For Wes: Remembering Wes Craven and the Movies That Changed Horror Forever

I am rarely affected by celebrity deaths, but when it was revealed that Wes Craven had passed away on August 30, 2015, weeks after his 76th birthday, I was devastated. Never before had I been so moved by the loss of a person I’d never met. I’ve written several tributes to horror icons over the past few years and have generally approached them from a bit of a distance, keeping my own experience out of them, but with Craven, I’m going to take a different approach.

With icons of the past, their biographies are not so well known and so I presented their lives as an unfolding story as best I could. It seems to me, however, that most fans of Wes Craven have a basic idea of his biography—born August 2, 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio; abandoned by his father who died soon after at a very young age; raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church that forbade the watching of movies; went off to college and discovered a world away from his traditional faith, became a college professor, then quit to become a filmmaker first in New York, then Hollywood.

His career was marked by genre-defining innovation and creativity-crushing studio interference. As a filmmaker he changed the face of horror three times with The Last House on the Left (1972), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Scream (1996) and, though he longed to make films in other arenas, was rarely given the opportunity. Still, there are few filmmakers that have had a more profound impact on a given milieu or the people who love it than Craven. And so I chose this more personal approach for several reasons, the greatest being the profound impact that Wes Craven has had on me as a film-lover and horror fan. I have a feeling I’m not alone in that.

Over the years I have discovered several things that Wes and I have in common—religious upbringing, starting careers in different fields than we eventually landed, teaching, playing guitar, and a gnawing need to express ourselves creatively. My religious youth was far less strict than Wes’s, but my parents were cautious about the kinds of movies I could see, especially when it came to horror. For the most part PG-rated movies were fine with them, unless of course they involved the scary stuff. The Universal Monsters were alright, but Poltergeist, Jaws, Ghostbusters, and Gremlins were all no-gos when I was young, and I had to rely on my friends for all the creepy details. This was probably for the best as I was a very nervous child and susceptible to nightmares, but that didn’t stop me from haunting the horror aisle at the video store, which is where I had my first encounter with Wes Craven.

I found several VHS covers to be creepy but the one that really freaked me out featured a wide-eyed girl in bed with gleaming knives hovering over her face and a hint of a skull with a rictus grin in the upper left. It didn’t even take seeing the movie for A Nightmare on Elm Street to give me bad dreams, that image was enough.

I distinctly remember finding out from a friend’s older relative (maybe a brother or cousin) that it was a really scary one, and the consensus among my friends, though few had actually seen it, was that it was the scariest movie ever made. I became obsessed. Before long, Freddy fever rose in the public and I found a book at the library called The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion by Jeffrey Cooper. It was in these pages that I first encountered the name Wes Craven. Not only was his name in the book but his picture—and he kinda looked like my dad.

Like many people, I expected the Prince of Darkness, but instead discovered the mild-mannered, professorial man who gave the nation Nightmares.

During Wes’s formative years, he received the smallest beginnings of his filmic education from family friend Eddie Bilton who had an 8mm camera and taught Wes some of the basics of shooting and editing while he stayed at the Bilton home while his mother was at work. When I was about the age Wes was experiencing all this, both my parents worked full time, and my brother and I stayed with a family that lived a short drive away. We spent our weekdays there before and after school and then all day during a summer or two. This family was quite different from my own in many ways, but I also received the beginnings of my own education in film. They had cable, we did not, so I was exposed to several movies I otherwise didn’t have access to, including my first Wes Craven movie—Swamp Thing (1982), which received the stamp of approval because it was PG rated.

It was the perfect entrée into Craven’s work for a kid of my age and disposition. It is more of a superhero movie but with just enough creature elements to be considered a gateway horror film. Later I would learn about the misery involved in the making of this film. It was supposed to be a launching pad to greater things for the director. If it had been a hit, it could have even led to Craven writing and directing a Batman film, but its failure made it almost impossible to get hired for anything. Instead, he focused on his script about a dream demon, shopping it to studio after studio where it was endlessly rejected until Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema took a chance—and the rest, as they say, is history.

Soon after discovering Cooper’s book (I bought a copy of my own that I still have on my shelf) I found my way to Fangoria and its companion magazine GoreZone. The first issues I bought featured articles on movies like Friday the 13th VII-The New Blood, Phantasm II, the new Nightmare on Elm Street movie (part 5-The Dream Child), and something new and interesting. It was called Shocker (1989), and once again my friends dubbed it “the scariest movie ever made,” though none had seen it. But to my mind it had to be worthy of such a label because there was his name again—Wes Craven.

It was during these years that several important things happened in my own life as a horror obsessive. First, I discovered Stephen King and was allowed to watch the film adaptations of the books I read. We even rented Carrie and The Shining at Christmas and watched them as a family. That same Christmas I also saw A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time. My uncle was a huge horror fan, and I begged my mom to let me buy him Nightmare as a Christmas present. At the family gathering on Christmas Day someone suggested that we watch a movie. I had gotten 4 or 5 from my grandma that were mentioned but I jokingly suggested we watch Nightmare. To my shock, everyone agreed. Though I had read the novelizations (again by Jeffrey Cooper) and knew what would be happening in the movie, it did not disappoint. To this day it is my favorite horror movie. Eventually I bought my own copy which played on rotation with The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13th until I practically wore them all out.

After watching Elm Street on Christmas, my parents pretty much surrendered and let my brother and I watch whatever we wanted. Again, I asked my friends to tell me what the really scary ones were. I remember one saying the scariest movie he knew of was The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) while his older brother made it clear that the scariest, most intense, and gory movie ever made was called The Last House on the Left. I knew I saw Serpent sometime in my high school or college years but Last House, along with its companion film The Hills Have Eyes (1977), by reputation alone kept me away for a long time. I finally saw both in my mid-twenties while my exposure to the extreme side of cinema was still very limited. I was so nervous about Last House that I chose to watch the DVD special features first and found Craven’s interviews comforting somehow. He was able to articulate the message that he intended behind all the violence and depravity, one of the ugliness of violence which he believed had been fetishized in movies for too long. The Hills Have Eyes only underscored the themes of Last House but in a much more cinematically refined way.

When Craven changed the face of horror for the third time, I had just graduated from high school and found myself estranged from the horror genre. I had become deeply involved in my church during that time and had been convinced by some that horror and faith did not mix. So unfortunately, I missed Scream in the theater. A few months later something interesting happened. The bass player in the worship band and I had a conversation about the faith-affirming aspects of horror, specifically in the film The Exorcist. Soon after, another friend, also a believer, encouraged me to embrace my love of horror, showing me anew the value of the films I’d loved for so long. I caught up with several films I missed, including Scream. I remember taking my college girlfriend to see Scream 2 (1997) in the theater; I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven me for that, but I loved it.

In the final year of my music education program in college, everyone in the program received some promotional materials for a movie that championed the value of music in schools called Music of the Heart (1999). Most noticed the stars—Meryl Streep, Gloria Estefan—I saw the director’s name and my jaw hit the floor. Once again Wes Craven had found his way into my life, and he had made a movie I could watch and enjoy with my mom. Music of the Heart didn’t have a huge effect on me or the box office upon its release, but when I returned to teaching music after ten years in another field, I discovered a beautiful film about the value of my work that is in my opinion the most accurate depiction of a music teacher ever captured on film.

After a very dark time in my life, it was horror and Craven that helped bring me back to reality, ironically through his profound ability to depict worlds of fantasy, dreams, and hallucination. During the pandemic, I watched through his entire filmography in order, including television episodes and movies, and found great solace in that experience during a very challenging time. Though I have read and written about him and his movies extensively over the past few years, I still find things about Wes Craven that surprise me. A few years ago, while researching a piece on the role of religion in his films, I discovered his alter ego Abe Snake and the adult film he made under that pseudonym The Fireworks Woman (1974). Recently, in reading Joseph Maddrey’s excellent book The Soul of Wes Craven, I discovered his wild streak and impish sense of humor as when he tried to jump a wide ditch in a station wagon carrying his young family and how he would make prank calls to friends using disguised voices, sometimes getting those friends in serious trouble.

But the more I discover, the more questions come to mind that I wish I could ask him. I’d love to hear his thoughts on Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini, and even his contemporary David Lynch and ask what kind of influence their films had on his work. I want to bring up some examples of the religious themes, symbols, and iconography that crop up throughout his filmography and discuss if those were conscious or unconscious inclusions. But then maybe he would just think I’m full of shit—I’d be okay with that. I’d ask him to elaborate on him and Sam Raimi hiding Easter Eggs from each other’s movies in their own. I’d ask why he thinks people are continually drawn to his films and re-evaluating many of those that were overlooked in the past.

I have my own opinion about that last point and again it has been crystalized by reading The Soul of Wes Craven. It all comes down to stories. Craven was interested in a great many things, often the political, socio-economic, religious, and familial undercurrents that constantly flow beneath societal ills. He constantly dealt with these elements in his films—Last House and Hills deal with the myths of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny in light of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, Nightmare with the ways the older generation passes its problems on to the next, The People Under the Stairs (1991) with economic inequality, race, and gentrification, and so forth. You can watch his films and mine them for the rich themes that underly all of them. Or you can simply enjoy them as good scary movies with engaging stories. In his college years Craven learned the value of metaphor in literature and storytelling and this is very apparent in his best films.

Wes would have been 85 this August 2nd. Even if he had not made any more movies in the past nine years, I would think that he would be gratified to see the reappraisal of some of the films that were not appreciated in their day. As time goes by, films like New Nightmare (1994) and Scream 4 (2011) have been reevaluated as among the best metanarrative horror films ever made, some preferring New Nightmare to the original and others naming Scream 4 as their favorite sequel in the franchise. Calls to #ReleasetheCravenCut of Cursed (2005) would likely amuse and gratify him greatly considering the studio interference and other difficulties he encountered in the making of that film. He may have found a sense of pride in the small, but growing, cult around his very personal penultimate film My Soul to Take (2010).

But these are only speculations. The man may no longer be with us, but his work still speaks to us and has the power to entertain, provoke, and maybe even change us for the better. His legacy as an artist speaks to our souls but so does his legacy as a human being. Like any man, he was imperfect, but he was also a man who sought to learn and grow and improve. Both the creative and human aspects of Wes Craven have been a great source of inspiration for me over the years. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

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