global cooling, you know? Wtf! Where might you drive? Do you have an ideal getaway spot? I assume it’s not Las Vegas. Thanks, I hope both of our Thursdays are pried-open treasure chests. ** Okay. I realised I had never done a Wes Craven Day, and I thought I probably should. Simple as that. See you tomorrow.
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