Why Wes Craven deserves points for always being on trend.
Wes Craven isn’t a great director, but in his career you can find the elements of an entire genre
There are three major director retrospectives this fall at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto: Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Craven. One is reminded of the deathless Sesame Street standard: “One of these things is not like the other; one of these things just doesn’t belong.”
The short straw in this case is drawn by Craven, but give the guy a break: It’s not the 75-year-old Cleveland native’s fault that he’s being lined up against two of the most influential filmmakers in the history of the medium. And the fact is that Craven’s comparatively artistically modest but still impressively sprawling body of work — 22 feature films in 44 years — places him in the front ranks of horror directors in the second half of the 20th century, while simultaneously serving as a major influence on the genre filmmakers of the 21st century — for better and for worse. Craven debuted in 1973 with
The Last House on the Left, a gruelling and gruesome parable of parental vengeance that Roger Ebert rightly compared to Ingmar Bergman’s The Vir
gin Spring — not that the grindhouse audiences that made it a hit were sweating the allusions. A truly uncomfortable film, The
Last House on the Left had a naturalistic texture that stood in direct opposition to the deluxe quality of big-studio horror hits like The Exorcist. Notwithstanding its ugliness, it may actually be Craven’s best-directed movie, although his two most enduring titles are surely A
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream (1996) — violent thrillers separated by just over a decade’s worth of real time yet representative of two entirely different epochs in the history of scary movies.
Released six years after John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) officially kick-started the so-called slasher-film vogue, A Nightmare on Elm
Street seemed a bit like a send-up of the cycle: It featured a wholesomely sexy female lead (Heather Langkenkamp), a leafy suburban habitat and an unstoppable killing-machine antagonist. The difference was that where Halloween’s masked murderer Michael Myers and
Friday the 13’ s hockey-mask clad Jason were supernaturally empowered monsters plunked down into realworld settings, Craven’s villainous child-killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was literally a walking nightmare — a dream-world projection rattling around in the mindscapes of his slumbering victims.
As a hook for a horror flick, this was irresistible; as an embedded commentary on the relationships between dreams and cinema, it was ingenious, and Craven — always a competent craftsman if never a visionary — rose to the occasion with enough weirdly offkilter imagery (like the brief, inexplicable shot of a lamb roaming a high school hallway as a prelude to one of Freddy’s first appearances) that the film transcended its cheapjack trappings to become a mainstream phenomenon. Where A Nightmare on Elm
Street re-energized the slasher genre in real time, Scream was an exercise in nostalgia — a loving tribute to a style of moviemaking that had mostly gone out of vogue by the mid-1990s. Then-hotshot screenwriter Kevin Williamson conceived a scenario where a group of young adults raised on the sorts of movies directed by Wes Craven suddenly found themselves living inside one; the masterstroke was inviting Craven himself to sit in the director’s chair. The result was one of the great have-our-cakeand-eat-it-too films of all time, with Craven staging expert stalk-and-slash set pieces only to have them broken up by characters commenting on the familiarity of it all. Craven had staked out similar territory in his underrated 1994
New Nightmare —a movie about Freddy Krueger escaping the Nightmare on Elm Street series and wreaking havoc in the real world — but
Scream’s potent, postTarantino blend of stunt-casting (starting with Drew Barrymore as a sacrificial lamb) and gore clutched the popcultural jugular with more dexterity.
Scream openly mocked the industrial profit motive that led to A Nightmare on Elm Street being diminished by an endless series of sequels; it also spawned its own increasingly unimpressive follow-ups, as well as a long list of imitators that placed a premium on laughs over scares. Without necessarily meaning to, Craven had presided over the watering down of a genre through whose veins he’d once pumped fresh blood, and in the years since Scream, only 2003’s Red Eye — a nicely economical little exercise in claustrophobia starring Rachel McAdams as a woman who has a very traumatic experience on a commercial flight — suggested an artist working anywhere close to his peak.
It may be that a director like Craven simply doesn’t fit into the current horror movie market, saturated as it is with “found-footage flicks” — films which locate their tension in the aping of documentary techniques. Craven’s more expressive style is now out of vogue, although it’s obviously infiltrated the frontal lobes of the new-school horror-meisters: the scariest moment in Para
normal Activity (2007), where a sleeping woman is dragged out of bed by an invisible force, felt like a callback to A Nightmare
on Elm Street’s still-shocking opening sequence. Craven may not be Stanley Kubrick (who wrought his own wryly comic variation on slasher-movie tropes in The Shining) but the trajectory of his career from low-budget button-pusher to unexpected hitmaker to rueful old pro serves is basically a microcosm of an entire genre. Seems like the guy may belong, after all. Wes Craven: Dreams, Screams and Nightmares is at Toronto’s
TIFF Bell Lightbox to Oct. 21