Remembering Wes Craven

Horror movies were off limits when I was a kid. That’s the way it should be. My mom, in her best intentions, always declared that watching a scary movie would definitely lead to nightmares the following night. I suffered from sleep paralysis as a kid, so nightmares were inevitable. But the connection between the two was profoundly influential on my relationship with horror. The idea that some piece of art could affect me in such a way that I physically suffered—how cool is that?

Sometimes it felt like I was the only kid in school who had such rules. All my friends watched horror films, and loved them, and I thought I was missing out. I realize now they likely were banned from them as well, but they all had older siblings who let them get away with it. I didn’t, so I was in the dark. Which only inflated my fascination. On the playground, movie monsters were my favorite topic of conversation. All the other kids told me about them, where they came from, the pain they inflicted on their victims. That’s how I first heard about the origins of Freddy Krueger.

Krueger was a janitor at the local school who preyed on children, so a group of parents locked him in the furnace and burned him alive. Now, he haunts their children’s dreams, and is so powerful he can murder them in the dream world. Only, the creepy predator aspect of his previous life was lost on my friends. They also made stuff up, as first graders are prone to do. For a while, I thought Freddy got his look not from the fire, but because one of the parents threw a cheese pizza in the furnace along with him. I didn’t know any better, since I had never actually seen the film. Freddy occupied the same folk-tale space as Bloody Mary or the Bogeyman, a space much more fitting for the character than a mere movie monster.

Back then I never gave much thought to the people who brought these things to life on film. What sadistic impulses drove someone to make a movie just to give people nightmares? Why would someone do that? I know now, that horror is inevitable. Freddy Krueger is the face we give our fear of sleep, because sleep is a place for fear. His primal power threatens us in a place where we have no control, and cannot avoid. It is the same fear that my mother used to keep me away from horror films in the first place. The fear of sleep turned into a fear of horror films. Wes Craven exploited both.

Craven already toyed with meta-narratives in New Nightmare, one of the best Freddy movies, but Scream was a deconstruction of the horror film as a genre that was not only a hit, but elevated horror after a drop in quality in the early 90s. Years of slasher flick sequels and a stagnation of ideas left horror stale and lifeless. Scream was totally new, and just fantastic. Don’t quote me on this, but it must be unprecedented in film history that the director who revitalized the genre was not some up-and-coming kid with a new take (plenty of those directors worked in horror), but one of the old guard, a filmmaker whose vision transcended the clichés and tropes that bogged down horror.

And the reason Scream did that is because Craven never just made horror films about monsters or killers, he made horror films about fear. Freddy on his own is a clown, but it’s where he strikes that terrifies us. Ghostface is just a kid in a mask, but it’s a kid in a mask who lives by the rules of a horror film. Even when goofy and campy, the idea of someone so enthralled with horror films to dress up and bring them to life is genuinely scary.

In the end, it takes a clown like Freddy to remind us that nightmares are just brain glitches. It takes Scream to remind us that scaring each other is fun, and to never take it too seriously. Wes Craven gave names and faces to the fears of my youth, and therefore relieved me of them. I enjoy horror films so much because I know that once the credits roll, the scares are over, and I can sleep at night.