Wes Craven, who has died aged 76 of brain cancer, was a horror film pioneer three times over.
The most notorious of Craven's movies remains his debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), the relentless tale of the torture of two women and the revenge doled out to the killers by the victims' parents, inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.
Exaggeration and advertising are synonymous, but this was one instance where the poster copy ("To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie . . . '") amounted to more than hyperbole. The scenes of sexual violence made Last House the subject of continuing censorship for more than 30 years. "It's not a movie I would go back and watch," said Craven in 2011.
In 1984, Craven enjoyed his greatest success with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which lent a fantasy aspect to the popular slasher genre. He devised a wisecracking monster, Freddy Krueger, who pursued his victims through the infinite space of their dreams. Scenes of the teenage protagonist struggling to ascend a marshmallow staircase, or being dragged by her pursuer into a bottomless bathtub, possess a haunted beauty worthy of Jean Cocteau.
Elm Street became a lucrative franchise, spawning six sequels, a TV series, endless merchandise, a spin-off and, finally, a 2010 remake. Craven was involved with two of the sequels. He wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and wrote and directed the sophisticated and rejuvenating fifth episode, Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), which featured the director and some of the cast playing themselves. It was witty, satirical and scary: a blood-splattered Pirandello.
Self-conscious slasher
Craven’s hat-trick was completed in 1996, when he directed
Scream
, best described as a horror movie that knows it’s a horror movie. Though the idea wasn’t his, it was consistent with his sensibility. The collegiate characters in
Scream
are well-versed in the conventions of the horror genre. The killer stalking them wears a ghostly mask elongated in a Munchian howl and is given to asking his victims: “What’s your favourite scary movie?”
Scream 2 (1997) retained the humour, horror and postmodern mischief: one scene included a discussion about how rare it is for sequels to improve upon originals. This foreshadowed a falling-off in quality across two more outings (2000 and 2011), both directed by Craven.
Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were strict Baptists who forbade him from reading comic books. After college he earned a master’s in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Craven taught for several years before breaking into the film industry as a sound editor. He directed pseudonymously a number of pornographic movies and was credited as editor and assistant director on It Happened in Hollywood (1973), a porn comedy produced by the editors of Screw magazine.
Horrors from life
The Last House on the Left
originated when Craven and a friend were commissioned to make a cheap horror film (under $90,000). Embracing a narrative free from moral certainties, Craven described the film’s coarse, gritty violence as a reaction to the horrors of Vietnam.
In the wake of its notoriety, Craven found himself all but ostracised: “My friends barely talked to me after they saw it. My social life among New York academic types disappeared.”
Unable to raise the money for scripts he had written outside the genre, he wrote and directed The Hills Have Eyes (1977), about a road trip that goes wrong when an all-American family find themselves at the mercy of mutant desert savages.
Craven followed this with several TV movies and a handful of tepid films. After A Nightmare on Elm Street became a hit, he seemed to flounder. He made the TV movie Chiller (1985), about a man cryogenically frozen; the zombie voodoo horror The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and several episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Though not a box-office hit, The People Under the Stairs (1991) was powerful. It took the idea of an imprisoned race of creatures, bred in captivity by a tyrannical white couple, as his metaphor for America's poor, African-American underclass.
Craven's choices remained variable. The Eddie Murphy horror comedy Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) was undistinguished, but the fine suspense thriller Red Eye (2005), set largely on a plane, was positively Hitchcockian. And the director strayed far outside his comfort zone for the sentimental drama Music of the Heart (1999), which earned an Oscar nomination for Meryl Streep.