CRAVEN NOT A COWARD

Wes Craven has been recognized as a leading horror director since the triumph of The Last House on the Left in 1972. He’s responsible for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, launching two of the most lucrative franchises in the history of the genre. In 2006, Alexandre Aja vividly remade The Hills Have Eyes, Craven’s classic tale of monstrous savages attacking a Californian family. The movie’s warm reception among horror fans stirred Craven to revisit the story he invented 20 years ago, so he cowrote The Hills Have Eyes 2 with his son Jonathan.

NYP: Horror is regarded within the industry as immensely profitable, which sometimes obscures the fact that making these movies is an artistic process. How do you go about presenting the creative elements of the horror genre?

Wes Craven: It doesn’t usually enter my thoughts. Once you start worrying about convincing people that what you’re doing is legitimate, you’re stultifying it. I think there’s been a gradual change where a lot of fans who fell in love with horror around the time of Nightmare on Elm Street are now either critics or studio guys. So, from around Red Eye—or maybe Scream—you talk to studio executives who are fans and have been all their lives. Before that, studio heads wouldn’t even be associated with it. They knew it made a lot of money, but you felt like once you left, they thought, “That guy must be really fucked up.”

Read the rest of my interview with Wes Craven in the New York Press...