Scary stuff — in so many ways
Horror king Wes Craven knew how to get through our defences
If it’s the goal of a film to short-circuit our emotional defences, to have us give ourselves over to its mood and meaning, then horror movies have a taller order than most.
Unlike with love, quippy buddyness or bad-ass actionery, we don’t like being scared. We’re conditioned to turn away, to cover our eyes or effect nonchalance, to tell ourselves “it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie,” and walk out of the theatre without checking over our shoulder — or under the bed when we get home.
As horrifying as the scenarios still remain, the remarkable thing about Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left is more prosaic: it was horror in real life, or at least as close to real life as horror gets. Famously appended with a fake “based on a true story” tag, it nevertheless did away with most of the conventions of horror up until then: there were no makeup heavy monsters, no gothic castles with Vincent Price vamping his way around thunderclap effects, no flourishes to let us (or, more specifically, the audiences of 1972) dismiss it as merely a horror film. It took what were already everpresent fears in our day-today lives and played them out to their most terrifying conclusion.
“To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie’” was the tag line for Craven’s first attempt to scare the living hell out of us, Last House was an almost unbelievably graphic movie for the ’70s. It was banned all over the place, sometimes repeatedly, and is still pretty psychologically brutal to this day. It depicts a gang of hardened criminals raping and murdering two young girls, and then an almost equally horrible revenge enacted upon them by the girls’ parents. It’s a revenge fantasy of visceral fear, anger and hatred, inflicting each on the audience as much as the characters.
It was an auspicious debut of Craven’s gift, which was for regularly finding new ways to block our psychological outs, to keep us trapped in the horrible world he was creating. Freddy Krueger was not the first slasher, and even his iconic look has more in common with the old Hollywood monsters than the twisted criminals of Last House, but his genius twist was that he struck us where we couldn’t even rely on our own selves for protection.
Not only is a nightmare a perfect metaphor for a horror film, but it was the way Craven played with the lifedream boundaries, sneaking us into Freddy’s realm and jolting us back out of it, finding something primal in the nagging existential fear of reality and how we know what it is.
The tragedy of innovation, especially something that relies on the visceral thrill of horror, is that it inevitably becomes calcified in overuse. Certainly, Craven’s films have lost a bit of their shock, especially if you’ve grown up on a diet of imitators. But he also found the ability to use our knowingness against us, first in New Nightmare and then, more successfully, in Scream, both twisted meta exercises that acknowledged the jadedness of the average horror filmgoer, and then eviscerated it.
In Scream, even telling yourself it’s only a movie is no out. It’s another kind of nightmare for anyone who’s ever stood at the top of a dark staircase and shook off their creeps by reminding themselves that there’s no killers down there. Even its final twist, that it’s those closest to us who are out to get us, amplifies the low buzz of sociological reality into a horrified, piercing scream.
Scream was Craven’s last triumph, perhaps mildly less influential than his others. There was a glut of knowing imitators, but horror found other ways of making its reality inescapable, particularly through heightened gore and the growing ubiquity of cameras that feed the foundfootage films. But Scream still counts as the crown of someone who managed to find new ways to scare us for three straight decades.
Craven’s nightmares are only movies, after all, but few other people have found so many ways to make us forget that.