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Drew Barrymore in Wes Craven’s 1996 comeback, Scream.
Drew Barrymore in Wes Craven’s 1996 comeback, Scream. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock
Drew Barrymore in Wes Craven’s 1996 comeback, Scream. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock

Wes Craven: professional scaremonger who rewrote his own horror rules

This article is more than 8 years old

Famous for his teen-slashers and gory, humour-laden films, Wes Craven has left this earth having set – then revised – horror film convention

Take any of the most famous conversations from the first three Scream movies – ones where a sycophantic movie geek explains the “rules” of the slasher genre – and they feel very much like the voice of a film-maker who has “seen it all before”.

It says something of the ethos of professional scaremonger Wes Craven that he directed the Scream films, not as a fresh-blooded video store-raised hotshot – a Quentin Tarantino or a Kevin Smith – but as a veteran who once made the very kind of genre films he was deconstructing.

Compare the smug self-referential nature of the Scream movies (Craven directed four in total) to his first film, 1972’s The Last House on the Left, and the differences are stark. Unlike Scream there is not a fleck of joy to be had in his sickeningly realistic debut feature, the story of a mother and father’s revenge against people who raped and murdered their daughter, brought to life with almost unbearable amounts of tension.

It was a bat-out-of-hell kickstart to his career, horridly impressive as a mood piece and influential in pushing the envelope by challenging censors around the world to define boundaries on depictions of sexual violence.

Craven was an innovator who feasted on breaking down barriers – between modern and postmodern, reality and dreamscapes, audience expectations and comfort zones.

His most iconic character – the splotchy-skinned, sharp-fingered freak Freddy Krueger – was a key proponent in the “rubber reality” horror films of the 80s, which blended characters’ worlds without allowing them to understand the extent to which their perceptions crossed over into reality. Painting landscapes of grotesque fantasy surrealism, it was probably inevitable that the sequels and spinoffs to 1982’s A Nightmare on Elm Street became increasingly ludicrous and special effects-heavy.

Wes Craven, master of Hollywood horror. Link to video Guardian

Craven co-wrote Elm Street III and, after the franchise floundered about in sequel land (with five follow-ups), returned to it a decade later, in 1994, with a revisionist film that poked fun at his own bastardised creation: the terrific New Nightmare. With a complex film-within-a-film structure, the plot is a coil of moments that give the effect of a movie folding in on itself – a lead-in to the “metafilm” horror pics that Craven would continue to expand in the Scream franchise.

The director, who appears in New Nightmare as himself, at one point says “the only way to stop Freddy is to make another movie”. It was as if Craven felt the only way to restore his reputation was to detonate the legacy of his most famous work. He will be remembered for an unusual, gut-busting kind of bravado.

Perhaps the film-maker felt burdened or restricted by his association with horror, thus his oeuvre-extending work such as directing 1999’s Meryl Streep drama Music of the Heart and a segment in 2007’s Paris, je t’aime. But dark and twisted scary movies were his forte, and Craven reminded us time and time again how varied horror and thrillers can be; how large a sandpit scary movies are to play with.

The tone of his aeroplane-set 2005 thriller Red Eye, which for most of its running time revolved around a handful of characters in a confined space, belongs to a very different universe than his more off-the-wall films, such as the deranged carnage candy of his 1977 cult classic The Hills Have Eyes, featuring a family of freaky cannibals.

The trailer for The Hills Have Eyes includes a hammy voiceover man delivering the line: “They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first.” Maybe those words also correspond to Craven’s legacy: he predicted where audiences wanted to go, then led them somewhere else.

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