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“He’s gone to that big last house on the left in the sky,” said Adam Lowenstein, director of the film studies program and associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh; he teaches classes on horror film and is the author of a number of books on cinema, including Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Lowenstein shared his thoughts by phone on why horror is a vital genre, how Craven’s work was thoughtful and brutal in equal measure, and why knew the scariest things are the things closest to home.
For the uninitiated/scaredy-cats among us, why is Wes Craven’s work so important?
Just point to his three most influential films, and see how each of them is a watershed in the history of the modern horror film. And the modern horror film itself is a genre that people take more seriously because of directors like Wes Craven. Wes Craven was able to combine a real brutality with a real thoughtfulness that has really shaped what the modern horror film can be. So the three films I’m talking about are, his very first film, from 1972, Last House on the Left, and secondly, A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and Scream, in 1996. These are the undisputed blockbusters of Wes’ career, and they all deserve the reputation that they have.
Before Craven made Last House, what was the horror movie landscape like? What was the context in which he was starting to make these movies?
Wes Craven was part of a generation of American horror film directors that really popularized the modern horror film as we know it: George Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper. What I think Wes Craven really brought out, even within that pantheon of extraordinary directors, was this ability to combine the brutal and the thoughtful. So Last House, on the one hand, it’s a very cerebral, high-minded remake of an Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. On the other hand, it is a completely, uncompromisingly horrific, nightmarish take on the worst case scenarios of the Vietnam era. And some of the stories that Wes would often tell is how he would run into people he knew and liked and trusted, and after they saw Last House, they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. And Wes was a very mild-mannered person — he was an English teacher before he was a film director, and he grew up in a very conservative, religious environment — and he was a gentle soul. But the films are not gentle. And I think that gives you a sense of what he was trying to accomplish. He was trying to get at us both through our hearts, our minds, and our guts.
Can you talk a bit more about Last House as addressing Vietnam?
Coming out in 1972, Last House was a product of the anguish of the Vietnam era. And it’s basically a revenge story. Two young girls go from the Connecticut suburbs into New York City, try to get pot at a rock concert, and wind up in the hands of the Mansons. They are brutally raped, tortured, and murdered. But then the Mason-esque group falls into the hands of one of the girls’ parents, and what the parents do to them once they find out what was done to their daughter makes the initial round of cruelty seem almost tame by comparison. And you emerge with: There is no difference between the civilized and the uncivilized. It’s a matter of a society completely broken down, untrustworthy and terrifying. And you can’t look to the young to be trusted over the old, or the middle class to be trusted over the working class. It leaves you with a very upsetting sense of the place America has gotten to at this juncture. It’s a terrifying film, still today. I do teach it periodically, and it’s one of the films that students still have a difficult time with.
Do you ever think, watching these films, that they are so violent and gory, they get in the way of this deeper idea they’re trying to get across?
It really feels like a film carefully and thoughtfully designed to shock us in ways that are maybe not pleasant, but that’s the point. It’s about unpleasant things, and it’s about confronting us with that unpleasantness, and asking us to think about it. And it’s true, though, I think the sense that Craven himself learned a lesson from Last House: He never made a movie again that was that confrontational. He made films that were, I think, equally smart and important, but never that confrontational. And I think his seeking of a broader audience made that imperative, because Last House, still, is not for everyone. Don’t recommend it to people if you haven’t seen it yourself.
So he had that in mind when he made Nightmare on Elm Street?
The important thing to remember, in terms of the landscape in which it emerged, by the time 1984 rolled around, the market was already glutted with imitations of Halloween and Friday the 13th, movies we refer to as slasher movies. Lots of the imitators of those films are not very imaginative; they’re really paint-by-numbers. And what Craven brought to the slasher subgenre was a really fresh sense of imagination and feeling. The whole trope of a killer that invades your dreams, rather than a killer that’s wielding a hatchet or a knife in the real world, is a brilliant innovation. It really opened up the subgenre to more interesting territory. I think it saved the slasher film in many ways from complete exhaustion at some point.
The other thing Nightmare does so well is, its feel for family dynamics is really superior. A lot of those slasher films, there’s really no room for parents at all. The whole trick of the films is teens alone in danger, and what happens then. But Craven really pumps energy into the dynamics between parents and children, and wider than that, between families and their communities. And that dimension of the slasher film was really in sore need of development, as well, and Craven really brought that out. And in terms of Nightmare‘s importance, a figure that we’ve come to know in the slasher formula is the idea of the final girl, the girl who survives, the girl who vanquishes the killer on her own. Nancy, in Nightmare, is outstanding. She is so gritty and resourceful and smart and fearless, without being a superhero. She’s recognizable as a person and as a teenager, but her resourcefulness and her grit is just thrilling to see, even today.
Scream is an interesting case, in that I think it’s how people who only see mainstream movies — people who do not like horror flicks — have an understanding of what horror movies are. That’s the reference point.
And I often bemoan the existence of Scream in certain ways, because of precisely that quality. People who don’t know much about horror films can go to it and feel almost superior to the genre, and comfortable with it. But the memory I always put alongside of that is, horror films are a central part of my work, so I see a lot of them, and I have friends who don’t like horror films at all, and Scream was one I could convince people to come with me to when it premiered, because I could say it would be fun but not scary. And the first 20 minutes of Scream is really scary. It’s intense. I remember my friends looking over at me across the aisle and saying, “You lied to us.” I think that’s a good summation of Wes Craven, in a certain way. Even within the framework of an entertaining horror film that is not very confrontational, that is interested in winking at its audience, there’s still moments that grab you buy the throat.
Do these tropes from horror movies that people know so well stem from Scream, or did Scream just popularize them? It’s such a self-aware movie, and you see these characters talking about other horror movies, like they know they’re in one.
Slasher films may not be imaginative overall, but they are very tuned in to the formula. Slasher films didn’t need to parodied, because they were doing it themselves already. You watch Halloween, after having watched Psycho, you already see the films very much aware of their predecessors and very interested in nodding their hat to their predecessors. So Scream didn’t invent that. But Scream brought it to the awareness of an audience that wasn’t necessarily genre-savvy, and made it fun for them as well. Which is an important feat. It’s good for horror to be able to reach people that don’t necessarily want to deal with it, because that can open the door to different sorts of engagement with the genre.
Horror has always been a very self-aware and self-conscious genre. And what Scream did is, it sort of heightened that experience of awareness for a wider audience. But it did it in a way that remained true to, I think, the way the genre had been working along before Scream. It was basically putting it in highlight and bold.
It seems like one of the recurring themes in Craven’s work is that the scariest things — the villains, the monsters — are actually pretty normal. They’re sort of, not mundane, but they’re not out-of-this-world, supernatural killers. They’re primal, everyday ideas.
Yes, absolutely. One of his favorite things to say is that the horror film is a boot camp for the psyche. Horror, for Wes Craven, was always about the immediate, the primal, the here-and-now. It was not about fantastic things. For him, the scariest things are the things that are closest to us, the things that we know the best, that we think we know and trust.
Why is horror an important genre? What can horror films do that other movies can’t?
I think horror has the potential to show us ourselves in a light that we need to see ourselves in, that we’re also not comfortable enough to try to do. I think horror is more honest about who we are as people, as families, as a culture, as a society, than most other types of films are. And they can get away with it, because a lot of people think horror films aren’t up to anything serious. But under that cover, they are deadly serious. And we ignore the horror film at our peril, because I think if you want an accurate account of who we are and where we are at, you need to go to the horror film as a place to gauge that. That thing becomes particularly crystal-clear during moments of what I call historical trauma. Something like the Vietnam era: A movie like Last House is telling the hard and painful truth about that era that a lot of the contemporary films of that time were not yet ready to talk about. The horror film could do it, because the horror film already has a vocabulary for the shocking, the horrific, the awful. So this is a genre that can engage with these things rather than hope they don’t exist or that they’ll go away.
Where do you see Craven’s influence in modern horror?
One of the themes that Wes Craven pioneered and developed and perfected is the revenge theme, and we can see it most clearly in Last House and The Hills Have Eyes. That’s still a formula that’s very crucial and powerful for the genre. Someone like Eli Roth’s movies and the Hostel films in particular really tapped into that dynamic, that the blood that is spilled in vengeance winds up tainting the avenger at least as much as the crime that was originally committed. And in America, a country where the whole idea of American exceptionalism and entitlement and might-is-right, that lesson about revenge is something we need to be taught over and over again. We never seem to quite learn it.
It Follows has got something to do with something Craven was already interested in in Scream, which is: Where does horror come from and manifest itself in a culture that is so over-saturated with media exposure? Where everything seems like it could be broadcast, televised, tweeted? Where there’s really no such thing as an original experience? I think It Follows is tuned into that. And I think Scream was, too. Looking back, 1996 was a primitive media era compared to now.
When Craven made Last House, he wasn’t clear in an explicit way, “Oh yeah, I’m talking about Vietnam. I’m talking about the present.” It was there in the work but it took a long time for people to really see it, even the directors themselves. I think that’s true now, too. I think with certain exceptions, it’s going to take time to get a sense of, well, what was this historical moment all about anyway? And what were the films that were tapping into it consciously or unconsciously? But I think even early, there’s evidence that the horror film is still doing that job. The movie I would point to semi-recently is Hostel, in the context of the war on terror, the post-9/11 war era. And what Hostel does with the idea of Americans abroad as something to be scared of is a very important and effective intervention into a post-9/11 America.
For the uninitiated/scaredy-cats among us, why is Wes Craven’s work so important?
Just point to his three most influential films, and see how each of them is a watershed in the history of the modern horror film. And the modern horror film itself is a genre that people take more seriously because of directors like Wes Craven. Wes Craven was able to combine a real brutality with a real thoughtfulness that has really shaped what the modern horror film can be. So the three films I’m talking about are, his very first film, from 1972, Last House on the Left, and secondly, A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and Scream, in 1996. These are the undisputed blockbusters of Wes’ career, and they all deserve the reputation that they have.
Before Craven made Last House, what was the horror movie landscape like? What was the context in which he was starting to make these movies?
Wes Craven was part of a generation of American horror film directors that really popularized the modern horror film as we know it: George Romero, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper. What I think Wes Craven really brought out, even within that pantheon of extraordinary directors, was this ability to combine the brutal and the thoughtful. So Last House, on the one hand, it’s a very cerebral, high-minded remake of an Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. On the other hand, it is a completely, uncompromisingly horrific, nightmarish take on the worst case scenarios of the Vietnam era. And some of the stories that Wes would often tell is how he would run into people he knew and liked and trusted, and after they saw Last House, they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. And Wes was a very mild-mannered person — he was an English teacher before he was a film director, and he grew up in a very conservative, religious environment — and he was a gentle soul. But the films are not gentle. And I think that gives you a sense of what he was trying to accomplish. He was trying to get at us both through our hearts, our minds, and our guts.
Can you talk a bit more about Last House as addressing Vietnam?
Coming out in 1972, Last House was a product of the anguish of the Vietnam era. And it’s basically a revenge story. Two young girls go from the Connecticut suburbs into New York City, try to get pot at a rock concert, and wind up in the hands of the Mansons. They are brutally raped, tortured, and murdered. But then the Mason-esque group falls into the hands of one of the girls’ parents, and what the parents do to them once they find out what was done to their daughter makes the initial round of cruelty seem almost tame by comparison. And you emerge with: There is no difference between the civilized and the uncivilized. It’s a matter of a society completely broken down, untrustworthy and terrifying. And you can’t look to the young to be trusted over the old, or the middle class to be trusted over the working class. It leaves you with a very upsetting sense of the place America has gotten to at this juncture. It’s a terrifying film, still today. I do teach it periodically, and it’s one of the films that students still have a difficult time with.
Do you ever think, watching these films, that they are so violent and gory, they get in the way of this deeper idea they’re trying to get across?
It really feels like a film carefully and thoughtfully designed to shock us in ways that are maybe not pleasant, but that’s the point. It’s about unpleasant things, and it’s about confronting us with that unpleasantness, and asking us to think about it. And it’s true, though, I think the sense that Craven himself learned a lesson from Last House: He never made a movie again that was that confrontational. He made films that were, I think, equally smart and important, but never that confrontational. And I think his seeking of a broader audience made that imperative, because Last House, still, is not for everyone. Don’t recommend it to people if you haven’t seen it yourself.
So he had that in mind when he made Nightmare on Elm Street?
The important thing to remember, in terms of the landscape in which it emerged, by the time 1984 rolled around, the market was already glutted with imitations of Halloween and Friday the 13th, movies we refer to as slasher movies. Lots of the imitators of those films are not very imaginative; they’re really paint-by-numbers. And what Craven brought to the slasher subgenre was a really fresh sense of imagination and feeling. The whole trope of a killer that invades your dreams, rather than a killer that’s wielding a hatchet or a knife in the real world, is a brilliant innovation. It really opened up the subgenre to more interesting territory. I think it saved the slasher film in many ways from complete exhaustion at some point.
The other thing Nightmare does so well is, its feel for family dynamics is really superior. A lot of those slasher films, there’s really no room for parents at all. The whole trick of the films is teens alone in danger, and what happens then. But Craven really pumps energy into the dynamics between parents and children, and wider than that, between families and their communities. And that dimension of the slasher film was really in sore need of development, as well, and Craven really brought that out. And in terms of Nightmare‘s importance, a figure that we’ve come to know in the slasher formula is the idea of the final girl, the girl who survives, the girl who vanquishes the killer on her own. Nancy, in Nightmare, is outstanding. She is so gritty and resourceful and smart and fearless, without being a superhero. She’s recognizable as a person and as a teenager, but her resourcefulness and her grit is just thrilling to see, even today.
Scream is an interesting case, in that I think it’s how people who only see mainstream movies — people who do not like horror flicks — have an understanding of what horror movies are. That’s the reference point.
And I often bemoan the existence of Scream in certain ways, because of precisely that quality. People who don’t know much about horror films can go to it and feel almost superior to the genre, and comfortable with it. But the memory I always put alongside of that is, horror films are a central part of my work, so I see a lot of them, and I have friends who don’t like horror films at all, and Scream was one I could convince people to come with me to when it premiered, because I could say it would be fun but not scary. And the first 20 minutes of Scream is really scary. It’s intense. I remember my friends looking over at me across the aisle and saying, “You lied to us.” I think that’s a good summation of Wes Craven, in a certain way. Even within the framework of an entertaining horror film that is not very confrontational, that is interested in winking at its audience, there’s still moments that grab you buy the throat.
Do these tropes from horror movies that people know so well stem from Scream, or did Scream just popularize them? It’s such a self-aware movie, and you see these characters talking about other horror movies, like they know they’re in one.
Slasher films may not be imaginative overall, but they are very tuned in to the formula. Slasher films didn’t need to parodied, because they were doing it themselves already. You watch Halloween, after having watched Psycho, you already see the films very much aware of their predecessors and very interested in nodding their hat to their predecessors. So Scream didn’t invent that. But Scream brought it to the awareness of an audience that wasn’t necessarily genre-savvy, and made it fun for them as well. Which is an important feat. It’s good for horror to be able to reach people that don’t necessarily want to deal with it, because that can open the door to different sorts of engagement with the genre.
Horror has always been a very self-aware and self-conscious genre. And what Scream did is, it sort of heightened that experience of awareness for a wider audience. But it did it in a way that remained true to, I think, the way the genre had been working along before Scream. It was basically putting it in highlight and bold.
It seems like one of the recurring themes in Craven’s work is that the scariest things — the villains, the monsters — are actually pretty normal. They’re sort of, not mundane, but they’re not out-of-this-world, supernatural killers. They’re primal, everyday ideas.
Yes, absolutely. One of his favorite things to say is that the horror film is a boot camp for the psyche. Horror, for Wes Craven, was always about the immediate, the primal, the here-and-now. It was not about fantastic things. For him, the scariest things are the things that are closest to us, the things that we know the best, that we think we know and trust.
Why is horror an important genre? What can horror films do that other movies can’t?
I think horror has the potential to show us ourselves in a light that we need to see ourselves in, that we’re also not comfortable enough to try to do. I think horror is more honest about who we are as people, as families, as a culture, as a society, than most other types of films are. And they can get away with it, because a lot of people think horror films aren’t up to anything serious. But under that cover, they are deadly serious. And we ignore the horror film at our peril, because I think if you want an accurate account of who we are and where we are at, you need to go to the horror film as a place to gauge that. That thing becomes particularly crystal-clear during moments of what I call historical trauma. Something like the Vietnam era: A movie like Last House is telling the hard and painful truth about that era that a lot of the contemporary films of that time were not yet ready to talk about. The horror film could do it, because the horror film already has a vocabulary for the shocking, the horrific, the awful. So this is a genre that can engage with these things rather than hope they don’t exist or that they’ll go away.
Where do you see Craven’s influence in modern horror?
One of the themes that Wes Craven pioneered and developed and perfected is the revenge theme, and we can see it most clearly in Last House and The Hills Have Eyes. That’s still a formula that’s very crucial and powerful for the genre. Someone like Eli Roth’s movies and the Hostel films in particular really tapped into that dynamic, that the blood that is spilled in vengeance winds up tainting the avenger at least as much as the crime that was originally committed. And in America, a country where the whole idea of American exceptionalism and entitlement and might-is-right, that lesson about revenge is something we need to be taught over and over again. We never seem to quite learn it.
It Follows has got something to do with something Craven was already interested in in Scream, which is: Where does horror come from and manifest itself in a culture that is so over-saturated with media exposure? Where everything seems like it could be broadcast, televised, tweeted? Where there’s really no such thing as an original experience? I think It Follows is tuned into that. And I think Scream was, too. Looking back, 1996 was a primitive media era compared to now.
When Craven made Last House, he wasn’t clear in an explicit way, “Oh yeah, I’m talking about Vietnam. I’m talking about the present.” It was there in the work but it took a long time for people to really see it, even the directors themselves. I think that’s true now, too. I think with certain exceptions, it’s going to take time to get a sense of, well, what was this historical moment all about anyway? And what were the films that were tapping into it consciously or unconsciously? But I think even early, there’s evidence that the horror film is still doing that job. The movie I would point to semi-recently is Hostel, in the context of the war on terror, the post-9/11 war era. And what Hostel does with the idea of Americans abroad as something to be scared of is a very important and effective intervention into a post-9/11 America.
