The Stuff of Nightmares: A Tribute to Wes Craven, by Reed Lackey

I was up late one night while we were visiting family out of town. I was alone, flipping through channels to find a movie to watch, when I stumbled across a sequence of images of a person sharpening knives and hammering metal brackets. A haunting lullaby ominously underscored the project and once the contraption was complete, a hand spread its fingers and revealed a terrifying knife-fingered glove. The title card read A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was eight years old.

Whether it was appropriate or intelligent for my adolescent self to watch that film is a discussion for another time. What I can say is that I have sat through many, many movies which have inspired, ignited and propelled my imagination. I have countless cherished experiences of sitting in a darkened theater with a large bucket of popcorn and being swept away in joy or in terror or in hope. But precious few of them rival the raw, viscerally frightening experience of stumbling upon those opening images and sitting through the film that followed them.

Now, double my age. I’m in high school. I love scary movies and have more than a few free evenings in my room alone each week when I can enjoy them. The problem is that by the mid-90s most of the good ones are several years old and I’ve seen them all at least twice. I had heard about a new one, though: one where a group of high school kids who all love scary movies suddenly start to realize that they’re living in one. I found it at the local video store, brought it home, and had one of the most fun times being scared I’d ever had.

That last film was, of course Scream, and the director responsible for both of those incredibly vivid home viewing experiences of mine passed away on Sunday. Wes Craven was such an icon in horror cinema history that it’s almost shocking to see how few films he’s actually directed. But his sensibilities as a director were so potent, his instinctual understanding of film craft so strong, that it would be difficult to imagine the modern horror genre without the influence of his vision.

Among Christians, the horror genre is often reviled as a waste of time at best and downright dangerous at worst. But the great storytellers in the realm of fear, in whose company I would without hesitation place Wes Craven, utilize subjects which frighten us to force us to face truths we would otherwise rather deny. Wes Craven was sometimes so good at holding up a mirror to mankind’s ugliest tendencies that at least one of his films, The Last House on the Left, I almost wish I’d never seen. Yet, in his two most noteworthy franchises – Elm Street and Scream – he managed to do something countless horror directors have tried to duplicate: he brought fear home.

With the character of Freddy Krueger, Craven created perhaps the most wholly original horror icon since the great literary figures of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A malevolent figure, evil to the depths of his soul, preys on innocent children in a small suburban town. But the truly profound component of Freddy’s character in my mind is the fact that his ultimate power – the power to manifest death and destruction through the world of nightmares – came as a result of mob vengeance. The parents of his victims killed him, and unknowingly created him. This terrifying concept speaks to a deeply rooted truth that you cannot destroy evil with more evil. I could be accused of imposing morality onto a mere “slasher” film, but as an imaginative deterrent to violent revenge, I can’t think of a better one.

With the Scream franchise, Wes Craven takes the fear to a new level, but examining why it works and what it all adds up to within the context of a narrative that abides by the same rules it’s examining. That kind of storytelling is as common as house flies these days, but I struggle to think of an earlier example than Scream that attempted it with such success. My experience of seeing Scream, perhaps because of how old I was when I saw it, gave me language to deconstruct a genre which I had previously only been able to enjoy. It deepened my understanding of why I enjoyed it, and subsequently made me enjoy it even more. As Craven himself once said, “In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers… But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears.”

The difficulty of hearing that such a reflective and influential voice in horror cinema is gone is that the body of work is now sealed. On the night he passed away, IMDB listed at least one project of his which was “in development” that has now been removed. But now, the body of work will exclusively inherit the voice of its craftsman. And where Wes Craven is concerned, that voice will whisper from the shadows, scream from the darkness, and echo through our nightmares.

But don’t you see, dear friends? Those voices make us afraid of the dark so that we’ll start learning to turn on a few lights.

Wes Craven, despite the darkness of his subjects, was an undeniably bright light in the world of cinema and he will be sorely missed. May his rest be far more peaceful than he allowed ours to be.