Posts Tagged ‘Wes Craven’
Tuesday, October 31st, 2023
Every Halloween if I’m able to I like to write an essay on one of the great horror movies. This particular one is very important to me in part because it’s the specific movie that turned me into a horror fan. I’ve written about it before but here I try to get at both why I still love it and how it speaks to me about the world today. Hopefully I’ve done it justice. Happy Halloween, everyone.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET begins either in the past or a dream. A montage plays inside a rectangle within the larger frame, in which the hands of Fred Krueger (Robert Englund, SLASHED DREAMS) construct what will be a major element of his iconography: his four-bladed right-hand glove. Maybe the thought at the time was that a horror movie couldn’t just jump out with a crazy weapon like that – they had to establish it.
The scene fades to black as the title comes up, and the next shot, of the blades cutting through fabric, fills the screen. We’re definitely in a dream as Tina (Amanda Wyss, FORCE: FIVE) runs from a white void into a flooded, steaming, labyrinthine boiler room where she’s stalked by Freddy, who calls her name, cackles, makes his (new?) claws squeal against metal like fingers on a chalkboard. Right when he grabs her she wakes up, escaping into reality, but she finds four slashes in her nightgown. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Wyss, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, Robert Englund, Ronee Blakley, Wes Craven
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 9 Comments »
Friday, March 17th, 2023
As I mentioned in my SCREAM VI review and elsewhere, I consider Wes Craven’s SCREAM (1996) to be one of the great horror films of the ‘90s, and since then I have dutifully watched each of the sequels as they were released and enjoyed at least parts of them. SCREAM 2 seemed quite good in 1997, but my attachment to it has faded over the years. SCREAM 3 was disappointing in 2000, and hasn’t much grown on me. That seemed to be the end of it, and it seemed questionable when a SCREAM 4 came along 11 years later.
I remember I saw it at a preview screening. After the debacle of CURSED and the (enjoyable) mess of MY SOUL TO TAKE, I didn’t necessarily believe that Craven would be able to pull off the difficult task of a decade-plus-later part 4 that few had asked for. I also remember there was a guy sitting near the front talking to himself and the screen throughout the movie, being pretty annoying, but when it was over and he was leaving he made direct eye contact with me and said, “That was great!” with so much more enthusiasm than I had for the movie that I forgave him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam Brody, Aimee Teegarden, Alison Brie, Anna Paquin, Anthony Anderson, Britt Robertson, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Ehren Krueger, Emma Roberts, Erik Knudsen, Hayden Panettiere, Kevin Williamson, Kristen Bell, Marielle Jaffe, Mary McDonnell, meta-slashers, Neve Campbell, Paul Harris Boardman, Roger L. Jackson, Rory Culkin, slashers, Wes Craven
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2019
THE HILLS HAVE EYES is not my favorite Wes Craven movie, but in a certain sense it’s one of his purest. It has that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT maniac-college-professor vibe – another raw, seedy gut-punch of a drive-in movie layered with completely sincere themes and social commentary. And it’s a little more fantastical than LAST HOUSE, with less straight up degradation, so I don’t feel as ashamed for liking it.
Instead of a gang of criminals we have a literal tribe of modern primitives – the wicked spawn of Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, THE CANDY SNATCHERS), born “40 pounds and hairy as a monkey” in Nevada, mutated by nuclear tests and the nearby Air Force gunnery range, grew to adult size too fast, burned down his parents’ home, his dad split his face open with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die, but he survived in the hills and kidnapped some poor prostitute (Cordy Clark) “to raise a passel of wild kids” with. They wear animal parts and pieces of junk as trophies, and like the buzzards in the sky they stay above, keeping watch below, waiting to see what the highway brings them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dee Wallace, Don Peake, James Whitworth, Janus Blythe, Martin Speer, Michael Berryman, Peter Locke, Robert Burns, Robert Houston, Russ Grieve, Susan Lanier, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, November 21st, 2018
I don’t know why there was a Wes Craven movie that I didn’t bother to see in the theater and then didn’t bother to see on home video for over 20 years. Granted, everyone said it was terrible, and it seemed to be an Eddie Murphy comedy vehicle, not a real horror movie, and he started wearing fat suits and shit right around that time.
But these days you can’t take fresh Wes Craven movies for granted, so I decided the moment had come to watch VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN. The verdict: it’s not an unheralded gem. But it’s also not what I had pictured. It’s a mildly interesting failure.
Murphy (DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) plays Maximillian, the only survivor of a tribe of Egyptian vampire who “traveled south through Africa and over the Atlantic to a beautiful island hidden deep in the Bermuda Triangle,” where they lived for centuries before the vampire hunters found them. There’s a certain parallel to COMING TO AMERICA, because he’s this confident, exotic visitor from another culture, looking for a woman. In this case it’s a specific woman, Rita (Angela Bassett, PANTHER, BLACK PANTHER), a rookie NYPD detective who doesn’t know there are vampires, or that her dad was one, or that she’s the last descendent and only hope to revive the race. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allen Payne, Angela Bassett, Charlie Murphy, Eddie Murphy, Joanna Cassidy, John Witherspoon, Kadeem Hardison, Simbi Khali, vampires, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Tuesday, December 5th, 2017
These days most horror fans have heard of the concept of the Final Girl, whether or not they know where it comes from. But they at least know it’s the heroine of a horror movie, the one that’s left standing at the end, like Laurie in HALLOWEEN or Sally in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE or… the ones in the FRIDAY THE 13ths.
There are few as iconic, and almost none as pro-active, as A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET‘s Nancy Thompson, played by Heather Langenkamp. She’s the all-American girl next door (or across the street in Johnny Depp’s case), she gets terrorized by a supernatural dream killer, the adults don’t believe her, not even her overprotective cop father (John Saxon, ENTER THE DRAGON, THE GLOVE). But this is not a heroine who only manages to scrape it out and survive. Nancy gets shit done. She goes to the library and researches, figures out who Freddy is, uncovers his connection to her and her friends’ parents, teaches herself to build booby traps and comes up with a clever plan to go into the dreamworld and pull him out and try to kill him. And then she figures out the next step after that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fandom, Heather Langenkamp, horror documentary, Robert Englund, Wes Craven
Posted in Documentary, Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Monday, October 17th, 2016
“Your father is one sick mother, you know that? Actually, your mother’s one sick mother too.”
I like THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS because it’s Wes Craven’s feverish impressionist portrait of American economic inequality circa 1991. It lacks the precise metaphoric aim and pulp effectiveness of THEY LIVE, but it’s Craven’s version of that same type of genre-film-as-angry-shout-at-The-Man.
In fact, one of the villains is even credited as “The Man” (Everett McGill, UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY). He and “The Woman” (Wendy Robie, THE GLIMMER MAN) own a big old house inherited from their family, living off of the rent from the “half of the ghetto” that they own. One of their tenants is our 13 year old protagonist Poindexter Williams (Brandon Adams, GHOST IN THE MACHINE – and this kid looks really familiar for some reason), who goes by the nickname Fool after the Tarot card of some joker trapped between a fire and a cliff. That’s where he is now, because at his back is having to pay triple rent or get kicked out of the apartment so the Man and Woman can razed it and build condos, at his front is his sister’s friend Spencer (Ving Rhames, FORCE OF EXECUTION) trying to pressure him into breaking into the slum lords’ house to steal gold coins they can use to pay the rent and for mom’s cancer treatment. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.J. Langer, Brandon Adams, Everett McGill, Kelly Jo Minter, political horror, Redhead Kingpin, Sean Whalen, Ving Rhames, Wendy Robie, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 18 Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2015
SCREAM 2 is a slasher sequel that had a rare level of difficulty. The fringe nature of the subgenre normally allows part 2s some leeway as exploitational cash grabs, making room for everything from an okay continuation (HALLOWEEN II) to an experimental misstep (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE) to a perfection of the formula (FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2) to a re-inventing masterpiece-in-its-own-right (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2). But SCREAM was such a mainstream smash hit, and it created such a new interest in horror among non-horror people, that it had different expectations to live up to.
Also, its horror-movie-where-the-characters-know-about-horror-movies gimmick positioned it as sort of above horror movies, so they couldn’t get away with a normal sequel, they had to also say something about sequels. At the same time, it couldn’t really follow the template of the sequels it was supposed to be commenting on because it’s a series where the bad guys die and the good guys come back in sequels, so it’s a totally different type of story from most popular slashers.
As if all that wasn’t a tall enough hurdle to jump over, this was maybe the first movie production to get screwed by internet spoilers. A first draft of the script got leaked online, so they changed the twist ending during filming. (I bet Elise Neal was bummed she didn’t get to do her killer reveal speech.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Elise Neal, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jamie Kennedy, Jerry O'Connell, Kevin Williamson, Laurie Metcalf, Liev Schrieber, meta-slashers, Neve Campbell, Omar Epps, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Sunday, August 30th, 2015
Damn, I never see these things coming. I sat down tonight to work on some writing and stumbled across the news that a favorite director has passed away today.
Before he directed the dirty, disgusting LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, Wes Craven was a college professor, and I’ve alway thought that made sense. To listen to him in interviews and commentaries he always seemed like the most thoughtful and literary-minded of the horror directors. He was interested in primal fears and ancient myths and where those intersect with modern lives. By directing SCREAM (from the screenplay by Kevin Williamson) he accidentally kicked off the meta era of horror, but I always felt he’d gotten there earlier in his own WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, where he made the played-out no-longer-scary-ness of his own creation, Freddy Krueger, part of the mythology. In that one the ELM STREET movies were just that – movies – but they were also an important tool of humanity because they could keep at bay the primordial force that inspired the character. The real Freddy.
Think about this. In 1972 Craven directed LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which helped kick off the slasher cycle of horror. In 1984 he directed A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, which started the supernatural slasher movies, and the ’80s era of slasher movie icons. Basically, Freddy became the Hulk Hogan of horror. (Even down to the racism, ’cause he said something pretty foul in FREDDY VS. JASON.) And think of what the Elm Street series meant for special effects makeup, with all those gooey, one-upping dream sequences they came up with each time. That’s why I was always a Freddy guy. I was into all that latex and crazy transformations and shit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Wes Craven
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 37 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2013
After the massive success of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET in 1984, you’d think Wes Craven would’ve been sitting comfortably atop the horror director pyramid. Yet his directational followups were just the ’85 TV movie CHILLER, the ’86 silly robot movie DEADLY FRIEND, and a couple episodes of the new Twilight Zone. It wasn’t until ’88 that he did something he seemed passionate about, the pretty respected voodoo thriller THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW. By ’89, only five years after the birth of Freddy, he was already at that sad “time to come up with the next Freddy” stage you’d expect him to go through eventually. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Tesh, Mitch Pileggi, Peter Berg, Ted Raimi, TV is violent, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
The SCREAM movies had their day in the sun. They arrived at the end of 1996, during what seemed like a horror drought. “Horror” was so out of sorts that the characters just call it “scary movies.” The actors, while promoting it on talk shows, called it a “thriller.”
We all remember that, but I thought it would be interesting to look up the specifics. According to my research there were only six other scary movie thrillers released theatrically that year: CANDYMAN: FAREWELL TO THE FLESH, THE DENTIST, THE FRIGHTENERS, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE* and THINNER. DTV releases included TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS, CARNOSAUR 3: PRIMAL SPECIES and CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Anderson, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Kevin Williamson, meta-slashers, Neve Campbell, slashers, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 187 Comments »
