Cover

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1: Total Immersion

2: Young Nightmares

3: Big City, Big Stress

4: The Last House on the Left

5: Kind of Monsters

6: Mixed Blessings

7: Godzilla Goes to Paris

8: More Shockers

9: The People under the Stairs

10: Scream

11: Scream 2 and Beyond

12: Cursed, but Not Entirely

13: Alive and Not Kicking

Notes

Resources

Photo Credits

Index

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Photo credits appear on page 253 and constitute an extension of the copyright page.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Wooley, John.
Wes Craven : the man and his nightmares / John Wooley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-49750-0 (cloth : alk. paper); ISBN 978-1-118-01273-4 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-01274-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-01275-8 (ebk.)
1. Craven, Wes—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.C72W66 2011
791.43′0233′092—dc22
2010054061

For Bill Bernhardt, with friendship and gratitude, equally deep

Acknowledgments

My thanks to my agent, Jim Fitzgerald, for suggesting that I do this book and then following up in a big way; Rachele Vaughan, the best researcher anyone could ever want; James Vance, a sure-handed navigator if there ever was one; and Joey Hambrick, who kept those movies coming. Once the manuscript arrived at the publisher, I was fortunate to have my editor, Thomas W. Miller; senior editorial assistant Jorge Amaral; and senior production editor Lisa Burstiner waiting at that end to guide this book down the track and across the finish line. I am indebted and grateful to them.

Dollie Banner at Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store in New York City was unfailingly cheerful and helpful, a swell combination, and that also goes for Tony Timpone, my editor at Fangoria for many years, and one of the great ones.

Many other kind folks helped this work—and me—in various ways. They include William Bernhardt, Carly Feingold, Jeff Lenburg, Michael H. Price, Suzanne and Michael Wallis, Paul McSpadden, John McMahan, J. Buck Millaway, Jerry Wythe, Clay Norvell, Chris and Sean Stefanic, Lisa and Vern Stefanic, Barry Friedman, Dylan Greenwood, Dennis King, Emily Johnson, Michael Smith, Ron Wolfe, and my sons, Jonathan and Steven. I must also acknowledge the top-notch research staff, as well as the facilities, at the Tulsa City-County Library and the Tulsa World newspaper, my old stomping ground.

Thanks, Janis, for—among many other things—your patience, tolerance, and understanding.

Finally, the obvious: my gratitude to Wes Craven, not only for his graciousness in consenting to be interviewed for this book, but also for giving all of us a body of work so rich, so entertaining, and so good. He may not have wanted to be a horror director, but he’s certainly done a damn fine job of it.

Prologue

It's the early seventies, and beautiful young Mari is celebrating her seventeenth birthday by heading out to see her favorite rock band, pausing to talk to her relatively hip upper-middle-class parents just long enough to have a brief discussion concerning no-bra hippie freedom versus the old square ways of dealing with bosoms. Before Mari leaves for the concert, the two adults gift her with a peace-sign necklace and express some minor reservations about the group she's going to see—Bloodlust—and the dodgy part of the city where the band is playing. “I thought you were supposed to be the love generation,” says Mom, referring to the band's moniker. Mari, being teenage and bulletproof, blows off their concerns.

As it turns out, however, her folks have every reason to worry. After Mari meets her streetwise friend Phyllis and the scene changes from pastoral and woodsy to urban and gritty, forces are set in motion that will lead to protracted suffering and death.

The two girls decide that they'd like to score some pot for the concert, so Phyllis unwisely addresses a twitchy young man outside an apartment building, who claims he has some primo Colombian right inside for the amazing price of twenty bucks an ounce. Drawn by the prospects of a great dope deal, the two girls follow him inside, where they instead find a pair of recently escaped hard-core criminals (“two convicted murderers, dope pushers, and rapists,” according to a radio broadcast) and their female accomplice—who, in the course of helping the others with their getaway, has kicked a German shepherd to death.

Clearly, the girls are in major-league trouble. Things quickly turn dark and serious, with little let-up. Ultimately, the scene moves from the apartment to the woods, where Mari and Phyllis frolicked just hours earlier. Now they are bearing the brunt of full-frontal assaults, forced to perform scatological, violent, and sexual acts. And it gets worse.

One of the girls, so close to escaping that she can hear the traffic on the highway just outside the woods, is instead hacked to death with a big knife, as another member of the party begins to work the other teen over with a switchblade.

At that point, New York Times critic Howard Thompson left his seat, exited the movie house, and ankled back to the newsroom to write his review. He began by calling the feature he'd just—partially—seen “a thing (as opposed to a film)” and ended the two-paragraph notice with a couple of scalding sentences: “The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven. It's at the Penthouse Theater, for anyone interested in paying to see repulsive people and human agony.”

Had Mr. Thompson stayed to the end credits, he would have seen plenty more, including an ugly rape scene, a protracted death-by-chainsaw sequence, and the oral amputation of some male genitalia. Granted, the last two aren't shown in great detail, but that hardly makes them any less effective.

The film, of course, was the original The Last House on the Left. And the Times critic was far from the only person troubled by what he saw unfold on the screen. In a piece on movie censorship that first appeared in the June 21, 2002, edition of the Independent, British film critic Mark Kermode quoted Last House's writer-director: “The film has always caused a furore. I remember that during the first year it ran in the US, people actually rushed to the projection booths trying to get to the print and destroy it. Theatre owners were bodily threatened, there was a fist-fight in one theatre, a heart-attack in another, reports of grown men weeping.”

In an interview with Tony Williams for the Journal of Popular Films and Television, the filmmaker offered a reason for the extreme reaction to the film:

People came into the theatre to be amused and entertained by violence, the right amount of blood and killing. They certainly expected the director to have the taste to cut away at the right moment. They certainly would not want you to be joking at the same time you were killing people or show sympathy for the murderers. So Last House upset everybody, outraged projectionists, was cut by censors and distributors and set upon by armed groups who forced their way in the cinemas.

At the same time, the R-rated film found a huge audience, mostly among the youthful crowd targeted by its stark and inspired advertising campaign. Those of us who originally saw it in an inner-city theater—where the picture got many of its initial play dates—may have been doubly disturbed by the laughing, yelling, and cheering that greeted each new onscreen perversity, but the reaction left no doubt that Last House was having a profound effect on the patrons. Even in an age when the out-front gore effects in torture-laden pictures like the Saw and Hostel series—which play in mall theaters across America with hardly a ripple of protest anywhere—are far more graphic than any violent image in Last House, the forty-year-old picture endures. Anyone unsure of its lasting fan base simply has to poke around Internet horror-film sites. There, a chorus of the movie's admirers, many apparently born decades after Last House's original theatrical release, still sing its praises.

To its defenders, Last House is a brilliant breakthrough picture, one that's far more than simply a well-done exploitation film. Some, in fact, see it as an allegory for the Vietnam War and the American baby boomers' corresponding loss of innocence, as well as an exploration of the dichotomies of the free-love generation. They also recognize it as an early-seventies American take on The Virgin Spring, the Swedish medieval tale brought famously to the screen in 1960 by Ingmar Bergman.

To its detractors, The Last House on the Left remains a sick piece of trash.

Ultimately, the film is a little bit of all of those things, a frankly exploitative, harsh, and sleazy feature designed to appeal to the thrill-seeking crowd, but one that also uses its sex and violence and plotline to explore some much bigger issues. Who would—who could—make a picture like that as his or her first go-round in the director's chair? And why?

Let's see what we can find out.

1

Total Immersion

Well, there’s nothing much bloodier than the Bible. Imagine a religion whose central icon is a man being tortured on a tree!

—Wes Craven

It’s been talked about so much that even Wes Craven, at one point, thought he might have overdone it. Those who have followed the filmmaker and his work over the years know that he had an evangelical Christian upbringing, one in which he was not allowed to see most Hollywood movies (or, for that matter, play cards, dance, or go to public swimming pools), and it’s widely assumed that these repressive circumstances led to the extreme content of his first feature film.

This is an offshoot of the cliché about how preacher’s kids are often the wildest youngsters in town. To those who subscribe to this theory, religion is the lid on the pressure cooker, clamped down hard over a roiling stew of youthful emotions, anxieties, thoughts, fears, and questions, until the mixture grows so potent that it blows the lid off and splatters the whole kitchen. In Screams and Nightmares, a book about Craven, he indirectly acknowledged this idea about his own work: “In many ways a rigid upbringing gives a real kick start to your imagination. It can weigh heavily on your wild years, because it tells you, no, you can’t do anything. So when you break free, you really break free.”

In a 1990 interview with Cineaste’s Michael Banka, though, Craven said, “In many ways, I regret ever having mentioned my upbringing because it’s been focused on too much. I was raised in a very religious period. I went to high school with Catholics who were in church all the time; they always wore crosses around their necks. But religion is a normal part of a lot of Americans’ lives, and I’ve never felt the need to deal specifically with it in my movies.” Certainly, the country in the 1940s and the 1950s had more of a churchgoing habit than it does today, especially with regard to Catholics and members of mainline Protestant faiths. When Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and other members of long-established denominations filled the pews on Sunday mornings, they were continuing a tradition that remained squarely in the U.S. mainstream. Those worshippers and their churches were also generally to the left of the denomination that had such an influence on Craven’s life.

In one biographical piece, Craven talked about the religious influences that surrounded him as a boy:

We were raised in the Baptist faith and our lives were very much circumscribed by the church. Our religion was very strict. The Bible was (I can still slip into their language) the holy creative word of God, was holy [perhaps “wholly”] inspired, and should be taken word for word. There was no quibbling about whether this was a translation made by a bunch of old scholars five hundred years later or anything like that. They took everything very literally according to their interpretation, believing in the six-day creation and in the five cardinal “No Nos”: No drinking. No smoking. No dancing. No playing cards, and no movies. So that kept me a great deal out of the mainstream.

These restrictions were indeed supported by the Cravens’ Baptist congregation, but that’s not to suggest that all Baptists of the time squeezed themselves down the same narrow path. Unlike many other denominations, Baptists eschew the idea of a central authority over their churches. They can join up with groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (with which former president Jimmy Carter is affiliated), but each congregation is responsible for its own church business, answering to no higher human authority. Because of this autonomy, the social conservatism of Baptist churches and their leaders and pastor can vary considerably from location to location. As long as they share the same basic doctrines, including baptism of professed Christians by immersion, they are all Baptists, even while remaining independent.

The Cleveland, Ohio, of Craven’s youth was likely home to a number of different Baptist churches, ranging from fundamentalist to reasonably moderate. And it’s clear that the Craven family’s house of worship was one of the former, rather than one of the latter. Even in the 1940s, many Baptists saw no problem with their kids using public swimming pools or going out and watching most Hollywood productions at their local theaters. The fact that those activities were prohibited in the Craven household indicates that Wes’s church, as well as his family, skewed to the far-right side of an already conservative denomination, one that encourages its members to bring lost sinners to Jesus, that they might believe and thereby gain eternal life. In a recent interview, Craven told me,

Our church members called themselves evangelical, which means you’re supposed to be going out and saving souls. A lot of the proselytizing of the church, of bringing people into the fold, was put upon the congregation and on the kids. When I was in junior high and high school, I was told I had to carry things to school—tracts, a bible. We had to carry a bible with our books. The bible actually had a red cover, so if someone said, “Why is it red?” you could say, “Because the bible should be read.” I mean, you were given this whole spiel. It was almost like being trained to sell vacuum cleaners.

My problem was, I always turned it toward myself. I felt I was maybe too cowardly or something to speak to people about these things. But then I realized that I would tell friends of mine anything about something that I had really, actually experienced—even if it was having a hamburger someplace, and you should try it. I realized I was never able to do it [evangelize] with any sense of wanting to do it, because I had never actually experienced [the beliefs connected with] it.

It wasn’t as though he was underexposed to what the church had to offer. In fact, as he recalled in our conversation, he was immersed in it.

Wednesday was prayer meeting, which we went to almost every week. Then Sunday—you’d start in the morning with Sunday school, then you would go almost immediately into a full sermon. You’d go back home, usually have a big lunch and fall asleep for an hour, and then you’d go back for opening exercises, which was a kind of musical hour in the church’s auditorium.

We would go on the air, actually. Our church had a radio ministry, so we’d go on the air, and there’d be music and the pastor would give his sermon. And after that, there was always either a Youth for Christ meeting you’d go to or what they called “singspirations,” where you would go to someone’s house, usually where there were teenagers, and you’d sing teenage-type hymns—and then rah-rah it up about Jesus.

I’ve told my friends that if I ever write a script about it, I’ll call it Total Immersion, because that’s what they called our church’s belief in baptism—and you were totally immersed in this culture.

There’s a prevailing notion that Craven’s church forbade its members—especially the younger ones—to go to any movie theater. Although Craven said that his mother didn’t go to movies while he was growing up, the taboo on seeing films was not absolute. “I did see movies,” he explained. “The church’s problem with Hollywood movies was that they were sexual and violent and had swearing in them. So I saw Disney movies; Disney movies were okay.”

He managed to take in a few other pictures as well, thanks to the Cleveland, Ohio, school system.

From junior high on, our Cleveland public schools had a program where you could go to an hour lunch period, or you could go to a half-hour lunch and then go to the school auditorium and see what was probably the equivalent of a reel of a movie. So we saw some Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis comedies and some war movies—things that were approved by the school board. My mother reluctantly gave permission for that.

• • •

Craven was born Wesley Earl Craven in Cleveland on August 2, 1939, the last of three children—preceded by his brother, Paul, and his sister, Carole—in the family of Paul Craven, a factory worker, and Caroline Miller Craven, a secretary. Young Wes was only three when his father walked out on the family. The very next year, Paul suffered a heart attack and died. He was buried on Wes’s fourth birthday. “My father was a bit of a mystery, rather scary in temperament. I still remember the day he left. There had been a lot of arguing around the house in the year or two before that, and things were stormy.” He amplified that very early memory in an interview in the New York Times. “By my fifth birthday,” he said, “I’d been exposed to a lot of anger, and to death. It’s never quite left me, that perception that under the surface there’s the potential for violence and chaos and things that are not accounted for by rational thought.”

In other words, by the age of five, Wes Craven had found one of the underlying themes he’d explore in his first film some thirty years later. And in the movie after that one. And in many more.

Once Wes started school, he began going to the house of a family named Dalton each day after classes concluded, instead of returning to the family apartment. He usually waited at the Daltons’ until somewhere around seven p.m., when his mother had finished working for the day and came by to pick him up. As he recalled,

A woman named Dorothy Dalton was one of my mother’s closest friends. When my father died, Dorothy invited me into their household during the day, until my mother came back from work at night. So, for many years they became my second family, and Eddie Dalton was like a surrogate father to me. One of Eddie’s hobbies was 8mm photography. He would take movies of everything. We would always go to their house on Saturday evenings and watch whatever movies he had taken. He would also rent movies from the local camera shop, which was a custom in those days. We would see everything from Woody Woodpecker cartoons to the world’s most amazing events. They were silent films, and everybody would talk and comment and laugh and what not. I remember that I was completely enthralled by film.

As was the case with the pictures Craven saw at school, the prepackaged 8 mm movies shown at the Dalton household were not forbidden to him. Silent versions of theatrical newsreels, cartoons, and other short subjects, as well as excerpts of features, these brief little films were the ancestors of home video.

Yet even with the movies to look forward to, Craven had to spend a lot of time without his mother, taken in by a family that, no matter how welcoming it might be, wasn’t his own. He had lost his dad, and now he was a member of an alternate family. (Given that situation, the number of times he explores surrogate families and familial relationships in his films isn’t so surprising.)

At the same time, his physical surroundings weren’t particularly reassuring. As he remembered, Cleveland had been known as “the Forest City” in the time before his birth, “a small, very beautiful, tree-lined place with decent neighborhoods and wonderful parks.” But all of that began to transmogrify in the 1940s, and when Craven, as a young teenager, looked around at his environment, he could readily see that things had changed—and not generally for the better.

Within this setting, the four Cravens struggled to get by on Caroline’s income, moving from apartment to apartment and not owning a family car or a television set (unlike movies, television shows were welcome in many fundamentalist Baptist households) until Wes was in high school. Craven said that living in poverty made them a tight family. “It always made me grateful for whatever I was able to earn later,” he added, “and also made me realize that the real foundation of strength is the family and the support you can give each other.” There’s little doubt that the congregation of his local church also provided some solace for him during his boyhood and even beyond. Certainly, it did for his mother, who found faith and fellowship there, sources of comfort that eased the psychic pain of her husband’s separation and death, as well as the breadwinning burden thrust on her by those circumstances. Faith and the church may have been enough for her, but they weren’t enough for her youngest child. In fact, Craven has indicated that he was never quite able to embrace the beliefs necessary to become a real born-again member of the congregation. He said,

I remember evangelical ministers who would come to our church once or twice a year to get a revival going. They would talk sometimes about the one unforgivable sin, which was a rejection of the Holy Spirit. And I’d think, “Well, okay, that’s me. I’m definitely going to hell now, because I’ve rejected the Holy Spirit. I don’t witness, and all of that.” . . .

I often felt that I was the one in the room who just had an irredeemable soul. They quite often would have the congregation all together for a revival, or they’d go overtime, and the pastor would say, “I know there’s somebody here. I can feel there’s somebody here. God is telling me there’s someone here who still hasn’t either truly, really given his or her soul to Christ or has backslidden and needs to rededicate his or her life to Christ.”

I can remember resisting that for years and years and years and finally going forward [to the altar], just feeling like my spirit was broken, like I had to do this. And still not feeling it.

Those who have come of age in the Baptist faith often have stories about simply being worn down by the relentless pressure to accept Jesus as their personal savior—to be, as the term would have it, “saved”—from hell, from a life of sin, from Satan himself. These repeated invitations and attempts to persuade don’t spring from any sort of malevolence; rather, they are in most cases a genuine desire to save a soul for the Lord, one of the highest achievements imaginable for an evangelical Christian.

Still, it can feel like unrelenting torture to a youngster who’s simply not ready (or may never be). The pressure can come from anywhere—usually including one’s own family. In our interview, Craven remembered one such instance.

I had a brother, ten years older than me, who was kind of my father figure. Once, in church, when I was maybe 13 or 14, the minister had just started his sermon, and I suddenly saw my brother walking down the aisle—which was totally anomalous, you know. There was no reason for him to be doing that. He stopped in front of the pulpit and said, “I want to speak to the congregation.” And he came up on the stage and spoke quietly to the pastor. The pastor said, “This is very unusual, but Paul Craven would like to speak to the congregation.” My brother just confessed that he had backslidden and he felt terrible and the Lord was upon him—all this stuff. I was like, “Oh, my God. That’s my brother up there.” It was this experience of being the last one who doesn’t feel it or doesn’t get it or somehow Jesus can’t find a comfortable place in his heart, you know? It was just a feeling of desolate loneliness mixed with having rejected what had to be embraced—and even cowardice, I was haunted by that.

The classic western High Noon had first been released in 1952, when Craven was twelve years old. Although young Wes didn’t get to see the film, he could hardly have escaped hearing the ubiquitous title song, a million-seller for vocalist Frankie Laine, which included lyrics about the sheriff having to face his enemy “or lie a coward, a craven coward, in my grave.” “Fortunately,” said Craven, “I’ve done enough courageous things that now I know I’m not a coward. But since my name was Craven, and High Noon came out when I was a kid, I was always afraid, well, maybe I’m a coward.”

Although Craven has been quoted many times about the influence of the church on his early life, and he and others have speculated publicly on how the notions he was taught about good and evil and the concept of free will affected his themes and topics once he became a filmmaker, something that hasn’t been brought up much is the Baptist emphasis on a literal, burning, eternal nightmare called hell, presided over by Satan, the tangible embodiment of pure evil. For many raised in the denomination, their most vivid memories of Sunday services revolve around the kinds of sermons known generically as hellfire-and-brimstone, in which preachers vividly and extensively describe the unrelenting tortures of a nonbeliever’s afterlife. Any Baptist who’s gone to more than a handful of services in his or her life has heard about it in sweat-inducing detail—the licking flames, the blistering skin, the constant intolerable pain, the eternal wailing of the hopeless damned.

To the baptized believers—just as it was to those fundamentalists who pulled their kids into screenings of filmmaker Mel Gibson’s hideously graphic 2004 feature The Passion of the Christ—the intensity and the suffering conveyed by these images served a lofty purpose, which was nothing less than the saving of people’s souls through their professed belief in Jesus. Baptist doctrine calls on people to state their faith in Christ before they can be lowered into the baptismal waters and become saved, or born again. This belief naturally disallows infant baptism, so it becomes incumbent on preachers and church leaders, as well as on the other believers in the congregation, to lead souls to the Savior. Sermons that focus on the unending tortures of hell are a proven way to dramatically instill in listeners—especially, young listeners—the dire and permanent consequences of being unsaved. To those who believe that saving people’s souls is the most important calling on earth, it’s a case of the means justifying the end.

The New York Times’s Robin Finn wrote that young Craven “had the impression he would burn in hell as a nonbeliever.” That’s a frightening thought shared by a lot of kids who are exposed to the segment of the Christian faith that includes a literal flaming hell, and if a youngster stays in one of those congregations for very long, he or she almost always makes that walk down the aisle, just as a deeply unconvinced Craven did, to confess Christ as personal savior before the assembled crowd, in accordance with church doctrine. Of course, plenty of other factors are involved in those decisions, but being saved from an incomprehensibly horrible afterlife carries a powerful weight.

Some internal hesitation or doubt, though, made Craven constitutionally unable to grab the lifeline that would keep him out of the pit of eternal damnation and away from Satan’s fiery clutches. On the other hand, as is the case for anyone raised as he was, young Wes must have still wondered whether hell, after all, was just as the preachers painted it, right down to the last broad brimstone stroke. That Baptist vision of the unbelievers’ afterlife surely must have colored his nightmares, planting in his subconscious some of the dark, torturous images that would later play out in his films. Craven told me,

I don’t think there’s any way all that stuff couldn’t have had an immense impact on every facet of my life, frankly. Certainly, the descent into hell, or Hades [hell’s Greek mythology counterpart], was intentional with Freddy. I didn’t think of him as Satan so much, because his [antagonism] is more localized to something the parents did, and he takes revenge on their children—which again was biblical, with regards to the sins of the parents being visited on their children.

Even though his creator doesn’t necessarily see it that way, Freddy Krueger does make a pretty good stand-in for Satan. Like the devil (in serpent’s skin) whose successful temptations get Adam and Eve banished by God from the Garden of Eden—a scenario young Craven’s congregation took as completely literal—Krueger is a deceiver and a trickster, delighting in suffering and misery. And the human Krueger, as the story goes, worked in a subterranean chamber—the boiler room—of a power plant, luring children there for the express purpose of murdering them. There, he was ultimately killed himself, burned alive as a result of the Molotov cocktails hurled at him by his victims’ parents. Following his fiery death, he was reborn as a demon, one reigning mercilessly over a kingdom of darkness.

There is fire in Krueger’s story, along with subterranean horrors and demons, just as there are in the literal biblical hell. There is also, as we shall see, an important element of belief—in the Nightmare on Elm Street world, one must believe in Freddy in order to fight him.

In the faith of Wes Craven’s parents, belief in the existence of hell was very important. And for them, hell was a nightmare from which there is no waking.

“Hell,” Craven said, “was more believable than believing in Jesus, oddly enough. If you believed in Jesus, there was supposed to be an immediate presence and knowledge of him. Whereas with hell, you wouldn’t know about it [for sure] until you were dead.”