Now, I was born in 1983, and thus I'm JUST young enough that I wasn't comprehending the majority of the period when Freddy Krueger ruled the Earth. I mean, I knew who he was. It was hard not to. The guy's face was everywhere; on posters, album covers, t-shirts, TV ads, even music videos. And just like Jason Voorhees, his omnipresent...um...presence fascinated me to no end. Well, sometime in 1991 that curiosity got the better of me and I caught the beginning of Nightmare on Elm Street 4 on TBS.
Note that I said beginning, because I didn't make it very far. Within the first 20 minutes, one of the movie's characters wakes up in in a junkyard of cars. He sees the corpse of Freddy Krueger reanimating, and then there's this long lead-in shot of the dude's shadow first before a gravely voice says "You shouldn't have buried me. I'm not dead." And that was all the longer I made it into The Dream Master, not to be seen in its entirety until I bought the whole series blind eight years later. But that night, and many nights thereafter, the guy with that big, bad glove cropped up in my nightmares, just as I'm sure he did for many people in my age bracket.
Time for another blanket statement: if it were ONLY the creation of Freddy Krueger, one of the preeminent Unholy Trinity of modern horror villains, Wes Craven would be thought of as one of the big-time luminaries of the horror genre. But when you factor in the guy's whole career, spanning over three decades of screams, nightmares and stage blood, I believe that he occupies a spot on the Mount Rushmore of horror along with John Carpenter, Vincent Price and a toss-up between Terrence Fisher and Dario Argento. Classically educated, possessing of a highly literary mind and with a big-time love of stage blood, it's hard to argue with the dude's filmography.
Read off the highlights, his movies are like a who's who of horror movies throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Swamp Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street, People Under the Stairs, Scream...and those are in chronological order, off the top of my head. He was directly in the thick of two of horror's great revivals, in the prime of the '80s slasher boom with the original NOES film and ushering in the more self-aware age with Scream. After one "WTF?" sequel to his signature creation, he co-wrote the script for Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors - for my money, one of the best MOVIES of all time. Yeah, I said it. Along the way, he branched out into other genres, trying his hand with basic thrillers (the woefully underrated Red Eye, featuring Cillian Murphy in a performance that makes me wish that Craven himself had been more directly involved in the Nightmare remake and suggested this dude as Robert Englund's replacement), drama (57 Violins) and comedy-horror (the Eddie Murphy vehicle Vampire in Brooklyn).
That's a lot of italicized words in one paragraph, isn't it?
And those were just the greatest hits. Every horror fan has their favorite big-time Craven movie, but it's when we get into the other stuff that things get really fun. Because some of Craven's misfires were just as fun - sometimes for the right reasons, and sometimes for the wrong ones. It's 1985, a mere one year after the release of Nightmare on Elm Street, and how does he follow this up? Why, with a movie about a teenage robotics wizard using machines to revive his dead girlfriend, of course. Then, in the wake of Red Eye, the next project is a movie where we get to see Jesse Eisenburg performing pro wrestling moves on his high school bully and a truly Wayne's World-esque "Mega Happy Ending."
And there's one movie that I have intentionally left out of this little bit of sentimentality until now. Folks, if you haven't seen The Serpent and the Rainbow, Joe Bob says check it out. For my money, this is the single scariest zombie movie of all time. It's not about post-apocalyptic settings, it's not about an annoying bunch of survivors, and it contains no mentions of "brain-eating." This movie is as REAL as it gets, an adaptation of Wade Davis' (nonfiction) book about a trip to an underground section of Haiti where the art of reanimating corpses with potions and chemicals is a way of life. And that scene where Bill Pullman gets buried alive while under a paralyzing spell with a tarantula crawling around in the casket with him...Jesus.
I'll close this out by stating that Craven was also known as an insanely nice, accommodating person to both horror fans and the press. A frequent guest of horror conventions, a proud ambassador for horror every time he spoke, and someone who is just a joy to listen to in the various documentaries and audio commentaries that he has been a part of. And while there are directors who I technically like better, Wes Craven's movies have been playing in the cineplex of my life for 20 years.
RIP, Mr. Craven. Screams and nightmares.
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