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For four decades, acclaimed horror director Wes Craven always managed to force us to
confront something inside of ourselves. Whether it was the way we let our unconscious dictate
our waking life with his
Nightmare on Elm Street series or pop culture's infiltration of
reality with each
Scream entry, Craven, who
passed away last night at age 76, wanted more
than to scare us with gore and suspense; he sought self-reflection, even in slasher flicks.
Consider Craven's directorial debut,
The Last House on the Left. A
trailblazing installment in the the rape revenge genre, the movie toyed with the idea of the peace-loving '70s
and lambasted the privilege of dedicated hippie-dom. But Craven wasn't just shining a light on how
we are still prone to abject horrors despite a commitment to kumbaya-ing through life (
Left deals with abduction, group sodomy and preying on the
naïve). He was also exploring the idea that the will to
vengeance exists in all of us, and that we're not tethered to the identities we try to inhabit. In the face of barbarity, even the most granola people will avenge their daughter's
rape, torture and murder in the most gruesome way possible.
Craven also asked us to look directly inside the machine of movie-making. In 1994's
New Nightmare, he reunited
his
Elm Street stars to play themselves looking back on the film series they carried
together -- only to discover that dream-dwelling monster Freddy Krueger existed off the silver screen. Having
Krueger emerge from the nightmare landscape directly addressed the effects of sexual assault and unbelievable strength it takes to overcome
and survive. The 2010 remake blatantly underlines that Kreuger was a
pedophile in the way so many retelling of classic horror films bolster the
source material's subtle motive narratives. But simply having Freddy only come for you in your
dreams, still marred by his attack when you awake, is already powerfully symbolic of both the societal denial
of sexual abuse and the way wounds are still present, even when the trauma seems impossible to see or comprehend -- an idea that was only further explored when Craven invited Freddy into the real world.
But this kind of exploration was what was important to Craven's greatest hits.
Scream's Sidney Prescott was the
ideal horror Final Girl, pure and ready to defend against the forces of evil, until she acquiesced to losing her virginity -- right as the film's villain, Ghostface, really ramped up his
victim count. Underage drinking and premarital sex has always been
slasher-bait, but by allowing Sidney to shirk the commandments of the chaste Final Girl, he
gave a necessary agency to a character who, under the old narrative logic, should have been doomed the second she broke
the rules. And that's why Craven was so important. He wanted to us to see structures as flimsy,
and better when they are dismantled.
That's why
Scream and all its sequels spend so much satirizing the genre. Craven wanted us to look
away from everything we have been told we're supposed to think, both in how stories are told
and how we follow our own belief systems. His
work dares us to question our understanding of reality, and it will continue to make us do as
long as horror continues to thrive.