Earlier this month, the nice people at the Scream Factory label sent me their new Blu-rays of Wes Craven’s Shocker and The People Under The Stairs, and I was surprised that Craven didn’t appear on any of the newly produced supplements. He was always closely involved in the special editions of his movies.
Tonight, we all found out the reason for his absence when it was announced that the horror auteur died of brain cancer at his Los Angeles home. He was 76 years old.
As I wrote last fall when TIFF Cinematheque screened eight of Craven’s films in a retrospective called Wes Craven: Dreams, Screams And Nightmares, Craven was a beloved figure in the genre, if an inconsistent filmmaker: he was a stylist forever in search of the right material.
He found success in a number of different modes, starting by turning Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring into the grindhouse revenge thriller, The Last House On The Left, which built its marketing campaign on the savagery of its violence. (It was not false advertising.)
With the queasy dreamscapes of A Nightmare On Elm Street (and its meta-sequel Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), the self-reflexive carnage of Scream (and the engaging Scream 2) and the clockwork suspense of Red Eye, Craven established a reputation as a skilled manipulator of the genre.
And if duds like Deadly Blessing, Deadly Friend, Shocker and My Soul To Take served to tarnish his reputation, fans could always point to the demented Reagan-era satire of The People Under The Stairs or the problematic but undeniably effective psychological horror of The Serpent And The Rainbow to argue that studio interference was Craven’s biggest stumbling block.
And sometimes that was even true, as was the case with the werewolf movie Cursed, which was meant to reunite him with Scream writer Kevin Williamson. The cut eventually released into theatres and on disc bears very little relation to the movie they set out to make.
Craven himself occasionally tried to shake things up, and in 1999 he directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination in the Miramax docudrama Music Of The Heart. It suggests Craven could have enjoyed a decent career as a director for hire, making prestige pictures for Harvey Weinstein, so long as he was willing to make another Scream movie when Harvey’s brother Bob came calling.
I would like to think his heart was always in horror, though. Even when his movies didn’t work, you could tell how much fun he was having making them. Which reminds me: maybe it’s time to give Shocker another chance.
