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Hollywood Scare Specialist |
Mr. Wes Earl Craven
Horror Flicks Inc.
Sunrise Studios
Hollywood USA
Dear Wes:
It seems like an eternity and a half ago since you and I sat in an office at Embassy Films in Hollywood and you waxed so elegantly about "Swamp Thing," a picture you had just finished shooting for the serge-suited execs sitting in the office next door.
It now feels so long ago, that day in 1982, that I have this image of the two of us in knee pants sucking on Tootsie Rolls as we yakked. That's absurd of course, because you were 43 that day and I was . . . well, let's just say I was barely out of knee pants and still had freshly-wrinkled Tootsie wrappers in my hip pocket.
I'll never forget your enthusiasm and sincerity about wanting to be an accepted film maker after giving up your established field as a humanities professor. You had that determined, don't-dare-defy-me look in your eye and that quality in your voice that Ray Bradbury describes as "the sense of wonder." That's the quality within our souls that makes us excited about every new movie we see and every new book we pick up to read. It's that intangible something that never allows our imaginations to deaden, that always keeps us naive (in a wise kind of way, of course) and wide-eyed and searching for the next thing that will knock our socks off.
I had the feeling then you were gonna go somewhere, Wes, I really did. Even if "Swamp Thing" did turn out, a few weeks later, to be a disaster, with or without that scene where Adrienne Barbeau goes topless. You said you wouldn't hesitate to send a child to see "Swamp Thing" because you'd left out all the "gore and meanness," but I guess those are the things your fans were really looking for, since the film took a pretty bad beating. You described "Swamp Thing" as your "reformation," but clearly you were going to move away from comic-book movies and go back to the horror genre. Anyway, using the word "reformation" gave you a kind of class I'd never associated with horror-movie directors before.
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You had some ideals then about the genre, which didn't surprise me knowing you held a master's degree in writing and a philosophy degree from Johns Hopkins University. "The best horror films," you told me, "are evocative rather than explicit," but then you added that you were fully aware of commercial necessities and clearly put your love for making movies above any love of art. You added, "When tensions and unbearable thoughts go to work in the subconscious, they're not likely to be expressed in waking society. A dream will release those tensions and so will a good horror film."
Finally, you remarked: "You can build a special case for or against horror films, but you have to admit one thing: there's something very compelling and special about them. And I want to continue to make my share of contributions."
Even though you weren't having an easy time of it then, because you still had a lot to learn about a business that sucks talent up and spits it out, you were true to your word. You stayed in the field of horror movies and you did better than just make the most of it. I also know you put everything you had into your projects and you went broke a couple of times -- lost everything you had gained, just to get a movie made. I'd call that determination.
And, I want you to know, I still haven't forgotten how hard it had been for you in the beginning to get established, and the pain of it was clearly in your voice that day as you told me about the hardships of your first movie.
You'd started out in the early '70s by making a $90,000 exploitation film called "The Last House on the Left," and even you admitted to me that long-ago day it'd been a "crude exercise" in violence and bloodletting that featured the screen's "first" chainsaw massacre, the rape of a virgin, several knife and gunshot wounds, and one straightout castration. (Your partner in this venture, Sean Cunningham, went on to make the first "Friday the 13th" film and created the "House" series. Yeah, he too cut a niche for himself in the pantheon of horror directors, but not the kind of niche you were planning to cut.)
Robin Wood, the film critic for Film Comment, wrote some erudite things about your movie "Last House on the Left" and one critic compared it to Ingmar Bergman's "Virgin Spring," but the mainstream film community hated it and the bosses turned against you, even when you wanted to make your version of Hansel and Gretel. I guess there's no accounting for taste in the world of financing.
So you'd gone off on your own, back to the only genre they would accept you in, the horror film, and you'd ground out "The Hills Have Eyes" outside Victorville in the Mojave Desert. This time your movie seemed to tick off the critics and the more sensitive aesthetes with its scenes of a husband being crucified and burned alive, a caveman drinking canary blood, and a man's skull being cleaved open by a crowbar.
But then at the London Film Festival producer Max Keller had eyes that saw your talent in a more respecting light. He gave you the dough to make a TV movie "A Stranger in the House" and then money to make a theatrical feature, "Deadly Blessing." That latter title included among its Craven-inspired grotesqueries a spider crawling into a young woman's open mouth and a rattlesnake slithering up a woman's bare leg. These skin-creeping visuals were more in keeping with what your fans were coming to expect of you. Blood-drenched ferocity was becoming your stock in trade. And "Swamp Thing" was fading away faster than ever. Like a bad dream, maybe.
Barbeau without a brassierre seemed an eccentric visual vagary by 1984 when you created the first film in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, which earned $26 mill off a modest $9.2 mill budget. You only made two out of the seven pictures -- you finished what you had started in a brilliant way. And by the way, I'd like to tell my readers right here that Freddy Krueger was the name of a bully you were harassed by when you were going to grammar school in Cleveland, proving that revenge can be sweeter than you ever thought.
And then with what was to become known as "The Scream Team" you turned Kevin Williamson's script for an original script, "Scream," into a major money-maker as producer-director. Hmm, you saw a return of $103 million on the original $15 million investment. Not too shabby. And since then you've spawned (pardon the unintended link back to "Swamp Thing") two sequels that were box-office hits. "Scream 2," just to remind you, brought in $33 mill on its first three-day weekend, more than making back its $23-million cost at the starting gate.
And I was really impressed just recently when "Scream 3" garnered at least $35 mill in its premiere three-day weekend. You've got to be one of the most successful and dedicated horror-movie-making mavens that Hollywood has ever seen.
(Some day you're going to have to write and tell me how this has affected your personality and your view of life. I get the impression from reading about you in the fan mags that you still have that "sense of wonder" I mentioned. You told someone recently that you hope you never have to work for a living. You're having too much fun making movies. Sounds like you haven't changed that much since that day we met in '82.)
Getting more than a hundred E-mail letters a day, rolling in all that dough and success, I got curious, Wes, how you had pulled this coup off. And I got to thinking how you had first begun to explore horror from a unique perspective with the way you decided to end the Freddy Krueger series in 1994 with "Wes Craven's New Nightmare." (I don't know how you convinced producers to put your name ahead of the title, but Frank Capra would have been proud of you.) It was really an ingenious movie, and my theory is, you tapped into a cinema-force that would set you on that trail to fame, riches and E-mail abundance.
Among the myriad sequels that have been made of popular horror films, "New Nightmare" ranks as one of the most original (and hence of great importance to the genre). It dares to expand the horizon of the earlier "Elm Street" films and explore more unexplored territory than any horror series, no matter how high the numbers in their titles climbed.
Freddy Krueger is back for the last time in a movie with the actors and behind-the-scene personnel from the series portraying themselves. Wes Craven (playing himself) is writing a new Krueger script at his real home in L.A. when his star Heather Langenkamp (played by Heather Langenkamp) is plagued by oddball dreams and other supernormal incidents punctuated by a series of earthquakes. Meanwhile, Robert Englund (playing Robert Englund) begins painting on canvas macabre scenes that blend death symbolism with images of Freddy Krueger (played by Freddy Krueger, otherwise known by his alter-ego identity, Robert Englund).
In a brilliant stroke, Wes, you made the spirit of Krueger an evil force that could only be laid to rest if you produced one final "Elm Street" flick. You even had actor John Saxon and New Line producer Robert Shaye appear as themselves to give "New Nightmare" a heightened sense of Hollywood reality. Instead of focusing heavily on the kind of bloody murders that had earmarked all the earlier films in the Freddy Krueger series, you daringly and wisely concentrated on Langenkamp's psychological trauma. You really tried to get into the psyches of Langenkamp and poor confused Englund as he struggled with his evil other-identity. And only then, once the people were vivid and convincing and flesh-and-blood people, did you finally climaxing the film with an apocalyptic duel in Krueger's underground netherworld.
This break-through film opened you up to greater possibilities, apparently, about the blurred line between movie reality and real-life reality. Because with "Scream" you have the time of your life going ever deeper into the "New Nightmare" realm, helped along by newcomer Williamson's satirical script of the slasher genre. Most of the characters, instead of existing in a vacuum where other movies never existed, were hip to the existence of classic horror films and the cliches and stereotypes that drive the genre. As one of the characters says in "Scream," "It's all one great big movie." Your own life, Wes, must be one great big movie. Be careful when you shaving in front of the mirror and you have the urge to shout "I want director's cut!"
You and Williamson established the three rules a character in a slasher-movie should always follow: (1) Never have sex. (2) Never drink or take drugs. And (3) never dumbly say, "I'll be right back." If he or she doesn't, a horrible death, usually by plunging butcher knife, is in store. Williamson's plot poked fun at the way horror movies are plotted, how characters behave, and how endings have to climax, and you directed it all with a tongue-in-cheek savvy that totally revitalized this overworked and subversive subgenre.
You continued to poke fun at yourself and your world of movies in "Scream 2" when teenagers gather in a movie theater to see the premiere of a new film, "Stab," which is an adaptation of "The Woodsboro Murders," a book about what happened in the first "Scream." That's three tiers of movie-within-movie that you textured. When the killer strikes in the very audience watching the premiere, one of his female victims dies on the stage in front of the screaming teenagers, the film's image of the masked killer projected on her face and body as she collapses in a pool of blood. You also established the three rules for a slasher sequel: (1) the body count has to be higher, (2) the death scenes have to be more elaborate and (3) there has to be more blood and gore--"carnage candy."
I'm sure it bothers you, being a man with a philosophy degree, making movies that many people find reprehensible and repugnant. You once called it "uncomfortable socially" to be a director of movies some people absolutely refuse to watch. Given your educational background, it must hurt more than a little to hear this.
So I think I understand why you wanted to address that issue directly in "Scream 2" during the classroom sequence where several student characters discuss the effect violent movies have on them. They talk about the ramifications of audiences seeing these terrible acts you depict so graphically and uncompromisingly . . . so in a most unusual manner your own movie is questioning the dubiousness its own values in an articulate and honest way. Suddenly, what seemed like a simple entertainment on the surface isn't simple at all. And it ends up going somewhere other horror movies never have gone before.
You continued with this self-spoofery in "Scream 3" by setting your film at Sunrise Studios in Hollywood, where "Stab 2" is in production, and where murder sites from "Scream" (based on accounts taken from "The Woodsboro Murders") have been re-created on soundstages. Remembering how all the characters had played themselves in "New Nightmares," you brought in low-budget schlockmeister Roger Corman to play a schlockmeister, and you cast Lance Henriksen, fresh from his run on Chris Carter's "Millennium" TV series, to play the sleazy producer of the "Stab" series. And you established the ultimate rule when you make a trilogy.
In the third film, "all bets are off."
And that, Wes, is what makes you and your movies so special. When "all bets are off," audiences know they are in for the ultimate in thrills and satiric subtexts.
You're like a pizza driver I know. You deliver and you deliver with a product that's piping hot.
Which explains why you've made enough money by now to open your own pizza parlor -- maybe even build your own version of the Taj Mahal in the Hollywood, where the hills have ayes for you..
Here's hoping you have a horrific future
doing what you do best and don't get carried away making too
many Meryl Streep musicals,
John Stanley
© 2000 by John Stanley
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