some thoughts on wes craven

Wes Craven passed away last week. If you have even the remotest interest in horror cinema, you know his name. He left an indelible mark on the genre. He’s unique because he started out in the low-end of grindhouse and somehow crossed over into bigtime, mainstream Hollywood.

It’s been fascinating to read the mainstream media reporting on his death. A fair share of articles state that he reinvented horror cinema three times: with The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. I don’t think I buy that. The first two, yes—and we’ll talk about them more in a bit. But Scream? It was a huge hit and launched a lot of probably terrible sequels (I never bothered with any of the first, I made that mistake with the Elm Street movies in the 80s) but I don’t think it reinvented the genre. It arguably set the genre back; it’s not really a horror film. It’s a sendup of horror films that forgets completely why people are drawn to these movies in the first place. And then proceeds to suggest that if you honestly enjoy horror films—particularly slashers—you must be pretty stupid. I’ve got a few issues with that interpretation.

Wes was clearly bored with the genre when he made Scream, especially after the commercial failure of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which can be seen as a dry run for some of the metacommentary he’d overload Scream with. I like New Nightmare; it’s an uneven film that drags after the first third (and I’m sorry, I’ll never buy the new look of Freddy Krueger, who looks so incredibly drab and fake instead of scary) but the always wonderful Heather Langenkamp gives a fantastic performance and the film attempts, if somewhat awkwardly, to explore the idea of the impact horror has on those who create it. I don’t think Craven fully succeeds, but the angle is interesting. Scream could have taken that exploration further, divorced it from a franchise that is too implanted in pop culture consciousness to carry that weight. Instead he cynically created a new franchise built on irony, that same narcissistic irony that sunk so much pop art in the 90s. You can, I guess, argue that Scream is simply a product of its time, but Wes is smarter than that. He knew what he was doing. And that is what disappoints me; the guy was smart but I think he was simply worn out. The endless monkeying with his vision by clueless studio execs in the 80s had clearly taken its toll.

Funny thing is, I kinda like Scream. It’s a well-made movie, and it is loaded with references that any horror fan will pick up on. If it didn’t hate its audience so much, it could have been a great one-off. But it does, and when you throw the endless sequels atop it…yuck. *That* is the stuff of nightmares. When I watched Scream, I kept wondering how the guy that made the woefully underrated The People Under the Stairs could’ve made this. The movie is a lobotomy. Blame the execs? I’d like to, but I think in this case it lies with Wes.

So that’s why I don’t think Scream is, ultimately, important. At most it’s a footnote in the genre. At worst, it’s the nu-metal of horror movies. And no one forgives Limp Bizkit.

A second common theme I noticed in the obits was the glossing over and sometimes outright ignoring the first of his films, The Last House on the Left. Even today, this is an extremely uncomfortable film, and proof that despite Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie’s best efforts, you can’t make grindhouse squeaky-clean and safe. Last House holds the distinction of being one of only two films to ever make me physically ill (the other, in entirely different circumstances, was that horrible mess called Caligula.) That physical reaction was largely due to the fact I was fairly young when I saw it. Fourteen, if memory serves, and I simply did not have the context for the movie or the understanding of the themes. Fourteen-year old me had no idea if it was a Vietnam allegory or a crude companion to other works of art dealing with the death of the sixties (it was all of these things and more.) All I knew is that I’d never seen women brutally raped and grainy dismemberment on the screen before. I’d seen plenty of horror movies, but they were all…safe, somehow. Last House on the Left is truly subversive and dangerous.

It’s also frustratingly uneven (a trait that Wes rarely escaped), what with the Keystone Cops routines in between horrific confrontational scenes and a soundtrack more at odds with the film than probably any movie ever. I guess one could almost be thankful for these elements; they remind you that you really are just watching a movie. Still I wonder what the movie would have been like if Wes could have made what he originally intended: a hardcore horror film. Wes had made a number of pornographic films before Last House and I shudder to think of how the movie could have played out if he’d really brought his vision out. I’d be in therapy, probably. Even with these incongruous elements, the movie is a grainy gut-punch (or perhaps disembowelment) whose very cheapness give it the feel of cinéma vérité. In this sense it is not so far removed from Night of the Living Dead…but there is no element of supernatural here. Rape/revenge films did not start with Last House (hell, it flat-out steals the plot from Bergman’s far more elegant The Virgin Spring) but it became the blueprint for a thousand truly sleazy, confrontational films. Virtually none of them had the power of Last House, because at the end of the day Wes is a talented filmmaker. You are compelled to watch, sickened or not.

I often wonder if I would have ever discovered grindhouse/exploitation/sleaze filmmaking without Last House. Thanks for that Wes—I mean it. Last House opened my eyes to a far more brutal and troubling take on horror…and in doing so opened my eyes to just what the genre might do.

Last House on the Left is not for everyone. It’s not for most people. It’s still probably more discussed than viewed. A Nightmare on Elm Street, however…is there anyone with even a passing interest in horror cinema that hasn’t seen this film? It was probably the most important horror film of the 1980s. And quite likely the best, although I think John Carpenter’s The Thing certainly has a claim to that title as well. It is very difficult to examine the impact of this film on an emotional level in 2015, however. A decade of increasingly awful sequels, the transformation of Freddy Krueger into a wisecracking killer—a slightly more deranged version of The Cryptkeeper from the old EC comics, if you will—and the transformation of indie horror cinema in the late 80s/early 90s in non-threatening, bland mainstream Hollywood product has taken away all of the darkness and danger of the original film in most of our minds. We can discuss it intellectually, but can we remember the sheer visceral impact this movie had when it was unleashed on an unsuspecting world in November 1984?

It’s hard. I’ve written on this particular film several times over the years, and never to my satisfaction. Partially because it reveals my limitations as a writer—I want so badly to make you feel what this movie did, and what it means, to me. The erasing of the border between dreaming and wakefulness and how that erasure was framed in this film—I would argue that nothing better captured the world as it was to us who grew up in that era. I will try, once more and without fanfare, to touch on that in the following paragraphs. The other reasons it is difficult to capture the impact of this film, except perhaps through a merchandise/dollars and cents lense, are the reasons listed above. Pale and exaggerated sequels turned Freddy Krueger into a cartoon, and one that wasn’t exactly scary.

Allow me to quote myself, in a piece I wrote over ten years ago:

In the movie, Freddy Krueger comes to a group of teenagers in their dreams and kills them. If you die in the dream, you are dead in real life. The kids fight to stay awake, knowing that they are not safe if they sleep. The movie becomes a tension-filled battle to fight off sleep. Sometimes they fail and fall asleep, but do not know it. Neither do we, the viewers. In showing this—in not letting us know if we are awake or dreaming—the film achieves its true brilliance. We live in a world where our nightmares are outpaced by reality. Sleep is not safe, and neither is being awake. The invention of electricity and the speeding up of time has created a world of timelessness, where there is no simple distinction between day and night anymore. We live on an entirely different cycle now, one that we don’t consciously understand. It is a first in human history. I believe that we have yet to truly adjust to this change; it is too new to human consciousness. So we create new myths, the previous ones no longer reflecting a world we know.

Freddy Krueger became a pop icon because he was a new myth. He wasn’t simply the boogeyman, though he certainly played that role effectively enough in the original film. He reflected the world kids and teenagers of the 80s lived in—your parents couldn’t protect you (if they were even around) and they almost certainly wouldn’t believe you; you were on your own unless you were lucky enough to have friends, and even then you couldn’t trust them; nightmares were reality. I see it as a companion piece to River’s Edge. Both movies unflinchingly portrayed the desolate landscape many teens grew up in during that time. Echoes of it abound today. It was, I think, the true beginning of the age of endarkenment. Allow me to quote myself once more:

 …. Humankind’s relentless quest to push down these boundaries—the walls between the conscious and subconscious, between night and day--is bringing about timelessness. We are living in timelessness. The age of endarkenment.

Yes, an age of endarkenment. I stole that phrase from Michael Ventura. He points out that the world is stained with dark psychic fluid, and we say on the surface we don’t want the stuff, but we sure don’t act that way. We revel in it. Adolescents understand this even better than most of us adults, I think. Adolescence is a scary fucking time, and kids are drawn to the scary stories because they need knowledge. We suck at teaching, anymore. We don’t have rituals like the dreamtime, designed to expose youth to the psyche at its rawest form, to gain the knowledge, to understand, and to develop the tools to live a spiritual life. So kids go to where they can find that knowledge, to the myths that speak to them, to the stories they feel. They go to A Nightmare on Elm Street. I went to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Sometimes in my dreams, I still go there.

And when I do, I do not sleep.

An age of endarkenment, indeed. We are still living in it. One last thing about Nightmare: it originally had a happy ending. New Line’s president forced Wes to shoot an alternate ending, mostly so it would be left open for sequels, which Wes didn’t want to do. But he did it anyway, and leaving aside those sequels, it’s one of the only times Wes’s work was improved by outside hands. Because a happy ending would have destroyed everything that film built up, completely erased the foundation of the myth by offering a clear line between dreaming and wakefulness. And the movie would have bombed. Because kids know when they are being lied to.

And here I am, two thousand words later. We haven’t even discussed The People Under the Stairs (his most underrated film) or The Hills Have Eyes (for some reason it never did much for me) or Deadly Friend (textbook case of a studio destroying a director’s vision) or The Serpent and the Rainbow (intriguing as long as you treat it as fiction and not a cinematic tell of the book of the same name) or Shocker (which I don’t remember well aside from the great Megadeth cover of No More Mr. Nice Guy) or A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (the only sequel Wes was involved in until A New Nightmare, nearly a great film but had the teeth pulled from it and a pretty lame ending tacked on…I’m not sure any director in the 80s suffered as studio interference/censorship as Wes did. Bonus points for an awesome Dokken theme song.) Wes made his share of terrible movies, sometimes you could blame studio interference and sometimes you could blame him. Few directors are as uneven—he rarely made a mediocre film. You got great or you got crap. Sometimes you got both. But rarely, save for maybe some of his later work, did you get “meh.” If we remove the problematic Scream from the equation, Wes last made an interesting horror film in 1994. Yet I miss the guy already, and horror fans will long mourn his passing.

Thanks Wes, for creating new myths and for making truly uncomfortable and thought-provoking work. Even when I strongly disagreed with the angle you took, I always respected that you were trying to do something different. I truly believe your work will be studied for years afterwards as one of the keys in attempting to make sense of the late twentieth century. I am grateful for all you brought, great and terrible alike.