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Wes Craven = Scary Movies: Why did he get into horror films? “It’s always struck me as kind of weird that I fell into making scary pictures,” said Wes Craven. “It was pure happenstance. The first time somebody talked to me about making a film, ‘I’ve got some money from these guys and they want a scary movie for their theaters.’ I literally said, ‘I don’t know anything about writing scary movies.’ ‘You were raised as a Baptist, right? Well, pull all the skeletons out of your closet.’ And after that, both he and I - I’m speaking about Sean Cunningham - neither one of us wanted to go on and make another horror film. We felt like that was enough.
We went, I think, almost four years individually and together trying to get other things going and just could not get any money. We knew no one in Hollywood. We never even approached Hollywood at all, trying to get money out of New York. But people were always saying to both of us, ‘If you want to do something scary, I can get you the money.’ At a certain point I was broke and needed to make child support payments and things like that, so I went and made Hills Have Eyes.
Once you get a name for doing something really scary, people assume that you’re crazy and live in a cave and all those things. Somebody asked me this morning, ‘What did your friends think when you made a romantic comedy?’ I said, ‘My friends all know who I really am. I’m not somebody scary in real life.’ It’s just one of those things that you have to get into this very special environment. I think [ Paris, je t'aime] could help, but it’s kind of an art film and I don’t know how many will see it. But you have the perception on the part of many, many, many people that I am scary and do scary things.”
Craven’s never grown comfortable with being known as a scary movie director. “No. I think there’s always a part of me that feels like, ‘F**k, if I had just not…or if I had worked harder or come to Hollywood.’ But I had no credentials at all in film except making Last House, and that was a film that made a lot of people angry at us and think that we were perverted, nasty and horrible people. If I wanted to make films and I did, and you can do it, you can make a scary film then go make a really good scary film. Don’t be restricted to just being violent but be interesting and talk about things that reflect the world around you. I was able to do all that.
At a certain point you realize I’m just lucky to be making films. Nightmare on Elm Street was a good example. I was studying Eastern philosophy at that time. I was like, ‘Okay, we’ll do something with levels of consciousness. Consciousness is awakeness, not being enlightened and conscious is being asleep.’ It lent itself perfectly to both this kind of philosophical look and to real life things. Once you realize that then you say, ‘Well, these are little art films. It’s just the audience has to scream in them.’”
