The ‘Sultan of Slash’
WES Craven, the film director, who has died aged 76, made his living out of scaring the wits out of people in films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), earning him the nickname “Sultan of Slash”. Later, as audiences became cynical about the franchise-driven genre, he served up horror with an ironic tongue in cheek.
Craven’s work left critics divided. Some denounced him as a purveyor of gore with a dazzling technique and nothing to say; others compared him to Ingmar Bergman. He created some of film’s most memorable bogeymen, culminating, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, in the blade-taloned Freddy Krueger, a murdered child molester in a moth-eaten sweater and filthy fedora brought back to life via the dreams of the teenage descendants of his killers.
Craven, who had a master’s degree in philosophy, became a defender of the horror genre, which, he argued, gives people the mental equipment to deal with a frightening world.
His films were often inspired by true stories. Nightmare was HORROR WITH AN IRONIC TWIST: Director Wes Craven inspired by reports about a group of refugees who had fled the Khmer Rouge, healthy young men in their 20s, who, after fleeing to the US, were suffering nightmares, after which they refused to sleep. “They would try to stay awake, and they would describe the nightmares to their families,” Craven recalled. “Finally there would be a scream and the guy would be dead. Death by nightmare.”
The film established Craven as a leading director. His producers established a franchise and went on to make several more Freddy Krueger films, without Craven’s input, until 1995, when he released Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
By this time, “horror had reached one of its cyclical stages of ennui on the part of the audience”. So Craven decided to poke fun at the genre. New Nightmare had the actors, studio head and Craven himself being stalked by Freddy Krueger.
Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 2 1939 to strict Baptist parents. Though forbidden from going to the cinema, he claimed that his religious upbringing had shaped his talent as a filmmaker, encouraging him to “ask big questions about life and death”.
The character of Freddy Krueger drew on an event in his own childhood when, one night, he heard a shuffling sound outside his bedroom window: “I crept over there and looked down. It was a man wearing [a fedora]. He stopped and looked up directly into my face. I backed into the shadows, listening and waiting for him to go away. But I didn’t hear anything. I went back to the window. He looked up at me again and then turned away. He walked into the door of our apartment building. I’ve never, ever been that scared in my life. I was terrified.”
He is survived by his third wife, Iya, a daughter and a son. — © The Daily Telegraph, London