Wes Craven

6.0 The Last House on the Left (1972)
6.5 The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
5.8 Deadly Blessing (1981)
5.0 Swamp Thing (1982)
7.2 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
4.5 The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985)
6.5 The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
5.0 Deadly Friend (1986)
6.0 Shocker (1989)
6.5 The People Under the Stairs (1991)
6.7 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
4.5 Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)
6.9 Scream (1996)
6.7 Scream 2 (1998)
5.5 Music Of The Heart (1999)
5.9 Scream 3 (2000)
6.5 Red Eye (2005)
4.5 Cursed (2005)
4.5 My Soul to Take (2010)
5.5 Scream 4 (2011)

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Wes Craven (USA, 1939), a professor of English at presigious New York colleges, equipped with a master's degree in Philosophy and Writing, dropped out of academia and started directing pornographic videos. He turned to horror movies with The Last House on the Left (1972), which is basically a horror and farcical version of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960). Half of the movie is mildly entertaining horror, and the other half is a farce that makes fun of stereotypes of the genre. The most disturbing part is perhaps the soundtrack, which seems to imply that Craven is enjoying the killing and rape. The soundtrack is perhaps where the real perversion lies. Mari is the only daughter of a middle-class couple who live in a suburban house far away from the city. It's her birthday and her mom is baking a birthday cake. Mari has decided to go out with her friend Phyllis and check out a rock band that is performing that night. Before she leaves the house, her father gives her a birthday gift: a necklace with the peace symbol. As soon as Mari meets Phyllis, the two girls start thinking about drugs. As they drive, they turn on the radio and hear the news that two killers named Krug and Weasel have escaped from prison with help from a youth and a woman. These four gangsters are in fact hiding in an apartment. We meet the two psychopaths, Krug's heroin-addicted son Junior and their common woman Sadie. Phyllis and Mari run into Junior and asks him for drugs. Junior brings them into the house with the excuse of giving them some drugs but the girls soon realize that they are trapped. Phyllis is gang-raped. We don't see what they do to Mari. Meanwhile, Mari's parents are getting worried and eventually they call the cops, but the cops discount the case as yet another girl who spent a night in the city. The following day the gangsters stick Mari and Phyllis into the truck of their car and drive them to a nearby lake. The car breaks down, by coincidence, just in front of Mari's house. The gangsters take the girls through the woods to the lake and terrorize them. They force them to have sex between them and watch them amused. Meanwhile, the cops drive in front of the abandoned car but don't stop to check it out. Krug walks back to the car and then Phyllis runs away through the woods to give Mari a chance to escape. Weasel and Sadie chase Phyllis while Mari tries to convince Junior to let her go. Mari even gives Junior the necklace she got from her father. Phyllis is eventually captured in a cemetery and she is brutally stabbed to death by Weasel. Mari is dragging Junior toward her house, but Krug finds them. To punish her, Krug uses a knife to carve his name into her chest, and then rapes her. Mari gets up and walks like a zombie into the lake. Krug shoots her dead with a gun, her body left to float on the water. Meanwhile, the cops finally realize that the abandoned car is the car of the wanted fugitive. They get into their car and drive as fast as they can to Mari's house. Unfortunately, they forgot to put gasoline in the car so they get stranded in the middle of nowhere and try in vain to hitchhike but nobody stops for them. The gansters wash the blood away in the lake and then walk to the nearest house, unaware that it is Mari's house. They tell Mari's parents that their car broke down and Mari's parents promptly offer them to stay. Mari's mother even cooks dinner for them. When they retire to Mari's room, they finally realize that they are in Mari's house. At night, however, Junior is shaken by a violent crisis of heroin withdrawal and the noise wakes up Mari's mother. She checks on the boy and sees that he is wearing Mari's necklace. She opens the suitcase of the guests and finds bloody clothes. She also overhears Krug mention the girl dumped in the lake. The parents run to the lake and find Mari's body. They bring the corpse back to their house and then prepare to take revenge on the gang. The mother lures Weasel to the lake and starts performing oral sex on him but then bites off his penis and throws him in the lake. The father fights with Krug and Krug is about to prevail when his son Junior stops him pointing a gun at him. Krug manipulates the boy to shoot himself. This has given the father time to arm himself with a chainsaw which he uses to kill Krug while Sadie runs out of the house but is stabbed to death by the mother who is returning from the lake. The comic cops arrive when the gangsters are already all dead.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) is about cannibals, influenced by Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Deadly Blessing (1981) is another horror.

Swamp Thing (1982) is an adaptation of a comic-strip super-hero.

Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) added a supernatural element to the slasher stereotype created by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), and at the same time created a new horror icon on the same level as Dracula King Kong, and Frankenstein's monster: Freddy Krueger. Freddy, however, seems to dwell not in the real world but in the symbolic and mythological world of dreams. There the girl is haunted by her mother's alcoholism and by her father indifference: those are the real monsters who terrorize her.

A teenager, Tina, has a nightmare in which she is brutally assassinated by a man named Freddy, who has a disfigured face and blades instead of fingers. When she wakes up, terrified, her mother notices four slashes on her nightgown. Later her best friend Nancy reveals that she too had the same nightmare. Tina's mother leaves town and Tina's boyfriend Rod sleeps with her. Nancy and her boyfriend Glen stay to sleep in another room. After Tina and Rod make love, Tina has the same nightmare, and Rod wakes up hearing Tina scream and sees her thrown in the air by a mysterious force and bleeding to death. Rod flees terrified. Nancy and Glen rush to the room and find Tina brutally killed. The evidence points at Rod being the killer. Nancy's father is a cop and arrests Rod. The following day Nancy falls asleep in class and has again the same nightmare in which Freddy corners her to kill her. In her dream, as she's running away from Freddy, she touches a hot pipe. The pain wakes her up and she finds the burn mark on her arm. Nancy hears Rod's version of the facts and concludes that Tina was killed by the man in the nightmare, Freddy, and that Freddy is now trying to kill her. In fact, the moment she dozes off while taking a bath, Freddy appears and tries to drown her. Her mother wakes her up just in time: Nancy has scraches on her hand. Nancy comes up with a plan: she asks Glen to sleep over and to wake her up in the middle of the night, so that she can face Freddy without getting killed. Glen falls asleep but luckily the alarm goes off just in time to save Nancy's life. However, she saw that Freddy is now turning to Rod. She runs to the police station and begs her father to help Rod, but her father doesn't believe her. Rod is found strangled with his bed sheets and her father assumes that he killed himself. Nancy's parents don't believe her either and send her to a psychiatric hospital. During the night, a doctor and her mother watch her having the nightmare. They see her convulse as if fighting and then waking up with a hat that has name "Fred Krueger" written on it. They still don't fully believe her, but her mother is alarmed: Freddy was a serial killer who killed twenty children, and was eventually burned alive by the parents on their street. Nancy, locked in the house by her alcoholic mother, tries to keep Glen from falling asleep but Glen's parents refuse to wake him up when she calls. Sure enough, Glen is killed in his sleep by Freddy. Nancy's father still doesn't believe her but she comes up with a plan to frame Freddy: she asks her father to simply wake her up in 20 minutes. Nancy prepares a trap in her house and then falls asleep. When Freddy appears, she lures him into the real world. Now she has the upper hand: she burns him again and locks him in the basement. Her father finally believes her but Freddy has escaped. Nancy and her father rush upstairs. Nancy opens the door and sees that Freddy is attacking her drunk mother. As her father approaches, both Freddy and her mother disappear into the bed. When her father leaves the room, Nancy again sees Freddy appear in the room. Nancy, however, tells herself to remain calm, convinced that Freddy is a materialization of her fear. Freddy is about to attack her but instead disappears. Now it looks like the whole story was Nancy's dream, all invented by her disturbed mind. In fact, the following day her mother is alive, and she leaves home to go to school with Tina, Rod and Glen, all alive and well. However, as she gets into Glen's car, the car gets out of control and at the same time she sees that an arm has grabbed her mother...

In between the two horror movies The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), about Haiti's voodoo and zombies, he also directed the sci-fi movie Deadly Friend (1986), about a teenage Frankenstein.

The third movie in the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise, Dream Warriors (1987), was scripted by Craven but directed by Chuck Russell. Craven had nothing to do with number 4,5 and 6 (1988, 89 and 91).

Shocker (1989), one of his most anarchic romps, and The People Under the Stairs (1991) were both gothic comedies.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) is an ingenious sequel to a series that was supposed to have ended with Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991). It is structured as a film inside a film: it imagines the lives of some of the actors who appeared in the original film: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and John Saxon, and the director himself, Wes Craven, all of whom play themselves. It is a sort of "meta-film".
Craven recycles the themes of his horror (the happily-married defenseless woman, the possessed child, the descent into hell) but this time the cause is not an evil supernatural being but the collective unconscious of the people who made the original film.
In a sense, it is also a critique against the entire horror genre, as this film is about the way the collective imagination can create more than just a fictitious character: an evil power that remains long after the film has ended.

Heather, the protagonist (Nancy) in Wes Craven's film Nightmare, has a gorey nightmare while the earthquake strikes her villa. Her husband wakes her up and brings her to her senses. It turns out she has been harassed by a mysterious caller who pretends to be Freddy the killer of that film. Her husband, an expert in special-effects, reassures her that it was just a dream, but the moment her husband walks out the door, an aftershock causes cracks in the wall that look like marks of blades. Her child is hypnotized in front of the tv set and, when she turns it off, starts screaming. The phone rings and it is the voice she fears. Somebody knocks at the door... it is just the babysitter.
A limo takes her to a talk show where she is the guest. The interviewer has a surprise for her: Robert, the actor who impersonated Freddy, has also been invited, and the audience goes nuts for him.
Bob, the producer of the series, tells Heather that, no matter what, Freddy is alive and well because he has become an icon for millions of people, and he wants to make another film of the series. Bob has already hired Wes Craven to write the new script. Heather is reluctant to join and asks Bob is he's also been having nightmares and strange calls since Wes started working on the film. Bob refuses to answer.
Back home, Heather finds her son Dylan in an epileptic fit and mumbling in Freddy's voice. She calls her husband to hurry home and then wakes up in the middle of the night having dreamt that he had an accident caused by Freddy's blade. The police is at the door: he did have an accident and he is dead. Heather insists on seeing the body: it has been ripped apart by razor-sharp claws.
At the funeral, the earthquake strikes again and Heather sees the coffin open and Freddy drag Dylan inside... but it is another nightmare. The funeral is real, though.
Dylan keeps having catatonic visions of Freddy and almost kills himself.
Heather talks on the phone with Robert, who, it turns out, has also been having nightmares and is painting horrible pictures of Freddy.
The nightmares get worse, as she imagines Dylan trying to kill her with Freddy-like blades, and Dylan does wander around the house singing in Freddy's voice "never sleep again" and the phone keeps ringing. Eventually, Heather has to lock Dylan into a psychiatric institution because he is clearly affected by schizophrenia.
Heather visits Wes to find out what the new script is about. Wes tells her it is about ancetral evil itself: whenever a story about it ends, that evil is set free. Freddy is one instance of this phenomenon: the films were his environment, and now, that the films have ended, Freddy is trying to sneak into the real world... through Heather. Wes believes that the only way to to exorcise the evil, once for all, is to make another film in which the demon (not just the monster) gets destroyed. Of course, it turns out to be the screenplay for the film we are watching.
Another earthquake brings more tragedies: the tv announces the mysterious killing of two of the experts who worked on the original Freddy movie, which is precisely what Heather saw in her first nightmare. Then Freddy finally appears and attacks her. Still bleeding, but sensing danger, she rushes to the hospital, and, sure enough, Dylan has had an attack. At the hospital the psychiatrist takes care of her wounds... but there was no earthquake. And Heather is embarrassed to tell the truth.
While she is by her son, the nurses and the babysitter take him away. Heather wakes up and has an hysterical crisis, imagining the psychiatrist is Freddy himself. The hospital suddenly looks like a claustrophobic Kafka-esque prison where everybody (psychiatrist, babysitter, nurses) could be part of a conspiracy. Heather begs the babysitter to keep Dylan awake. The psychiatrist wants to talk to Heather: she suspects that there is madness in her family. Heather refuses to answer her questions but her wounds betray that she is lying. In the meantime, the babysitter fights with the nurses who want to put Dylan asleep with sedatives. In vain does Heather beg the psychiatrist to keep the child asleep. The babysitter is attacked by Freddy. When they hear the screams and open the door, the babysitter is in a pool of blood and Dylan is gone.
Heather takes the car and chases Dylan who is slowly crossing a highway while hundreds of cars narrowly miss him. She has to do the same, causing a pile-up on the freeway, and, even after being hit by a car, keeps running after him. She finally finds him in her friend John's house.
John calls her "Nancy" and thinks she is going crazy like Nancy's mother did in the film. Heather realizes that John is the one still living in the film, probably the one who made the scary phone calls, probably the one who manipulated Dylan's brain to talk like Freddy. As John leaves the house, Heather follows Dylan into hell and, after finding the script of this film, has her final duel with Freddy. When Heather and Dylan come back alive and well to reality, Heather picks up the script of this film, and starts reading it. A note by the director thanks her for having the guts to play Nancy one more time and thereby destroying Freddy forever.

The black comedy Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) is one of this worst films, almost a parody of the horror genre.

At the docks two night watchmen suspect that a stowaway hides on their ship. One of them, Julius, is a coward and runs away. The other one stumbles into a number of dead bodies, and then sees a wolf jump ashore and turn into a man wrapped in a black cloak. Julius is in trouble with the mob: two gangsters take him to a narrow alley and are about to finish him off, when a stranger appears and saves his life. He (Eddie Murphy) proclaims to be Max, the last of the vampires. He wants Julius to be his servant, because he is a liar, a thief and a cheat. To make sure he obeys him, Max bites one of Julius' ears off.
Rita is a police officer. She and her partner Justice are assigned to the case of the ship. As she searches the ship, she stumbles into a coffin, from which Max the vampires emerges. Max seems to recognize her and, instead of killing her, disappears.
Later, Julius helps the vampire move (coffin and everything) into his apartment. It turns out that Max came to New York in search for the only other being who is related to vampires, which is Rita herself. But Rita reacts in a very hostile manner, and from that moment Max keeps trying to enter her private life (Eddie Murphy impersonates a series of characters whom he enslaves and possesses). Max even manages to destroy the relationship between Rita and Justice (by making it look like Justice slept with her best friend). After a romantic evening, Max finally manages to seduce her and bite her. Rita's best friend is found dead (in a position that Rita painted it).
Justice is ready to forgive her, but Rita realizes that she is mutating into a vampire. As repulsed as she is, as angry at Max she is, she needs to feed, and follows him to a park, where he teaches her how to stalk victims. Rita refuses and prefers to starve to death. Justice finds them and tries to rescue Rita, but Max's strength is super-human. It is Rita who finds the strength to kill Max.
The film ends on a funny note, as the dumb and sleazy Julius accidentally inherits Max's ring and turns into the new king of the vampires.

A new franchise was born with Scream (1996), scripted by Kevin Williamson, a satire of television and self-reflections on Craven's own movies and on the horror genre in general (the most famous line being �Movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative�). The film had three sequels of dimishing artistic value: Scream 2 (1998), Scream 3 (2000), scripted instead by Ehren Kruger and more interested in cameos and self-referential jokes than in developing the story, and finally Scream 4 (2011).

He also directed the biopic Music of the Heart (1999), scripted by Pamela Gray and very similar to John Smith's Dangerous Minds (1995), and the thriller Red Eye (2005), one of his best, and two mediocre horror movies: Cursed (2005) and My Soul to Take (2010).

Craven died in 2015.

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