![]() ![]() It sounds preposterous, but the postmodern genre riffs are a smart vehicle for a more serious message about society’s need to tell ourselves these tales of terror – and what happens when we stop! ![]() But the groundwork for Scream was laid in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), in which the makers of the Freddy Krueger films are terrorised by their own creation after cancelling further sequels. In 1996, he slyly deconstructed well-worn horror tropes in Scream, inspiring a slew of lesser flicks that attempted to repeat his trick of blending self-referentiality with genuine scares. No surprise that, alongside his genre films, Craven also directed Music of the Heart (1999), a moving biopic of Roberta Guaspari, a music teacher celebrated for her pioneering work in Harlem, which earned Oscar nominations for best original song (Diane Warren) and best actress (Meryl Streep).Ĭraven was always ahead of the curve. Similarly, in 1991’s The People Under the Stairs (on the set of which I saw first-hand how much care Craven took of his young cast), the gothic horror masks a satirical tale of gentrification, greed and class conflict. In The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which took inspiration from the legend of Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, the tables of “savagery” and “civilisation” are turned when a suburban family meet their mirror-image match while touring across the deserts of Nevada. Whatever their nightmarish trappings, all of Craven’s finest works can be read as down-to-earth allegories, often dealing with failing families and social inequality. View image in fullscreen Meryl Streep as Roberta Guaspari in Music of the Heart (1999). But he was a monster with a mission – an embodiment of the sins of guilty parents, coming back to haunt their innocent children. Like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees before him, Freddy entered modern horror’s hall of fame. These were movies in which amorphous fears were given physical form – none more viscerally than in Freddy’s eerie combination of Struwwelpeter and the long-legged scissor man. Publicised with the tagline “If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming she won’t wake up at all”, the film marked what director Brian Yuzna called the zenith of “plastic reality” – a new wave of popular surrealist horror that owed a debt to the works of David Cronenberg and Luis Buñuel, and paved the way for Yuzna’s own 1989 horror masterpiece, Society. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), he introduced the world to the spectre of Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund) – a pizza-faced, razor-clawed dream demon stalking the children of Springwood, Ohio through their sleep. This year, Craven’s most famous creation celebrates its 40th anniversary. ‘When Last House first ran in the US, people actually stormed the projection booths, trying to get to the print and destroy it,’ Craven told me Each time, his message was the same: that horror films were not bad for people, but could be a positive force in a world filled with fear. ![]() And I want to help out, if I can.” Over the next quarter century I would interview him regularly for newspapers, radio programmes and TV documentaries. I was just a hopeful freelancer with little chance of publication, and when I asked him why he would give me an hour of his time, he smiled and said: “Well, you seem keen. I first met Craven in 1989, when I interviewed him in LA about his new electro-themed film Shocker.
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