Wes Craven (1939-2015): A Tribute to a Horror Film Legend.

Chances are if you were a kid growing up in the 1980's, then you probably heard all about Freddy Krueger, the antagonist of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. If you saw those films at young age, no doubt you suffered nightmares about him just as the characters in the film do, and that's largely thanks to the man that created the phenomenon: writer and director Wes Craven. Before scaring audiences senseless with the original Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, Craven had already made a name for him self in horror cinema with cult classics The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Recently, he sadly passed away as a result of brain cancer, so I'm dedicating this post to the horror maestro, celebrating his talent and legacy.

I consider Craven's most popular film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, a horror masterpiece and one of my all time favourites. With this film, Craven gave the slasher sub-genre a new edge, bringing in more surreal visuals and upping the gore, eclipsing standard setters Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Not only did Craven help to establish this extra gear for the genre, but in the process introduce one of cinema's most iconic villains: Freddy Krueger. In the original film Freddy is at his scariest, as Craven allows Robert Englund's fantastic performance to shine without focusing on wisecrack dialogue, which would feature heavily in the sequels. The Nightmare on Elm Street series was undeniably better off with Craven attached, with him writing and directing the original, writing the fan-favourite third instalment, Dream Warriors (1987), or reinventing the franchise with New Nightmare (1994). In New Nightmare, Craven ingeniously brought Freddy back to his more serious routes whilst also paying tribute to the campiness of the sequels by setting the film in the real world, with Robert Englund playing both himself and the new Freddy. In the film, the cast of the franchise are terrorised by Freddy, and soon the exact events of the original film start to happen. Shortly after returning the series to form and yet again giving the slasher genre a new depth, Craven decided to further utilise this idea to honour and parody the genre with the Scream films.

Craven revitalised the slasher genre's popularity in the 1990's with Scream. Unlike other horror films, the characters in Scream are all aware of the horror clichés, and so there's a good amount of humour present as well as scares. Though I think Scream should have been a standalone film, its popularity ensured three sequels carried on the story. In the original 1996 film, a high schooler is murdered by a masked man whom had made threatening phone calls to her. With the whole town unnerved, a group of teens are all under suspicion of being the killer, and all hell breaks loose at a party. If you haven't seen the film, I won't spoil it, it's certainly worth checking out for fans of slasher films, and even a casual horror viewer should be entertained by it. The sequels delve even further into genre clichés, but they can't match the original's twists and turns. Craven knew exactly what to deliver at exactly the right time, cementing his reputation as a master of horror cinema.

Through his creative ideas and slick execution of them, Wes Craven is truly one of the finest contributors to the horror genre. His undeniable talent has ensured the survival of the horror genre's popularity more than once, and for that we should be eternally grateful. Wes, thank you for the nightmares!