RIP Wes.

It was almost like a sporting rivalry. Who's better Wes Craven or John Carpenter? This was a question that horror fans asked each other for years. For the record it has to be Carpenter but while the "master" hasn't made a truly great movie since In the Mouth of Madness (1994) Craven managed several hits with the Scream franchise and worked with Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart.

But we'll come back to those. Wes Craven was a talented film maker with a very dark sense of humour. For all his talent though he's made, by my count, one essential movie: A Nightmare on Elm Street. Since then he's made some really solid movies and some really terrible ones. For every Scream (I like all of them) there's a My Soul to Take. For every New Nightmare there's a Cursed.

What he did do was pave the way for other film makers to play in the horror yard he helped build.

In 1972 he directed The Last House on the Left which was also produced by Friday the 13th creator Sean S. Cunningham. Steve Miner also worked on the project. With that trio involved it was always going to be nasty. However, I felt it was just exploitation and it repulsed me. I'm sure that's what they were going for and they succeeded admirably. However, the movie didn't once hint at the talent within Craven. For me, it detracts from a decent legacy... I'm sure the man himself would disagree. People still cite the movie as hugely influential and it was remade in 2009 with Craven and Cunningham producing.

In 1977 he fared better with The Hills Have Eyes. The idea is similar to The Last House on the Left. Normal people forced to fight for their lives, this time against mutant cave dwellers. It started a kind of "love letter" relationship between Sam Raimi and Wes Craven. Raimi saw The Hills Have Eyes and loved it so much he put a poster of it in the basement in his classic The Evil Dead. Craven returned the favour in A Nightmare on Elm Street when we saw The Evil Dead on television in that movie. Eagle eyed viewers of The Evil Dead 2 will find Freddy's glove hanging over the door of the tool shed...

After "Hills" he lumbered from one bad project to the next. It's a pretty terrible list of movies actually: Deadly Blessing, Swamp Thing, Invitation to Hell and an ill advised sequel to The Hills Have Eyes. However it was at this point that he managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat... and what a rabbit. Craven had read about this kid who was convinced he would fall victim to whatever was chasing him in his dreams. When the kid finally did fall asleep, he never woke up. He apparently died screaming. Craven, like any of us was deeply upset by this story. Unlike any of us he decided to make a movie based around the concept.

The first time I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street I was completely absorbed. Terrified but unable to take my eyes off the screen. Suffice to say, I LOVED the movie (and still do). There's just so many fucking amazing visuals in it... too many to mention here. Freddy himself is pure genius. A nasty irredeemable bastard who is going to get you and he genuinely is the stuff of nightmares. It feels like a cross between Halloween and Phantasm. It has that Halloween slasher feel (though isn't quite as scary) and it has a lot of the fuckeduppedness of Phantasm (again not quite as effective) However when you combine the two and add Freddy Krueger to the recipie, it is every bit as effective.

The success of the movie basically built New Line Cinema and gave Johnny Depp a decent start. It also became its own animal as Freddy Krueger became a household name and the biggest of all the horror movie icons. While Freddy became the new rock n' roll, his creator's career seemed stuck. His next picture would be the well meaning but ultimately forgettable Deadly Friend. Okay, we'll never forget that basketball scene but by and large, it's a poor enough movie.

Wes wasn't really happy with the sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street so he wrote part three. You could tell. It's a really fun horror movie and solidified Freddy as the new dog in the yard. Jason and Michael were starting to feel very old hat (pun intended). He'd stay away from the franchise until the New Nightmare. More on that later.

1988 saw him direct The Serpent and the Rainbow. Again, it's a well meaning attempt but ultimately must go down as a failure. And Shocker, while full of interesting ideas was an attempt to bring forth the new Freddy... It failed. 1991 saw him come back to form with the unusual but rather good "People Under the Stairs". Again, Craven was moved by the true events of a couple who kept their kids locked in a basement. His movie, while horrific is also riddled with darkly comic moments and showed Craven's use of humour which would become a bigger part of his career. "People" made a few quid but it also showed how good he could be. He proved it again in with his next flick...

In 1994 Wes Craven went back to the Freddy well. To his credit though, this was no cash grab. Craven was happy with the success of the "Nightmare" franchise but less happy with what Freddy had become. He was, for all intents and purpsoes, a joke. This had to change. Craven wrote and directed The New Nightmare and with this movie he showed he had a lot left in the tank. First up, Freddy needed to be scary again. Now, given that Freddy had his own lunch boxes by now, this was a big ask. However, Craven writes Freddy as a menacing bloodthirsty nightmare in the movie and uses the pop culture aspect that made him so famous as the "energy" that ultimately brings him to life. It's a genius concept, executed to perfection by Craven. He goes after the actors from previous movies in the franchise and Craven himself is in the movie explaining just what is going on... Craven is also smart enough to know that humour is expected in these movies now but rather than have Freddy deliver yet another awful pun, he straight up pokes fun at previous sequels. Poking fun at horrors would become a nice little earner for Craven but I digress, despite being a truly fantastic movie Wes Craven's New Nightmare made fuck all money. He followed it up with the risible Eddie Murphy vehicle, Vampire In Brooklyn. He needed a hit. It didn't seem like it was going to come. A lesser man may have thrown in the towel...

Make no mistake about it, Scream was a fucking sensation when it hit. It was cool, it was scary, it was funny and it brought horror movies to a whole new audience of people who'd usually never watch them. Scream was a very simple concept. A teenage "whodunnit" set in a small town. You've all seen the movie, you don't need me to remind you of how much fun it is. What I will do is tell you about my experience of it when I went to see it on preview night way back in 1996. Cinema was half full. I was waiting for my favourite horrors to get a mention. They all did with Halloween's amazing score being used to excellent effect in the last act. I had to bite my hand so as not to scream the answer to the question that sealed Drew Barrymore's fate and over all I had a hell of a time.

Craven and his writer Kevin Williamson didn't back away from the big issues either. "Movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos creative" is a fucking superb line. The movie was a deserved success and launched a four movie franchise. Scream 2 was even more successful and was for me an improvement on the original. Parts three and four also had their moments but, as you'd expect, the magic dissipates with the later installments. That's okay though. All of these movies know what they are and they aren't ashamed. Nor should they be. Scream kept horror alive and Craven was deservedly proud of his creation.

Craven and Kevin Williamson teamed up again for what we all expected would be a fantastic horror. It was a werewolf movie called Cursed. It proved, if nothing else, that Craven was just as capable of soiling the nest as he was of building it. Cursed is a fucking awful movie. One hilarious gag in the final minutes is not enough to save it. How this creative team put this garbage together is beyond me, but they did and it can't be erased. Lost its bollocks too!

Moving on. On the back of his Scream success Wes Craven got to make a movie with Meryl Streep. When Madonna backed out of Music of the Heart (something the studio must have been happy about) Streep stepped in. Suddenly Craven was working with the world's best actor. The movie itself is the usual "kids in shit neighbourhood have awesome teacher" and it's fine but the point here is, Wes "last house on the left" Craven was working with Meryl "better than everyone" Streep. If that's not a bucket list moment for a director I don't know what is.

Soon after he put together the serviceable thriller Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. The movies best moments are, predictably enough, on the Red Eye but the last act falls into the absurd and very nearly undoes all of the good work of the previous hour. Still Red Eye must go down as a success. If you haven't seen it, I won't ruin it. Worth a look.

His last two movies that had him behind a camera were My Soul to Take and Scream 4. My Soul to Take is such a terrible movie that I simply refuse to give it anymore air by talking about it. Scream 4 on the other hand is a much more worthy epitaph for this man. It's rock solid fun. It flirts with genius and has some great moments... This for me, sums the man's career up.

Cheers,

G.