Geek-Cetera
Master of horror Wes Craven dies at 76
By Dave Gonzales 08.31.2015 :: 3:25PM EST 08.31.2015
@da7e
Horror film visionary Wes Craven died Sunday, August 30th at the age of 76 after a battle with brain cancer. Following Craven's career is a tour of highlights from cutting edge cinematic horror created in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
In the 1970s, the horror genre embraced the idea that the threat wasn't space monsters or foreigners, it was the people living among us. Craven tapped into this, in the 1972 horror with the rape-revenge film Last House on the Left, which he wrote directed and edited, and followed it up with the equally controversial and equally terrifying The Hills Have Eyes in 1977. The former saw a rape victim's parents murder the perpetrators of the crime, while the latter film was about cannibals that lived off tourists passing through.
Craven went on to create the iconic slasher of the next decade, Freddy Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. In that decade, mainstream horror blockbusters focused on an unstoppable killer that would hunt those who acted immorally. Actor Robert Englund's role as the dream-haunting child killer would be expanded upon in many sequels, eventually reaching the edge of self parody before being roped into Craven's first attempt at meta-textual horror with Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
The star of the first Nightmare, Heather Langenkamp, plays herself in the "real world" for 1994's New Nightmare where the story of Kruger must be told to lock a real evil into another Nightmare movie. It's a bit confusing, but all the heavy exposition is delivered by Craven who is playing himself, the writer/director and creator of Freddy Kruger: avatar for a great innocence-killing evil.
This meta-textual self reference would lead to Craven's third period only two years later. With the horror genre waning at the box office (New Nightmare made the least amount of any of the Nightmare movies after adjusting for inflation), Craven unleashed Scream, the Neve Campbell-starring franchise that winked at the idea of 80s slasher movies while simultaneously being a new take on them.
Characters in the four Scream movies would reference rules to being in horror movies and be vaguely aware of the plot points they were doomed to repeat. Scream 3 gets especially meta in a New Nightmare way setting the murders on the set of Stab 3, the fictional movie based on the events of the Scream franchise.
Besides setting horror film benchmarks, Craven managed to also throw in enjoyable thrillers like 2010's My Soul to Take, 2005's Red Eye, and – yes – even 1982's Swamp Thing movie. He was also a producer of quality content and a novelist. He was executive producing a few television projects at the time of his passing, including the MTV adaptation of Scream.
Freddy Kruger
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