by Frank Calvillo
When Wes Craven died last week, the world lost one of the greatest minds ever to approach the art of horror filmmaking, who left behind a legacy other filmmakers can only ever hope to come close to matching.
Not only did Craven invent the modern slasher film, but he also managed to reinvent it a number of times. He laid down the blueprint with the still-disturbing The Last House on the Left, explored the internalization of fear with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and elevated the genre into postmodernist territory with Scream.
A jack of all trades, though, many forget that Craven’s affinity for storytelling often ventured outside the realm of slashers. His unbound imagination ventured into dark comedy/fantasy in The People Under the Stairs, voodoo in The Serpent and the Rainbow, zombies in Deadly Friend, vampires in Vampire in Brooklyn, thriller territory in Red Eye, and he even directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination in the drama Music of the Heart.
I know that there will be a number of tributes being written to honor this undisputed master of horror, as there well should be. However, rather than focus mine on his greatest achievements such as Scream or Nightmare, I’d like to pay homage to some of Craven’s more unheralded works which the public either never got the chance to explore, or sadly, just didn’t get.
Flowers in the Attic
Though it seemed like the most unlikely of pairings, Craven was originally hired to adapt the bestselling novel Flowers in the Attic to the screen. Author V.C. Andrews (who had script approval) liked Craven’s take on her text, but producers felt the screenplay was too dark for the audience the film would undoubtedly attract and the director was fired from the project.
Reading Craven’s original script (which is BEYOND easy to find) shows just how much of a deep filmmaker he was. His understanding of the film’s gothic atmosphere would have pleased the fans, while critics would have been taken by the script’s psychological undertones and the stirring (yet never gratuitous) violence would have pleased Craven’s followers. While a reshot ending to the finished film borrowed heavily from Craven’s screenplay, it only hinted at the kind of fascinating film Craven would have made.
Nightmare Cafe
Why this project didn’t yield better results is actually half-shocking (even Friday, the 13th — The Series lasted 3 seasons). Though the franchise that A Nightmare on Elm Street had evolved into began to fade in popularity, it didn’t stop NBC from approaching Craven about creating a TV series inspired by the Freddy films.
The result was Nightmare Cafe, a weekly series produced, written, and (for one episode at least) directed by Craven. The premise saw a man and woman (Jack Coleman and Lindsay Frost) who each perished in fatal car accidents stuck in an all-night cafe as a cook and waitress, respectively, where they encounter a variety of lost souls with mysterious pasts and unfinished business. With shades of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and even Robert Englund (in a non-Freddy role) as the cafe’s owner, Nightmare Cafe was inventive, entertaining, and deserved more than just the measly six-episode run it was given.
Fountain Society
Not many would have pegged Wes Craven as the literary type even though those who knew him could readily confirm his bookworm status. I guess it came as a surprise to everyone BUT them when in 1999, Craven wrote and published a novel called Fountain Society.
The story recounted the tale of an acclaimed husband and wife scientist team trying to stop their evil colleague from taking hold of their research containing secrets regarding eternal youth, while at the same time, a beautiful, yet crafty model goes on an international hunt when her boyfriend vanishes without a trace. Equal parts medical thriller and love story with a mad scientist thrown in for good measure, Fountain Society was a truly riveting debut novel that shows just how far Craven’s skill as a storyteller reached.
Craven optioned the film rights to Dreamworks in 2000, though sadly the project never materialized.
Cursed
The reteaming of Craven and Scream writer Kevin Williamson on the werewolf tale Cursed seemed like a prospect that couldn’t miss. However the production lived up to its name when Craven’s initial cut of Cursed was rejected by the studio, leading to 80% of the film being rewritten, recast, and reshot before promptly failing with both critics and audiences.
However, fans of Craven found plenty to love about Cursed, the story of a pair of siblings (Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg) who experience mysterious transformations after being bitten by a werewolf in the Hollywood Hills. There’s the cutthroat showbiz setting, the great mix of CGI and classic Rick Baker effects, the whodunnit plot, and the excellent over-the-top finale which takes place in a wax museum complete with a smoke and mirrors sequence.
Craven went on record as saying Cursed was a career low point for him. For his fans, however, it showed that even the greatest of studio interference couldn’t stop the master of horror from delivering.
My Soul to Take
This penultimate offering by Craven was sorely dismissed by critics and audiences despite being his most personal work ever. In My Soul to Take, a group of teenagers in a small town who were all born on the same night that a convicted murderer was put to death find themselves dying one by one when it is discovered that one of them has inherited said killer’s soul. The story is admittedly a bit darker than most of Craven’s most recent works, and the plot’s many directions can throw one for a loop.
However, in the film’s main hero Bug (Max Thierot), Craven drew a protagonist that shared many commonalities with the director, including his days as a social outcast, being raised by a hard-working single mother, having an absentee father who was a bit on the mad side, and a general sense of not knowing where he belonged in the world. Moreover, My Soul To Take was one of the first films which bravely tackled the bullying issue head on at the height of the 2010 epidemic and earned kudos for doing so.
It will never be on the level of Scream and Nightmare, but My Soul to Take may have been the most cathartic and unguarded film of his career.
At the time of his death, Craven was currently basking in the glow of the positive response garnered from the Scream TV series, which he was executive producing. The number of other projects recently announced showed how excited Craven still was about his dark form of storytelling and what he had to say about its relationship with society and humanity. For me, that will forever remain his essence. No other director managed to take the scariest of scenarios and expose their truths regarding the world around them in quite the way he did. Above all though, Craven forced us to look unflinchingly at the darkness that plagued our psyches and taught us how conquer them head on.
Goodbye Mr. Craven, and thanks for everything.
