Kicking off his career in the pornography industry (which feels weirdly appropriate), the late director Wes Craven would move on to a gradual and consistent slew of hits in commercial cinema. With early low-budget independent pictures that focused on vile creatures preying on suburban innocents, Craven was making stone-cold classics from all the way back to the early '70s. A writer as well, Craven would coin so many of the tropes and clichés that horror movies now seem far too fond of reusing.
Through the '90s and early '00s he would go on to continue in the genre while also parodying and subverting it, introducing postmodernism into mainstream horror by linking back to his own works even and reviving them as something new for a fresh-faced audience. Much like many of the villains that he had showcased on screen, with each new work Wes Craven just came back stronger, and his contributions to the revolutionary Scream series would make his name known over the good part of almost five decades. With the release of Scream 5 (a movie that ends with a credit specifically dedicated to the man himself) we take a look back over some of Wes Craven's back catalog.
9 Shocker (1989)
Shocker is, well, exactly that. Feeling like a hangover from Nightmare on Elm Street, a teen, through his dreams, can witness a serial killer (Mitch Pileggi) as he performs grisly slasher murders as they happen. It never seems to stick with any of its ideas, and morphs all about the place in an attempt to utilize too many ideas at once. Shocker feels like it could have been a really neat X-Files episode, but not a whole feature, and begins making up its own rules - before breaking them by the next scene. The strangest takeaway from this is that a crazy Mitch Pileggi sounds like a normal Tommy Lee Jones.Still, it's a bonkers mess that's pretty fun.
8 The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
Most Craven fans won't even recognize The Serpent and the Rainbow, and quite rightly: watching it, it doesn't feel like a Wes Craven movie whatsoever. That's not necessarily a bad thing at all but, while functional, it does also lack the director's usual tense flair. This is an unconventional zombie movie, in that it really isn't about zombies whatsoever, or at least it's about the actual Haitian tradition of zombies rather than the Western cinematic equivalent. Rather, people are being drugged, their bodies essentially 'dying' before being recovered. Bill Pullman plays the most American tourist ever in a film that never really accomplishes much as far as the horror genre goes, but is a pretty unique dramatic and anthropological film. Think Angel Heart meets Apocalypse Now, but far dryer. A+ for weirdness though.
7 Scream 4 (2011)
A black sheep of the series, Scream 4 was looked poorly on when it was released in 2011. That's a shame, as the film (dubbed "Scr4am" at the time) seemed to just miss out on being able to really take part in the remake trend of the 2010s. Instead, however, we got an efficient and very willing take to the series, refreshed 11 years later from undoubtedly the low point of the series. With a truly bright young cast (Hayden Panettiere stands out as the resident film nut), confident execution, and a labyrinthine script, Scream 4 reminded how relevant Craven and Ghostface still were.
6 Last House on the Left (1972)
Craven's debut feature Last House on the Left focuses on a rape-revenge story and a whole lot of misanthropy. Mostly remembered by just how shocking and controversial it was at the time (alongside its claims of being based on a true story), by today's standards it seems kitschy and relatively tame, though still extremely cynical and morally disturbing. Don't skip this one though, with its interesting and frugal sound design and obligatory chainsaw scene, this is an upper-class grindhouse picture, adapted as it was from Swedish art-house classic The Virgin Spring. Underneath the grime is a tight and interesting first film that would showcase Wes Craven's talent to the world.
5 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
New Nightmare walked, so Scream could run. Wes Craven's New Nightmare proposed the metafictional scenario, "What if the actors that played these characters were attacked by the (supposedly) fictional killer?" New Nightmare is a strange and weird experiment, and, considering the real lack of risk in much of Hollywood, is genuinely extraordinary that it exists at all. It doesn't have anything on the true ingenuity of the original Nightmare On Elm Street, but this is still a wildly intriguing horror movie that changed everything that followed it, using irony and self-reflective techniques to create horror in a startlingly original way. The mythology it builds regarding Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger character is also fantastic.
4 The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Scrappy and evidently low budget, The Hills Have Eyes is a stripped-back, mean, and nasty little movie. This low-quality affair - both from a technical and narrative point of view - almost add to the overall minimalist discomfort of the picture. Following similar themes of his previous Last House on the Left, Hills adds the threat of cannibals as an American family is ambushed on their vacation. In hindsight, this was another controlled horror film with methods that set up so many tropes which would become overused conventions for the genre. It's tight, scary, and brutal. Craven would go on to direct the sequel as well.
3 Scream 2 (1997)
Scream 2 only just misses out, as it could never have been able to muster up how original and fresh the original Scream felt. With that said, this film does exactly what a sequel should-- it moved the characters along, while expanding their stories and remained scary; it upped the blood, and even mocked what sequels should be, keeping up its own relevance and mocking, critical edge. Scream 2 is just as good as its predecessor, perhaps even better on a good day, but lacks the novel ideas of its original. The opener to this is spellbinding, also.
2 Scream (1996)
At the time, Scream was a total shock to the system. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson complained that the horror genre had been stale for ages, and so he wrote this meta, cliche-teasing whodunit masterpiece. With a relatively unknown and spunky cast (outside of ten minutes of Drew Barrymore), Scream was a product of the '90s that hailed the slashers and chillers of the '70s and '80s, alongside its director's own works. A brilliant film that still does not feel aged or remotely hackneyed, and just totally pitch-perfect and exquisitely paced, Wes Craven's winking, wonderful horror film defined a generation of moviegoers.
1 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Terrifying, creepy, classic, and at times tacky and rubbery, Nightmare on Elm Street has every right to have its Freddy Krueger character heralded as one of the major horror villains. In such a tremendously simple but ingenious premise, teens are being dispatched by a dead serial killer via the one place they can't hide: their dreams. Turn the lights off and close the blinds, and Nightmare on Elm Street remains incredibly creepy. The many sequels would be an entirely mixed bag (Dream Warriors is excellent, Part 2 and the remake are just dreadful), but this original may be Craven's crowning achievement.