Obituary
On Sunday in Los Angeles at the 77th year of life, died from brain cancer Wes Craven, the “father” of Freddy Krueger from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) and the killer in a mask of Quadrilogy “Scream” (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011). The most authoritative King horror compared himself with the Impressionists, indifferent to the recognition of the establishment, and in 43 years has made in its genre a couple of revolutions, and at the same time a counter-revolution.
When the producer offered to 32-year-old philologist remove Craven horror film, he protested: “Yes I am no horror movie ever seen.” Producer reasonably objected: “You fundamentalist demons around you flocks must be twisted.” Craven resigned and took “The Last House on the Left” (1972), the most unpleasant and persistent horror movie in the world, actually releasing the demons on the screen, but are not responsible for his personal, and for national fears. Patriarchal American dream – all significant in the culture of the United States devoted to the search for this elusive dream – collapsed at the behest of “white trash”, tortured, raped and murdered daughter Illustrative parents and her friend. Revenge of the terrible atrocities of the parents was a lesson-degenerates. Watch the movie and still painful. Awkwardness enhance not conditional genre and realistic European style shooting and that Craven quail mystical tragedy of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Source” (1960). Only Bergman brutality engendered inscrutable miracle, and for Craven catharsis was unthinkable.
Yes, he was a fundamentalist: his parents – adamant Baptists from Cleveland – taboo any movie except Disney. Once after school in New York, he was shocked by the movie Robert Mulligan’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962): Our Mowgli could not even imagine that there is a movie in addition to the “Bambi”. In the small cinemas, he absorbed the “new wave” and Bergman. Neglected philology, dived into the world of cinema. In 2005, the documentary “Inside Deep Throat” found out the details of his debut. Craven started as a pornographer and obviously participated in writing and / or installation of the most famous porn in the world – “Deep Throat” (1972) Gerard Damiano. Well, then it was quite revolutionary porn genre in Fleury European sophistication.
Second genre revolution – after the “Last House” and the equally depressing film “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977) on mutant cannibals Jupiter and his sons, Mercury, Mars and Pluto – Craven made by releasing a monster on the screen with a burnt face and claws stiletto. “Nightmare on Elm Street” opened a gold mine genre wandering between dream and reality, and on the brink of adolescence adult horror and quite sticky nightmare without falling into infantilism. What can be said about the notorious “Scream,” which – and it was a counter-revolution of the genre – Craven is not without a fight, but capitulated to the demands of the teenage audience.
Elm Street in the town of Potsdam, New York, where he taught at Craven College English literature, not an accidental namesake Dallas street where President Kennedy was assassinated. Craven as a painter of the American dream was a political director. In the shadow of “Nightmare” and “Scream” are two openly political masterpiece. The “Serpent and the Rainbow” (1988), he placed in the context of a zombie mythology pro-American and terrestrial savage dictatorship of the Duvalier family in Haiti. “People Under the Stairs” (1991), a translation of “The Communist Manifesto” into the language of horror. Family of perverts, landlords, whose folly increased in direct proportion to their greed, kept in captivity “curse branded” poor peasant children, bringing them to the loss of the human form. Well, “Night Flight” (2005) was a film not so much about the terrorist threat as a paranoid fear generated by September 11th.
Craven could easily shoot a great movie. Extravagant – to your right classicism – “Music of the Heart” (1999) earned a nomination for “Oscar” Meryl Streep, who played a creator of music school in Harlem. Novella with the ghost of Oscar Wilde at the Pere Lachaise cemetery – one of the most charming segment of the anthology “Paris, je t’aime” (2006). Could, but not particularly something and wanted. Like no other, Craven knew that in the era of “after Auschwitz and Hiroshima” most brutal claims to produce a decent world order within the lowest genres.
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