Wes Craven knew how to
make horror movies that had a purpose.
There was action,
suspense, drama, comedy, romance, there was a little bit of everything when you
sat down and watched a Wes
Craven film. He didn't just sit you down in front of a screen and throw a
bunch of creepy and unnecessary images on the screen, he actually made a movie
where you had to use all of your thought process to figure out what's going on.
Long before I was able to sit down and figure out a movies plot just from the
trailer alone and the actual ending deduced from the first five minute of the
movie, Wes Craven created
films that didn't give you time to think. As a matter of fact you didn't want to
think because you were having such a great time watching the actual movie. There
are few men in the history of movie making that actually made you want to watch
the movie and not even care about what's going to happen in the end, he was a
master movie maker, something that is sorely missed today.
He's the creator
to two of the most successful horror movie franchises ever,
A Nightmare On Elm Street and
Scream. His next biggest movie outside of those two franchises, (in my
opinion I should state),
The People
Under The Stairs. It was big in the box office and it ran a lot during the
early days of cable on Sunday afternoons and on the SyFy channel. He's also the
creator of the generally known film series called
The
Hills Have Eyes. He also helped produce
Wishmaster, a film
that wasn't really that good but had a lot of cameos from the biggest names in
horror movie lore. In that movie the actors who all played Freddy, Jason,
Candyman, Darkman and even
Verne Troyer showed up in the movie, and that's the big reason why I enjoyed
it, it payed homage of sorts to a lot of franchises when you pay attention. He
also had a good one hits in my book with
Dracula 2000,
Carnival
of Souls and making
Swamp Thing into
a big film adaptation. And he also directed a popular movie amongst black people
Vampire In Brooklyn
starring Eddie Murphy.
His later work includes a tv series adaptation for Scream on MTV that seems to
be popular as well as the
2009 remake of his original film
The Last House On The Left, with
My Soul To Take
being his last film released in 2010.
Basically the man
made some pretty good horror movies outside of his signature franchises.
He once said that
horror films don't create fear, they release it. He had a knack for scaring
people senseless and having a payoff in the end to send people home happy. These
days too many people try to make horror movies where everyone just dies a
horrible death and that's it. There's no real direction with horror movies
because they payoff is where you can make the most people go home scared from
the craziest ways of dying. I think a lot of films delve too much into those
points without developing characters or setting up plots where they can survive
more than just one film, that's why a lot of them are rebooted. That's why any
number of his films are able to go up and continue it's storyline continuity
because it developed itself during the course of the film. That's something that
will be sorely missed with him and other liked minds that no longer make movies.
The generation of wanting everything now rather than later has made sure that
storytelling is a thing of the past.
Wes Craven was renowned
universally not only by his peers but amongst fans themselves. Whether they are
Black, White, Asian, or Latin, he earned the respect of so many people by making
good movies and making them to the best of his ability. This is one of those
times where I reiterate how minds like Craven need to be nitpicked for all that
they know so that they can continue to inspire and teach people for decades to
come. When I think of horror movies I think of Freddy right off the top of my
head and when I think deeper into it I think of the Scream series as one of the
first ones when talking about the best. I'm really glad that a lot of people and
film institutions are honoring
Wes Craven for the
innovator of Horror as they should.
Do you have any
favorite parts from the Wes Craven movies that you know about? If so leave a
comment in the description below.
Until next time
guys.
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