Craven made the ordinary very scary
A look at just some of the places we learned to fear
I can no longer watch horror movies, and that’s thanks to Wes Craven — which is a compliment.
The writer-director-producer was just that good at scaring audiences, and some of us have a limit for how much fear we can take. His movies turned innocuous things, like beds, concerts and road trips, into instruments of horror. And at some point, I realized that it wasn’t normal to think, “I hope Freddy Krueger doesn’t reach up and grab me” every time I took a bath.
Craven died recently at 76, but I, for one, will still be thinking about him and the movies he made for a long time to come.
Here are some of the everyday objects and occurrences that might prompt us to remember the master of terror.
BATHS
If Nancy was afraid to fall asleep, why on earth did she decide to get into a hot bubble bath? It might have been strange logic, but it wasn’t enough to make the scene in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street any less traumatizing as Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) nods off and Freddy Krueger’s knife nails emerge, reaching up through the strategically placed bubbles between Nancy’s legs. The suspense plays out perfectly, taking a breather for some comic relief when she wakes up. Once Nancy nods off again, she gets dragged under the bubbles into a suddenly deep body of water. Baths have never been the same.
CONCERTS
What could be a more commonplace teen experience than heading to a concert with friends? But The Last House on the Left transformed that rite of passage into a cautionary tale. When two girls are abducted by a gang of escaped convicts, they are sadistically tortured and brutally murdered. None of what happens to them can be recounted here — or maybe it could be, but I don’t feel emotionally prepared to revisit it all, so just trust me: Don’t go to concerts. Or if you do go, don’t try to buy weed off any strangers.
DREAMING
Falling asleep was a deadly event in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it wasn’t the only Craven movie that made slipping into REM seem like a very bad idea. The Serpent and the Rainbow starred Bill Pullman as an American ethnobotanist travelling to Haiti to track down a drug that can resurrect the dead. Once he’s there, he’s stalked by the commander of the Haitian secret police, who doesn’t just arrest and torture him in real life, but also stalks his subconscious, showing up in the American’s dreams.
GARAGE DOORS
Scream left a lot of unsavory images imprinted on our brains. But one of the most memorable was sassy teen Tatum (Rose McGowan) trying to escape from the masked murderer by crawling through a dog-door inside of a garage door — only to have the garage door start going up. It didn’t end well.
ROAD TRIPS
It’s not that you can’t take long road trips. It’s just that you shouldn’t get out of your car. Not even to buy gas. Otherwise you might end up like the poor family in The Hills Have Eyes, who are terrorized and murdered by a clan of cannibals, who are all named after planets.
LONG FLIGHTS
It’s not that you can’t book a long-haul ticket, it’s just that you shouldn’t talk to anyone, even a seemingly friendly old lady.
You just never know, so keep the headphones on. Otherwise you might end up like Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) in Red Eye. The hotel manager falls prey to a deadly terrorist (Cillian Murphy) that wants her to help him with an assassination plot, or else.
BEDS
Before Johnny Depp was Johnny Depp, he was just collateral damage in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
He played Nancy’s boyfriend, Glen, and his untimely end happened in the safest of safe havens: his own bed.
But sometimes a bed is not a bed.
Sometimes a mattress will suddenly start receding into a bed frame and suck you in with it, just as soon as you’ve got comfy. And then it’ll spit you back out as a horrific geyser of blood.
Craven taught us not to doze off, but if you do, maybe you should do it in a sleeping bag on the ground.