Wes Craven dead at 76

Brain cancer.

Not everything he did was stellar, but I've always appreciated much about him. The first Nightmare on Elm Street is a favorite of mine. His Swamp Thing movie was a Saturday afternoon staple growing up.

Definitely made some cool stuff.

It's weird.
I heard that Oliver Sacks died early yesterday, then Wes Craven later that day.
Both are polar opposites on what they produced.

I guess the many faced god felt a disturbance in the balance, and took Craven for the loss of Sacks.

Not to diminish Craven's importance in the horror genre or to denigrate his passing, but I've never been a big fan of his work outside of the first Nightmare on Elm Street (which is probably the best film of its ilk, even better than Halloween IMO) and the grossly underappreciated Serpent and the Rainbow.

In fact, looking back over his filmography, I see more movies that probably did more HARM than GOOD to the genre. Last House on the Left is a deeply troubled, problematic movie on a number of levels. I think his experiences working in pornography really influenced the way that picture looks and makes the audience feel. The sadism is still pretty over the top even by today's standards, but then there are some interesting things going on- mostly cribbed from The Virgin Spring and revenge motifs common in the films of the 1970s. The Hills Have Eyes is another unusually cruel movie, one of those 1970s "dirt road" horror movies that were really more upsetting than scary. These movies were really the genesis of the "torture porn" thing. Moving on up to Scream, regardless of its self-reference and awareness it still made the slasher film even stupider and more juvenile than it had ever been before.

Beyond those pictures, a lot of so-so work- Shocker, People Under the Stairs, Swamp Thing...

But still, definitely one of the big names in 70s and 80s horror and profoundly important in the genre regardless of my rainy day opinions.

No, I think you're right.

Well, maybe not the part about NoES being better than Halloween, though I don't think I could pick between the two.

His early stuff is trashy and cruel and I've never liked it. As if they hadn't damaged the genre enough the first time around, they also got remade into even trashier and crueler movies, this time with the bonus of being creatively bankrupt.

The first Nightmare on Elm Street is utterly brilliant, sure to make an appearance in Halloween Horror series. I also like New Nightmare, though it's squarely behind the first film and Dream Warriors (which he wrote).

Scream is another one that did more harm than good. While I don't like the movie, I do appreciate it's goal: Demerit and end the slasher genre while still delivering one. It only served to revitalize it with a slew of shitty teen-centric slashers. I pretty much wrote horror off during that entire time period, all the way up until The MIst came out in 2007.

I re-watched the entire Elm Street series last year, which was tough to get through, but watching it with the documentary "Never Sleep Again" on Netflix, which takes a solid look at each movie in the series, made it that much bearable. It's damn good. And I found impossible to not like Craven from his interviews.

Never seen Serpent and the Rainbow. I'll add it to the list.

I think NoES is just more _interesting_ than Halloween, even though Carpenter's film is regarded as "first"...which, of course, it really wasn't...I think Peeping Tom is more of an inception point for the slasher film than Halloween was. And then there's the whole Bava/Argento Giallo strain, which Carpenter was aware of and was drawing from. I really liked that NoES had a supernatural, old fashioned "boogeyman" element to it, it was very baroque and gothic...which is much more interesting to me than more real-world murderer stuff.

The key to both Halloween and NoES being so resonant is that they were very suburban and spoke directly to suburban, American audiences. But in both cases, the films just went off the rails and into parody. Scream was redundant by the time it came out, because were up to stuff like New Nightmare that was already satirizing and mocking genre convention. Halloween was up to #6 or 7, and at that point straight-to-video anyway.

But yeah, those Craven remakes...good god. The 00's were such an awful period for horror and those remakes really were endemic of what was going wrong in the genre at the time. An impetus for harsh, unrestrained and unconscionable cruelty. I remember watching stuff like that Hills Have Eyes remake, The Devil's Reject, Funny Games, etc. and it wasn't "cool" or thrilling at all...it just made me sad because there wasn't any substance OR style there...just empty violence. But that empty violence, it's all post-9/11 psychology if you (like me) subscribe to Skal's theory that what scares, upsets and disturbs audiences is built out from cultural influences of the time, but the level of just plain real-world negativity in those pictures and others like Hostel is just completely- as you put it- bankrupt.

I never saw The Last House on the Left remake...fun fact, there already kind of was a remake- a movie called The House at the Edge of the Park, from 1980 (?) and directed by Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust). It wasn't parents that went after the bad guys though, it was a bunch of socially elite teenagers. And David Hess, who was the main psycho in LHotH, plays almost exactly the same role. It's actually a much more interesting film, in some ways, because it somehow isn't as cruel and it feels like there is more of a subtext there about wealth, privilege, and amorality.

Sort of OT fun fact- I have never seen any of the Friday the 13th films. Not even the first.

Michael Barnes wrote: Not to diminish Craven's importance in the horror genre or to denigrate his passing, but I've never been a big fan of his work outside of the first Nightmare on Elm Street (which is probably the best film of its ilk, even better than Halloween IMO) and the grossly underappreciated Serpent and the Rainbow.

I don't mind Craven, for what he does he was reasonably honest about it and talented enough to pull it off ok. May he RIP.

I've always thought that NoES, even though I don't really love any of them, is one of the best horror movie ideas of all time. Freddy is a great character and the main gist of the movie leaves room for lots of great cinema.

I actually have a weak spot for part 3, maybe it's the shitty D&D wizard, or the amazing Dokken video which seems to either have used or created every rock video cliche of all time. I can never tell which.

I always thought the opening scene of the first Scream was pretty awesome.